This HR pro builds ‘connective tissue’ to impact culture and connect the workforce

If it’s been a decade or more since you sat in on an anatomy class, you may not remember much about connective tissue. It functions as the glue that connects muscles to bones and keeps organs in the right spot.

Some heavy lifting for a part of the body that doesn’t get enough recognition.

Paulo Pisano, CHRO at Booking Holdings and CPO at its flagship property, Booking.com, knows that connective tissue holds a great power, albeit in a much different context: the workplace. It can bring different people and businesses together and keep company values and identity in the right spot.

That’s why since 2020, when he joined booking.com as CPO, and later as the conglomerate’s top HR exec, Pisano says he has worked to build connective tissue at the digital travel and tourism company.

“As you build more connective tissue, as people talk more to one another, there’s something, I think, that happens organically,” Pisano said. “How can you do things organically, rather than through ‘policy’...You’re shaping culture. You’re shaping ways of working, and you can do that in a subtle way. It may take a little bit longer when you do it subtle, but it lasts longer. It becomes more sustainable, because it becomes more embedded.”

It wasn’t always this way.

“Booking Holdings grew through acquisition, like many companies in this market,” he said. “The approach Booking (Holdings) took is keep brands independent.”

The benefit of keeping Booking Holdings’ brands independent was threefold, according to Pisano: It kept the companies autonomous, focused on the market and the customer, and without major operational changes to properties following acquisitions that might have distracted the workforce from delivering for customers.

But the organization realized over time that it “might be leaving value on the table” by not collaborating more effectively.

“We realized that independence is amazing, but interdependence can be even more powerful,” Pisano said. “We don’t have to solve it through organizational design. We can solve it through building connective tissue.”

Missed connections. Pisano told HR Brew the journey has been a bit like beginning a new routine at the gym: You don’t know exactly when it happens, but at some point, you start seeing results.

For the HR teams at Booking Holdings’ brands, it’s through communities of practices. L&D leaders at Priceline, Kayak, and OpenTable regularly come together to share resources and best practices, for example, he said.

“That’s the benefit where you have a bunch of companies that are peers, but we are not in competition with one another, so we can openly share,” he said. “So we started building those connecting points through our teams.”

Booking Holdings also builds connective tissue by running HR programs across the organization, and sharing resources for leadership or management development, conferences, or learnings from experimentations or pilot programs. It’s more of an exchange of ideas and learnings, rather than an edict from a corporate entity.

For other business units, the connective tissue helps with product development. Or marketing teams, for instance, can share campaign experiments, impacts, challenges, best practices.

“There are, for example, brands like Priceline, Booking, and Agoda, which are more similar in the nature of what they do. They have different ways of marketing,” he said. “Sometimes it’s about replicating, sometimes it’s about not replicating the same mistake, and sometimes it’s about complimenting or not replicating, and saying, ‘Hey, you do you, and I do me.’”