Company culture is a popular buzzword across all industries and is used to describe the culture within an organization. Typically, a good culture produces content and hard-working employees who stick to the long haul. On the other hand, a poor culture leads to detached employees, poor productivity, and high staff turnover.
In today’s connected and complex world, every organization has defined its own definition of a company culture but all of them fall under the same definition. Generally, company culture is defined as the environment in which employees work, and a variety of elements including company’s mission, value, ethics, expectations, and goals. After getting familiar with the definition, the question now arises why company culture is importance for business success?
Why Company Culture Matters?
For every organization, its culture can be the strongest quality or greatest liability. A culture that is hard to replicate offers a competitive advantage to the company. With different cultures present today, employees have a variety of options to choose from. Many business leaders started putting emphasis on the importance of corporate culture because they observed that having a good culture leads in high retention rate of employees, success in business, growth and expansion in diverse sectors along with increased productivity. One of those leaders is the founder of Aura, Hari Ravichandran who stated that you should never underestimate the importance of good company culture because there are countless examples of startups with huge valuations that were brought down by systemic cultural issues. The difficult task for these business leaders now to identify what type of company culture is fit for their business. Listed below are a few common cultures to help them understand what culture they have or they might need to practice in the company. According to Forbes, companies with strong cultures saw a 4x increase in revenue growth. Gallup suggested that highly engaged workplaces see a 10% increase in customer ratings and a 20% increase in sales. Also, happy employees are 12% more productive.
Type 1: Empowered Culture
In this model, employees feel that their role in the business is crucial for the operation. They take ownership of their work and are willingly responsible for the outcomes. Also, workforces get the opportunity to display their skills while completing task and confidence in their decisions regarding the projects they are handling. Furthermore, requests for bonuses, wage increases, and position changes are considered seriously and granted when it is appropriate.
How to put it into practice?
To implement this model, organizations should focus on employees’ development and offer them freedom, transparency in the working environment. Delegate tasks to every employee and make them responsible for it. By doing so, business leaders are creating an atmosphere where employees are developing their skills. As a result, productivity is increased which leads to the overall growth of the company.
For example: Adobe is a company with a culture that avoids micromanaging in favor of trusting employees to do their best. Employees are given stock options so that they know they have both a stake and reward in the company’s success.
Type 2: Customer-Centric Culture
A customer-centric culture is all about customers and how to meet their demands. This culture promotes employees to see everything through the eyes of the customer. They have to make appropriate decisions based on their observations. The main aim of workers is to deliver a consistent level of stellar customer experience. Also, products and services developed according to the requirements of the clients.
How to put it into practice?
Here, the culture of the organizations should focus on developing products and services that can meet the client’s demands. These organizations should train the customer-facing team properly to deliver best experience. In addition, every decision taken by them should be based on the mottos like “customer is always right” and “a satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all”.
For example: Amazon is a company with a culture of customer service excellence. The company is always ready to serve its customers.
Type 3: Hierarchy Culture
In this model, the traditional top-down hierarchy is maintained within companies. There are various levels of management between leaderships and workforces that results in low level of communication between them. According to management level, managers have the authority and power to allocate resources, reward, and punish behaviour and give orders to their subordinates. Moreover, subordinates know whom to report to and where to get information and directives.
How to put it into practice?
To implement this model, organizations need to create and maintain a proper guideline for senior members and employees to follow. Furthermore, it should allow managers to divide responsibilities to the people in a logical way, creating an additional layer of efficiencies. By having a clear line of communication, the tracking of ongoing activities, the status of projects, and the quality of work can be monitored at all levels.
For example: Founded in 1892, GE is about as traditional as they come and is well-known for its cut-and-dry management practices. Recently, however, in favor of more regular interactions between management and staff, it scrapped the conventional performance review and is even introducing an app to help promote feedback.
Type 4: Clan Culture
This model imitates family-based culture. Since employees spend most of their time in the office, strong bonds of loyalty, tradition, and commonality generally form. The company drives employees through shared goals, vision, outcomes and outputs rather than setting stringent rules and procedures. When compared with hierarchy culture, there are less levels of management between leadership and employees. In companies, employees are close-knit, work together as a community and typically place their peers’ needs first.
How to put it into practice?
It is fact that a happy team creates a happy business. So, the company needs to focus on employees’ happiness. They should create an environment of teamwork and family, where people have strong loyal ties and working towards a common cause.
For example: Walt Disney is most recognizable brands in the world and has the kindest community on the planet. It is compassionate towards each of its employees.
Type 5: Innovation Culture
To stay relevant in the competitive market, innovation allows organizations to bring new ideas and plays a vital role in economic growth. It is kept as the core strategy for developing any new products and services. Moreover, in this model, the company encourages employees to present new concepts for optimizing and streamlining the entire business operation. Its focus is not only on creating new ideas, but also on pursuing a systematic process in order to bring those ideas to fruition.
How to put it into practice?
In order to enforce this culture, companies should create an environment where everybody feels comfortable communicating their ideas. They should also have diverse set of personalities to foster more creative ideas. By having different set of perspective, complex issues can be solved as well.
For example: Tech giant, Google is always innovating new products, services, and solutions for companies.
At the end of the day, irrespective of size and sector, all organizations fall under the same culture. Rather than trying to fit into a single culture, they should focus on the aforesaid models to better understand how different companies function and maximize their growth and make people recognize for the good culture.
