Serving as the chief human resources officer at Organon, Aaron Falcione brings unique value to the team and the organization through his experience and talents. In his role, he oversees all human resources functions, including talent acquisition and development, employee relations, compensation and benefits, performance management, diversity and inclusion, and health and safety compliance.
Aaron’s journey to becoming Organon’s Chief Human Resources Officer began in the mid-1990s when he joined the PricewaterhouseCoopers organization, serving as a member of PwC’s Transaction Services practice who specialized in post-merger integrations. During his more than nine-year tenure with the company, Aaron applied his educational background in human resources to his developing career.
During this period of his career, Aaron was able to apply some of the organizational psychology he had learned in college. His understanding of unique dynamics among different companies and cultures allowed him to more effectively navigate his role in helping companies navigate the complexities of integration..
He says, “It was an amazing set of experiences over the years of seeing the tactics and strategies that worked and those that didn’t. It really was a foundational experience for me.”
After his time with PricewaterhouseCoopers, Aaron began to work at Siemens, one of Germany’s leading industrial organizations. While there, he took on numerous roles and experienced acquisitions due to the nature of the company’s operations.
“Siemens is very acquisitive as an organization,” he says. “I had the chance to be part of an acquisition, and then I stayed on the team as a human resources lead for the global business unit.”
From Siemens, Aaron took his talents to Merck, where he worked at the company’s office based in Switzerland. He stayed there for nearly five years.
He says about his time at Merck, “This was the role that ultimately led me to Organon. In that role, I was responsible for HR throughout the emerging markets, and then eventually the broader international markets, all markets outside of the US from an HR standpoint.”
He continues, “I worked with a man named Kevin Ali, now the CEO of Organon, and we formed a really mutually beneficial partnership. And as Merck started to contemplate divesting or spinning off this portfolio of products, they tapped on a proven leader to help orchestrate that and figure out what Organon would look like and how it would be focused — and that person was Kevin.”
On the history of the company’s origin, Aaron says, “I had a lot of confidence in Kevin. I said, ‘I want to be part of it, I want to try and help figure this out.’
At that moment, though, Organon was only an idea. It wasn’t even known as Organon. It was a project within Merck, to figure out what the right portfolio is and what the right focus and strategy of the organization would be, and what the basic economics of that business would look like around the world.
Aaron continues, “Here we are now — the project itself took about 18 months, and we finally went live as a separate, independent publicly listed company in June of this year, so we just hit our one-year anniversary as an enterprise. And it’s been an absolutely incredible journey.”
During the first year of operations at Organon, finding their footing and establishing their identity has been an important part of moving forward. A major factor in creating the organizational atmosphere they want to foster is implementing the foundational pillars that will define what it means to be part of the team at Organon.
Aaron says, “We truly built Organon culture first,” adding that the team hired new members and leaders based on not only competency and knowledge but also humility and integrity.
“We were looking for value-driven leaders with unimpeachable integrity, features that could really bring life to the culture we [wanted to establish] at Organon.”
Describing the process of defining Organon’s values, he says, “We were in the midst of hiring our Executive Leadership team and interviewing each on the values that mattered most to them. The week our last ELT member started, we held a two-day workshop on our values, covering the values we want to reflect as an organization, what values we are holding our leaders accountable for, and what we are holding our teams accountable for.”
He adds, “During those two days, we were really working through ‘What do we really mean? What does it mean to Be Real (one of Organon’s values)? What does it mean to say “We Rise Together? How can we expect to see our values expressed through standards of behavior?’”
Was the values workshop successful? Aaron believes so. “Our values are resonant throughout the organization.”
He adds, “Our founders have picked them up and they run with them. There are examples in every corner of the organization and all over our intranet about what our values mean to our Founders.”
As a culture-first organization, Organon holds its values as a foundational part of its operations — and it will continue to do so into the future.
Aaron says, “Our values are lived. I think most companies can craft compelling value statements, missions, and visions — they’re all noble benchmarks for behavior and aspirations. More importantly though, are those statements reflecting the lived experience that happens inside of an organization? Is it congruent? Do we live and behave in accordance with our values? And ultimately, have we adapted our systems and processes and work practices to reflect them?”
He adds, “It’s always been our view from the beginning that it’s a necessary but insufficient condition to articulate your values — what really matters is making sure that when people are experiencing processes like performance management, incentivization, and compensation that they reflect those values, and it’s not in conflict, because we also know that our Founders’ experience is going to be heavily influenced by the processes that we have, not by the values that are on the wall.”
“So we talked about this idea of getting the values off the wall and making sure that people really live them.”
How does this commitment come to life at Organon? Aaron explains, “We’ve made adjustments to our benefits programs, and we’ve completely reimagined our performance and rewards systems and approaches all guided by a simple question ‘Does it or does it not align with our values?’ If it doesn’t, we tend to go in a different direction. If it does, we stay the course. I think that’s something that someone from the outside looking in at Organon may not appreciate until they actually get here, and they see it and hopefully feel that this is a different kind of company.”
As the CHRO of Organon, Aaron Falcone is going above and beyond to foster an atmosphere where team members, leaders, and clients feel their voice is heard.
Using experience from his ongoing career in HR, he is able to help the organization bring its values to life, creating the culture-first, vibrant workplace atmosphere they are striving to offer.
Aaron concludes, “One of the anchoring concepts of our employee experience is the importance of Psychological Safety. We’re working diligently to create a sense of psychological safety throughout the organization. You do that by having people that are curious, compassionate, empathetic and appreciate the need to be candid and courteous with each other. Those are some of the attributes that we really do look for; we are not going to be an organization that tolerates the highly-effective jerks, or the really skilled, competent but unkind people — that’s antithetical to everything we’re trying to create.”
