If You're Going to Change Your Corporate Culture, Do It Right

Ed. note: Posts published on From the Workplace are written by outside contributors and do not reflect the view or opinion of SHRM. This post was originally published in 2022.

Executives today are focusing on company culture. They can build an effective corporate culture to improve customer satisfaction through acquiring additional knowledge from customers, developing better relationships with them, and providing a higher quality of service for them.

Company performance is determined thorough various aspects such as customer satisfaction. And executives can positively affect company performance through increased customer satisfaction. Company performance is what every executive is concerned about. Thus, there is a global need to cultivate a strong corporate culture to accomplish sustainable competitiveness in global markets. This strong corporate culture includes three areas of collaboration, trust, and learning.

How Does Corporate Culture Work?

These three cultural aspects play a critical role in improving innovation and enhancing the effectiveness of organizational knowledge management. For example, collaboration provides a shared understanding about the current issues and problems among employees, which helps to generate new ideas within organizations.

Trust towards their leader’s decisions is also a necessary precursor to create new knowledge and improve company performance through increased quality of products and services. Moreover, the amount of time spent learning is positively related with the amount of knowledge gained, shared, and implemented, aiming at breaking through performance gaps in corporations.

Executives  are very involved in cultural change initiatives and, in particular, by creating more effective workplaces, developing people and shifting organizations toward the creation of new services and products. Knowledge, in of itself, is a by-product of culture and culture’s role in guiding and facilitating people's action is the key to executive decision-making. Through an effective company culture, executives can contribute to new products and services to meet dynamic market needs, through higher expectations and stimulation for new and strategic opportunities to meet the expectations of strategic goals and the needs of customers in the marketplace.

Executives can build such company culture to serve the customer needs and become more profitable. By influencing behavior and providing valuable resources, executives can change the culture of an organization.

This new focus helps the organization develop a unique culture that is hard for the competition to duplicate. Executives can act as change agents who provide a more humanistic and applicable approach to create a great company culture. For example, executives can facilitate collaboration by developing relationships in organizations. An executive can contribute to the cultural aspect of trust, through considering both employee’s individual interests and company’s essential needs. Also, executives can identify individual needs of employees and develop a learning culture to generate new knowledge and share it with others.

The next sections particularly present a set of actions that can be taken by executives to build an effective corporate culture within corporations.

Building a True Collaboration Culture

  To build a collaboration culture, executives need to improve the degree to which employees actively support and provide significant contributions to each other in their work. They need to develop a collaborative work climate in which:

• Employees are satisfied by the degree of collaboration between departments
• Employees are supportive.
• Employees are helpful.
• There is a willingness to accept responsibility for failure.

Creating a No-Fail Trust Culture

 To create a trust culture, executives need to maintain the volume of reciprocal faith in terms of behaviors and intentions. They need to build an atmosphere of trust and openness in which:

• Employees are generally trustworthy.
• Employees have reciprocal faith in other members' intentions and behaviors.
• Employees have reciprocal faith in others' ability.
• Employees have reciprocal faith in others' behaviors to work toward organizational goals.
• Employees have reciprocal faith in others' decisions towards organizational interests rather than individual interests.
• Employees have relationships based on reciprocal faith. 

Cultivating a Successful Learning Culture

To foster a learning culture, executives need to enhance the extent to which learning is motivated within the workplace. They can contribute to the development of a learning workplace in which:

• Various formal training programs are provided to improve the performance of duties.     
• Work assignments and job rotation provide opportunities for informal individual development. Attendance at external seminars, symposia, etc. is encouraged.
• Various social mechanisms such as clubs and community gatherings are provided.
• Employees are satisfied by the contents of job training or self-development programs.

Mostafa Sayyadi is a business book author and contributor to business publications.