Business
How pharma giant AbbVie holds leaders accountable for culture
Ever since spinning off from Abbott Laboratories in 2013, AbbVie has made culture a strategic business priority.
The logic is sound for a business that relies on the skill and ideas of its people to find and develop new drug candidates, which is vital for long-term growth in pharmaceuticals.
“We think sustained performance will be driven by a consistent culture,” explains Jason Smith, AbbVie’s senior vice president and head of Europe commercial operations.
“We’re not looking for a one- or two-year view on financial performance,” at the expense of employee experience, Smith says. “You may win for a quarter or a year, but you’re not going to sustain the performance. You’ll see people less engaged. You’ll see attrition.”
It’s a principle that is doubly important given AbbVie’s highly specialized work requires rigorous development and training, with an average tenure across Europe of nine years and some team members serving more than 20 years in their roles.
One bad manager or leader can, in but a few months, undermine a team with decades of collective service to the organization.
That’s why AbbVie is deeply passionate about its expectations for leaders, captured in its ‘Ways We Work’—a set of behaviors and norms that approximately cover shared success; speedy, ethical and high-quality decision making; accountability; transparency; and the pursuit of excellence over the status quo.
Holding leaders to account
It is not the existence of these values that helped AbbVie’s place on the 2025 Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For – Europe list, but the way they are brought to life.
Rather than being words on a wall, for example, these leadership behaviors come up in performance reviews. “End-of-year reviews are equal parts business performance and behaviors,” Smith says.
Behaviours are measured through 360-degree reviews and employee surveys, where data can be broken down by function to analyze the individual impact of leaders. This, in turn, helps the business spot potential problems early.
“We look for trend variances year over year,” Smith says of employee survey analysis. “We compare to your peer group, but we also look very specifically at outliers where we have people leaders who are showing up more in the red on some of these behaviors.”
Where people have opportunities to improve on aspects of their leadership, the business creates action plans, with progress measured over time.
Partly as a result, 84% of AbbVie employees in Europe say managers show a sincere interest in their wellbeing and success, compared with just 51% of employees at typical companies in Europe, according to surveys from Great Place To Work.
“We compare to your peer group, but we also look very specifically at outliers where we have people leaders who are showing up more in the red on some of these behaviors.” Jason Smith, AbbVie’s senior vice president and head of Europe commercial operations.
This matters not least because high levels of trust in leadership are rewarded with higher levels of discretionary effort and agility, key elements of success for any business. At AbbVie, 92% of employees give extra effort at work compared to just 59% of employees at a typical European workplace.
Maintaining a high-trust culture
With an expanding workforce, including from acquisitions of early-stage drug discovery firms, AbbVie has instituted several practices to ensure that new leaders and managers understand what is expected of them.
“After somebody comes into a new role leading a team or an organization, you’ll have a facilitated discussion with their direct reports,” Smith shares. The conversation isn’t focused on business performance but instead investigates behaviors and culture.
“It’s your responsibility as a leader to take all of that and to not only act upon it, but to make sure you’re aware of it on an ongoing basis,” Smith says.
Another system of support is AbbVie’s culture ambassador programme.
About 70 volunteers in Europe join colleagues from across the company to take on an advisory role, participating in a cross-functional Culture Summit and developing action plans to improve workplace practices within their local region. Being an ambassador is not for the faint of heart. “You have to be willing to invest in going back and challenging your leadership team at a local level,” Smith says.
Making culture a priority every day
Smith is keen to explain that Ways We Work isn’t something that leaders talk about once a year during a culture event or at a performance review: “We want it to be embedded every week in the way you do business.”
As an example, the team in Romania decided to focus on psychological safety, which is key in pharma, as a lack of psychological safety can lead to less innovation, groupthink, and even systems failure.
“It’s your responsibility as a leader to take all of that and to not only act upon it, but to make sure you’re aware of it on an ongoing basis…”Jason Smith
“We found that there was quite a wide range of people in teams really feeling like they could speak up and challenge their leader,” Smith says.
The team had a series of discussions and training for leaders in the field, building awareness and skillsets. The result? An 8-point jump in measures of trust on the Great Place To Work survey for those employees.
Data is an invaluable resource for creating a high-performing workplace culture, Smith adds. “Don’t just be negative but look for the outliers… look for areas of improvement and ask people about it.”
He shares his favorite question to ask employees as he travels from country to country across his portfolio in Europe: “If you have my job for a week, what are the two things you would do?”
The answers generate invaluable information to help guide his efforts to make AbbVie stronger and more resilient in a highly competitive market.
Ted Kitterman is a content marketing manager at Great Place To Work®.
