All should join culture club

Tony Hsieh once said if you get the culture of a company right, "most of the other stuff will take care of itself".

Perhaps you do not know who he is and are wondering why anybody should care what he thinks. But if his CV is anything to go by, every leader should listen to what he has to say.

The Taiwanese-American Harvard graduate founded a multi million-dollar online advertising network, LinkExchange, and helped to build the world's largest online shoe store, Zappos.com.

But as important as it is, many struggle to define what an organisation's culture actually is, according to Ilona Steffen, a principal with Booz & Company.

"It is how people behave in the company," she says. "How they feel, what they like, what they don't like, what they think is important, what they think is less important, what they believe is right and wrong." In other words, a company's culture is a philosophy or a way of doing things, such as a code that dictates everyone wears jeans and acts informally with each other, or the opposite.

And every company has one.

It may not exist from the first day of its founding but a culture evolves in a company fairly quickly.

"You would expect a company culture to be defined by the people that work there but, surprisingly, that is mostly not the case," says Britt Thyssen, a senior organisational psychologist with Innovative HR Solutions (Ihs) in Dubai.

Companies that do not consciously manage their culture usually have a strong correlation with the values of the owner or the founder.

"Therefore the people who complain about the company culture are usually not the management but the people within. And it doesn't end with complaints. Research has proven that having a negative company culture also has a strong impact on morale, teamwork, knowledge transfer and employee retention," adds Ms Thyssen.

But when it is at its best, a positive culture can energise and accelerate a business' goals and strategies.

"It can be the secret sauce that makes your organisation really special," says Ms Steffen.

Research by Booz & Co has found almost every company that has achieved "peak performance," including Apple and Microsoft, did so by applying five principles. And culture is at the heart of them all. They are as follows:

First, match strategy and culture: executives sometimes underestimate how much the successful implementation of strategy depends on culture. "Culture trumps strategy every time," says Ms Steffen.

Second, focus on a few critical shifts in behaviour: changing the behaviour of people is hard. "I have seen companies come up with two pages full of things that their employees were supposed to change in their behaviour," says Ms Steffen. It does not work. Companies should instead try to focus on a few "critical" behaviours of specific groups, such as frontline sales.

Third, honour the strengths of a company's existing culture: too often companies obsess about the negative aspects of a company's culture and overlook the good. "Tie the changes you are trying to accomplish back to positive cultural strengths. That's really a source of energy," says Ms Steffen.

Fourth, integrate formal and informal interventions: companies that want to introduce new policies should make more of informal elements such as networks. "Often when you have a colleague who does a similar job that you do and whom you know and trust and they say. 'Wow, this new policy makes a whole lot of sense,' you are likely to believe them. You walk in that person's shoes and you trust that person," says Ms Steffen.

Finally, measure and monitor cultural evolution: many assume it is impossible to do so, which is not true. Surveys are a good way of keeping track of it, according to Ms Steffen.

"You really want to treat a cultural programme behavioural approach programme just like you treat any other business initiative so you also want to know whether it's working."

gduncan@thenational.ae