It’s a thankless job that does not generate revenue and can tarnish a brand’s image if not done well
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” are the famous words of Peter Drucker, an Austrian-born American management consultant who advised many great companies, including General Motors, General Electric and IBM. If you don’t get culture right, even a great strategy can prove ineffective.
Zappos and Google are names that often come to mind when we think of companies with a great work culture. Ever since it was founded in 1999, Tony Hseih — CEO of Zappos — drove a culture centred on customer happiness. It’s no wonder that 95 per cent of the team are call centre executives and that an average Zappos employee answers 5,000 calls a month and 1,200 e-mails a week.
Google, on the other hand, goes all out to provide a superlative work culture for its employees. Flat organisational structure with a transparent & open door environment, outside work community engagement, clear mission & values, and casual & democratic atmosphere are just some of the cultural characteristics that make it one of the greatest places to work at.
Closer to home, Indian companies have also started viewing work culture as an integral part of their overall strategy. There is a definite and growing understanding of how it directly reflects in a company’s functioning and in its performance. But there is still a long way to go.
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Let’s run through a few commonplace observations that make Indian companies prime candidates for getting a culture chief, and how a culture aligned with an organisation’s overall strategy can drive long term value, enhance customer experience and make employees embody productivity as a second nature.
Compared to their western counterparts, the customer service levels of companies in India have still to play catch up. Customer service is tough. It’s a thankless job that does not generate revenue and can tarnish a brand’s image if not done well (think social media complaints). What is happening is expected response times are decreasing, and channels for customers to register a complaint to vent their frustration are also increasing. The key here is to hire the right people. Employees can always be trained to ably service their customers, but it is imperative to bring in people with the right attitude.
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A people’s person, a patient listener, a good communicator, a genuine desire to resolve customer issues and a seeker of feedback. A few good hires leading by example can help inculcate these traits in fellow employees. A company-wide culture that is customer centric is the cornerstone of a world-class organisation. But the secret sauce of such world-class organisations is that they constantly strive to create and maintain an environment that facilitates and promotes these traits.
We then have the stereotypical Indian work culture (that of long hours) which, unfortunately, is still considered to be oblivious to the concept of work-life balance. What is required is a change of perspective. The focus needs to shift from logging in more hours to being more productive in fewer. This is actually the perfect opportunity to take advantage of a natural human tendency.
Under restrictions, we tend to utilise a greater percentage of our brain in thinking out of the box and turn experimental, taking the path less traveled. Applied here, not only will we learn to manage time better but the ‘think differently’ approach will throw open ways of doing things we had never thought of earlier.
If the perspective of completing a task without having the luxury of stretching the deadline is established, one starts valuing the available work hours in a day. This further percolates into our meetings, so as to not let them run beyond the stipulated duration. With employees moving towards higher levels of productivity, efficiency and self discipline, organisations can continue to scale and stay lean at the same time.
In larger organisations, the lower rung is often disconnected from the bigger picture. What they do and how that fits into the larger scheme of things is not adequately communicated. As a result, the much needed sense of contribution to a company’s overall strategy or mission is absent.
One way to become more inclusive as an organisation is to adopt a flat structure. This reduces the degrees of separation between the management and employees, aiding better communication. However, this being a massive exercise may not be conducive for all.
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Another great way which is quicker to implement is for organisations to have a regular offline and online forum for communication. Knowlarity holds a monthly town hall meeting where the management talks about where the business is, the way forward, followed by a highly interactive Q&A session with the employees.
Over the past few years, many organisations have created new positions in the C-Suite, that of a Chief Culture Officer. Some of their core responsibilities include: defining organisational goals, effectively aligning business verticals, departments and teams, setting the tone for communication within and outside the organisation, acting as a liaison between employees & the management, conducting events for employees. It helps that a dedicated resource is given the sole responsibility of driving the culture in the organisation, but for this to work best, it is important that each C-suite member is in alignment with the CCO’s thinking & embodies the cultural values with equal vigour.
The Googles and Facebooks of the world are taking the cake when it comes to nailing the culture brief at work. Perhaps, it’s time for you and I to take a leaf out of their books, introspect and shoot off a mail titled “Are you the culture chief we’re looking for?”
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