RIYADH: There is a noticeable tension and lack of trust in the relationship between employees and the employers in the region. This is often fueled by the employees’ concerns over job security and employers’ fear of potential abuse of company resources. Such a relationship is unhealthy and counter productive. To counteract this situation, regional business leaders should build a corporate culture that link the organizations’ desired target performance to promoting transparency, trust, and team-work as well as job security.
Corporate culture represents unwritten rules that feel so natural and familiar to the work force to the extent that they would find it rather difficult to describe. It represents the heart and soul of the organization; including knowledge, beliefs and attitudes. It guides the thought of employees and acts around issues like quality, customers, teamwork, innovation and decision-making. These are all the things that directly impact company’s performance. It affects every business measure in the company such as costs, productivity and revenue.
The corporate culture deserves the attention of the entire work force. This is because leadership alone is no longer a sufficient differentiator. Stimulating and trusting corporate culture can be a key competitive advantage, especially when recruiting highly skilled and talented individuals. In the long run it will contribute to the bottom line.
When building a corporate culture, the business needs to determine a number of corporate traits; including the long-term direction and purpose; the company’s ability to drive commitment and to develop employees’ ownership; the values that grip the company together and the company’s ability to read and respond to the business environment.
In a complex and changing business environment where mergers, acquisitions and alliances shape the corporate landscape, the leadership needs to be able to answer key questions, such as: What does current culture look like? What role does internal communication play? How much does it cost to develop a culture? What are the components of culture that needs to encourage in the organization to build a performance culture and how can be done? And, ultimately what is culture’s impact on the bottom line?
Only when these questions are properly addressed can the management commit to the implementation process, taking into consideration that change must be permanent and pervasive. Once change is accepted by the work force as a part of their daily lives, then target improvements in performance can follow.
Communication is an essential tool for shaping a company culture. For example, the corporate values of any organization appear pleasant and thoughtful when written on a piece of paper, but unless employees adhere to these values, the business cannot advance. When considering communicating through culture, it is important to look at the roles and responsibilities of the leadership. Leaders and managers attitudes greatly influence their teams’ behaviors when creating a culture or managing a cultural change.
Although communication is one of the key tools for shaping organizational cultures, it is important to recognize its limitations. Shaping and maintaining an organizational culture takes a team effort with supporting policies and procedures that promote company values and good ethical practices. Reliance on internal communication to function alone to shape a company culture will not be adequate or practical. The fact that culture is ingrained into every part of an organization means that a range of functions will need to be involved to influence change; from strategy development to employees reward scheme.
Today’s business landscape poses complex challenges to companies when it comes to shaping their culture. Regional companies are becoming increasingly global, often growing through mergers, acquisitions and alliances. Technological advances make it possible to work from almost anywhere in the world and allow work to be outsourced relatively easily to third parties.
Many multi-national companies seek to build a single corporate culture that cuts across diverse businesses or countries in order to unite the company under a common brand. They achieve this by encouraging collaboration, sharing knowledge and harnessing cross-selling opportunities. Other companies aim to create or maintain distinct sub-cultures to enhance performance in specific business units or enable the delivery of niche brands. Some companies are working to shape the corporate culture for thousands of employees, often with different ethnic backgrounds and cultures, across the region.
The most effective companies have their corporate culture aligned with their strategy, so that the organizational culture drives behaviors that are supportive in delivering the strategy, thus creating a more enhanced value and contributing to the bottom line. When strategy and culture are not adequately aligned, the culture may encourage behaviors that are inconsistent with company objectives or impede strategy execution, thus destroying value or impeding value creation. In this part of the world, which employs people of diverse origins and ethnic backgrounds, the business need for a clearly defined corporate culture could not be greater.
(Yahya Shakweh is a vice president at Advanced Electronics Company, Saudi Arabia. The views expressed in this article are the author’s personal opinion. He can be reached on E-mail: [email protected])
