Corporate Culture Matters
You've heard that Corporate Culture Matters. But what does that mean?
Corporate Culture is how your people, customers and the public perceive who you are and what you stand for.
The success of your company’s brands and services are tied directly to these perceptions.
While profitability is a key indicator of your performance and success, customers are more
attracted to what you stand for and how you emulate your values and standards in the marketplace.
What is Corporate Culture?
At CRI Global CAPS, we believe a company’s culture is a combination of your history, heritage, standards, values, attitudes, ethics, customers, employees, leadership, performance and legacy. Because your corporate culture impacts performance and profitability, it is much more than a simple behavioral model; it evaluates the norms and expectations of employees and how they perform their work and interact with customers.
How does Your Culture Impact
Your People, Performance and Profitability?
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We believe that every successful company relies on its culture to improve its people, performance and profitability. By defining your culture, you will better understand how your culture impacts your company’s performance goals.
Culture also impacts your customers – how they respond to your brands and marketing campaigns. One of our goals is to help you create “broadcast customers” by better understanding the power of your corporate culture. In other words, we know that “broadcast customers” are four times more likely to sing your company’s praises, convert prospective customers into buyers, and tell your story better than you can through word of mouth and social media! This is one of the benefits of understanding your corporate culture and how to use it as a powerful, competitive tool to ensure the continued growth and success of your business.
When it comes to customers, the fact is that their wants, needs and expectations are constantly shifting; and, so is your marketplace. How you define and shape your culture affects your performance with customers because culture matters more to your customers than your bottom line. But, “broadcast customers” feel as though they have a vested interest in your company’s success. This is why they want your company to be profitable.
So, how customers view your commitment to their needs is paramount in how you position your brands through your marketing, internal and external communications, and employee engagement.
Culture is Part of the Triad of Business Success™
At CRI Global CAPS, we view culture as a triangle with the legs of Business Operations, Profit Strategies and Customer Relations. These three legs comprise what we refer to as your Triad of Business Success™.
These three legs of your business must be balanced:
Business Operations includes all your primary business units and departmental functions such as accounting, human resources, supply chain management, legal, compliance, risk management, and so forth.
A company’s Profit Strategies include such areas as pricing strategies, product development, new business development, sales and marketing, brand management and retail relations.
While the importance of the third leg, Customer Relations, is self-explanatory, many companies fall short in their customer relations strategies by not tracking their customers’ spending patterns or not frequently surveying customers to assess their needs and expectations. We have also learned that every successful company plays on the mystique of their culture. They create a “cult-like” mystique that employees and customers want to be part of. This so-called “Cult Factor” is what drives customers to line-up at midnight at the entrance to your stores just to be the first to buy your latest widget, or brag on social media about how wonderful your new product is. It’s also what keeps the resume pile three-feet high in your Human Resources Department. Everybody wants to work for a great company! And, a dynamic corporate culture is part of that mystique.
Together, these three legs – Business Operations, Profit Strategies and Customer Relations – form the Triad of Business Success™. When these three legs are aligned, they can lead your company to market domination. But it also requires the guiding hand of capable leadership.
Culture Impacts Regulatory and Compliance Issues
Over the past five years, we've seen a dramatic increase in both regulatory and compliance issues. Recently, many regulators and insurance companies have started to include Culture as part of a company’s performance audit review. Why is this?
Regulators realize that a company’s standards, values and attitudes translate to their employees’ performance, behavior, customer relations, absenteeism, workers’ compensation claims, on-the-job accidents, lawsuits, liability and insurance claims. Companies that are classified as “High Performance Cultures” typically have fewer regulatory or compliance issues when audited. But companies that are classified as “Volatile Cultures” or “Under-Performing Cultures” often have higher incidents of risk and regulatory violations.
So, it makes financial sense to not only assess your company culture, but also reshape that culture so you create a high performance workplace.