I encountered the below great example on how a CEO builds culture by getting his hands dirty. But first let me develop some arguments on how I view the importance of culture in today’s fast and digital world.
“Culture is important to keep employees and to beat competitors”
In today’s fast environment and changing customer preferences you cannot operate a company without CSR thinking, sense of purpose and constant monitoring of the customer experience. Add to this mix the culture. The culture is becoming more and more important to be able to keep strong employees and to develop your business.
Make no mistake about it – the top management sets a company’s culture. The most influential people in a company will affect the culture. Companies with a strong and healthy culture are doing extremely well. Usually these companies have their founders still active (IKEA, H&M, Amazon).
Personally I have worked in different type of companies. All of them try to cultivate a certain culture but it is extremely hard. A culture is according to me based on:
· Top managements way of thinking,
· The questions they ask,
· The way they think about the organisation,
· The way they genuinely care for people and the way they give a purpose of where the company is heading.
In a fast and digital world culture is more important than ever. In Sweden we have an extremely hot job market within IT and people can change jobs on a weekly basis. In my company we have had a few great years but eventually reached a plateau. During this time the culture has changed. As you hit the wall the culture needs to absorb the effect so you wont loose your employees. We all know that the brightest disappear first. Some people say that tomorrow’s organisation will only exist for a couple of years, until the needs have changed or are fulfilled by others in a better way. I come to think of Tom the navigation company that was replaced by the Maps function in our mobiles. The mobiles and the two main platforms, Android and Apple can with a few moves kill a whole market. It helps that they have strong financial muscles but their strong culture helps to constantly advance.
Anyhow, if you are among the top management and reading this keep in mind that you are the one responsible to set the culture. Now to the wonderful story I found on the net:
“Culture is set by top manangement”
As a CEO of a huge company, you often get out of touch with your workers- all you see are results. Here’s a good story to highlight the point:
The CEO of a manufacturing company I worked for some time back visited our division for a “peptalk” type speech since the company was doing so well. He was trying to talk everyone and everything up, but noticed he wasn’t getting the expected response. At the time, we were all being forced to work 60+ hour weeks + and mandatory weekends to keep up with customer demands. We were all exhausted, fed up, and even though we were getting overtime, we felt like we were getting screwed (the factory was hot and involved a lot of physical labor).
Our CEO, who happened to be a genuinely nice and caring guy, happened to see a woman with wet eyes during the speech. He cut things short, then asked her point blank “We’re surrounded by good news and you look so sad…can I see you in a few minutes?”
The lady’s name was Julie, and it was rumored she was about to be fired due to attendance. She was a single mom, and because we worked so much she had a hard time finding people to watch her kids, resulting in her being late or absent. She got called in to the manager’s office that morning, and by her response, we think she finally got the boot.
The CEO called us all into the meeting room again later that day (which was unusual), and wow—the law got laid down. He announced he was going to stay in town for two weeks and personally go through every employee’s records (there were over 250 of us!), and his office door would be wide open to anyone that would like to talk to him. He also said that nobody at his company would ever be disciplined over a family issue, and immediate changes would be forthcoming.
Julie came back to the crowd with a huge smile, so I assume things were straightened out. In that two weeks the CEO was there, plans were made for on-site daycare, weekly employee lunches, and temp workers were brought in to get our workhours down to the 40-50 hour range. Weekends were made volunteer only, and we all ended up getting $1000 bonus checks. We were all shocked, and it boosted morale like nothing else.
