Mousom Some, IOCL

Any company’s culture is similar to its neural network. It functions similarly to how a neuron does in the human body. The values of the corporation are communicated to every cell, or group of its personnel, through corporate culture. An efficient and productive culture transforms the company, and it is only achievable when the business’ employees uphold its ideals.

Culture

For nine years, Lou Gerstner oversaw IBM as its CEO and Chairman. He went into further detail on IBM’s successful culture shift that put it on top. He explained the need for a culture shift inside a company in his well-known book, “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?” He emphasized that culture is not only a component of the game but is the Game itself. From being a hardware company to a technology service company, he changed IBM’s emphasis and culture. Agility and scale are essential for survival as the market, consumers and technology are all evolving rapidly. The globe has seen several global crises over the past 20 years, including the 2008 Financial Crisis and the most recent Pandemic Crisis. To sustain in these tough times, the company’s values, vision, and culture should be part of its DNA. That’s why IBM has been successful in the business for more than 110 years and became “The Living Company”.

Employee engagement and motivation are boosted by a positive corporate culture, which enhances business performance. The company’s personnel reinforce its corporate culture, beliefs, and activities to create a distinctive business environment that offers a distinctive customer experience.

In ExxonMobil, the employee culture is grounded in a shared commitment to safety, integrity, high-quality work, and good corporate citizenship. Apple Inc. has an organizational culture for Creative Innovation.  Google’s corporate culture is to make employees happy because happy employees are more productive and creative. Google aspires to foster an environment where staff members are free to use their imagination, whether it is through coming up with fresh approaches to old issues or simply by the way they carry out their jobs.

 Values

Core Values are “the deeply established beliefs that influence all of a company’s operations and serve as its cultural pillars,” according to the Harvard Business Review. Values are an organization’s set of moral principles that everyone must uphold to maintain the organization’s integrity and hold one another accountable for acting in a way that is consistent with the organization’s values.

Unless the culture is connected with values and vision, it cannot alter a firm on its own. The company’s goals for the future can only be met by preserving its deeply embedded culture and beliefs.

The secret sauce that makes up Amazon’s culture is made up of four core principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, Earth’s best employer, and Earth’s safest place to work.

Culture and Value for Organizational Transformation

Setting business culture throughout the whole firm is a difficult task. Additionally, it is not viable to adopt a “Ctrl C and Ctrl V” technique for cultural reinforcement. Culture cannot be implemented by SOPs, KRAs, or KPIs. It can only be done if there is perfect alignment towards the company’s values, mission, and vision, as can be observed in many successful firms. A genuine cultural shift takes place when employees act as representatives of the company’s principles in both their professional and personal lives. Employee commitment to the company’s policies, goals, and vision is crucial in this regard. 

Renowned professional executive coach and famous author Marshall Goldsmith said in the “Trigger: sparking positive change and making it last” that employee engagement is not only about what companies are doing to engage its employee, but also what employees are doing to engage themselves. When workers are properly engaged, benefits extend beyond those of the business and its clients. The employee himself or herself would be the primary beneficiary.

The fact that Google is crystal clear about its beliefs and objectives is one of the main reasons why it continues to be an innovator and industry leader. They list their essential principles on the web page “Ten things we know to be true.”

As mentioned in https://about.google/philosophy/, the following are 10 of their core values, explained in further detail on their page.

• Focus on the user and all else will follow.
• It’s best to do one thing well.
• Fast is better than slow.
• Democracy on the web works.
• You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.
• You can make money without doing evil.
• There’s always more information out there.
• The need for information crosses all borders.
• You can be serious without a suit.
• Great just isn’t good enough.

Google, like other big businesses, has a sizable human resources (HR) division, but they call it “People Operations” (POPS). People Operations is where HR and raw science meet, and it’s what maintains Google as a top-performing business. Google was aware of its high female turnover rate a few years ago. To lessen this turnover, studies revealed that only new moms were connected with significant turnover. Google is providing paid maternity leave as a remedy.

Some of the successful models of effective reinforcement of core values deep inside the organization and its employees include following

1. Employee performance is evaluated against the core values
2. In Siebel, a Software Company

• A third-party auditor’s customer satisfaction surveys are used to determine bonuses and incentive packages.
• It is hard for a new employee to work there for one week without learning that the company prioritizes client happiness.
• All conference rooms are named after customers, and all the artwork on the walls is taken from annual reports of customers.

1. Several businesses promote their values on t-shirts and coffee mugs.
2. During orientation, a practical story of impressing customers by a colleague was preferable to receiving a detailed handbook describing how to deliver great service to customers. 
3. From corporate cheers to computer-based training, Walmart consistently emphasizes its basic values of excellence, customer service, and staff respect.
4. The famous “HP Way,” that enlightened model of doing business was built on trust and excellence.
5. At Microsoft, transformation programs shifted from a Product Focus (marked by Individualism, Competitiveness, and a “know it all” mentality) to a more inclusive People Focus (with the goal of “empowering every individual and organization on the earth to achieve more.”
6. In Paypal, a firm focused on Strengthening Employee Financial Wellness, employees’ financial health is estimated and progress is tracked.

Widely known and influential thinker on management Peter Drucker said that our mission in life is not to prove that we are right and we are smart. Our mission in life is to make a positive difference.

If all of us carry these values not only in our workplace but also in our family, it will certainly make a positive impact in the workplace and in the family and make everyone happy. A happy employee is mostly highly productive, efficient, and effective in every orbit of life.