LAST week we looked at the need for businesses to align their corporate culture with their business strategy.
We also noted that a highly-engaged workforce was essential to achieve strategic objectives and goals.
We further looked at the case studies done by a Sweden-based firm, Barret Values Centre, Culture and Leadership Consultants and authors Tor Eneroth and Ashley Munday, on Volvo IT and Unilever Brazil.
Thankfully, they have permitted us to ‘stand on their shoulders’ and use their case study research outcomes in this column.
Today, we will look at how the Volvo IT and Unilever Brazil managed to align their corporate culture to their business strategy as well as engage their workforce.
These companies, in their unique individual circumstances, aligned and transformed their cultures auspiciously.
It is important from the onset that we have a pictorial mind view of a high-performance culture which is created by a culture strategy alignment and employee engagement.
Tor and Ashley describe an ideal workplace culture as “one where there’s excitement, where everything is done to enhance the customer experience.”
They go on to visualise a workplace as one where innovation thrives and teams easily adapt to unforeseen circumstances.
They see the senior team working toward a shared vision of success.
Additionally, they visualise an ideal workplace as one where people genuinely care for one another, feel recognised and are supported within the organisation.”
In our case study involving a local company, we saw that the firm had adjusted its business strategy to cope with the fierce competition in the industry.
While this is a worthwhile move, it is not sufficient to warrant a proportionate expected result in terms of a high-performance culture.
As we saw last week the workforce of this firm were finding it a hustle to work in an adjusted environment where, instead of working at their own pace, they had to exhibit a customer-centric focus which was an entirely new concept to them.
They regard the CEO’s initiatives as “Not invented here” or “If it has not been done before then it can’t be done here”.
A customer can visibly see the workers extra pressure to adjust to the new customer focused behaviour.
Our scenario is a possible indicator of workers who had a new strategy imposed on them.
They feel they have not been engaged, they do not feel the ownership of the new strategy.
Their emotions and beliefs are detached from their work.
In all fairness, the firm would do better to invest in the worker – engagement process and reap enormous rewards.
The above scenario is an indicator of a culture lag and the lack of employee engagement.
The key to developing a high performance corporate culture, particularly one that becomes a source of competitive advantage, requires two issues: gaining insight into how culture is formed; the critical role that employees’ attitudes and perceptions inevitably play in the process.
Additionally, business leaders should deliberately decide to have the passion to implement and engage the workforce to foster significant performance improvements.
For firms that have successfully created a customer focused culture aligned with their business strategy, there are exceedingly enormous rewards.
The workforce acts in unison as a dedicated team, striving to move the firm toward achieving its desired strategic goals.
Having a highly engaged workforce is not enough! It is equally important to align the organisational culture with the business strategy.
A workforce that is pulling in the wrong direction, one that operates with enthusiasm but contrary to strategic intent, is detrimental to performance.
Essentially, having an appropriate mix of strategy and culture in any given circumstance is a critical recipe for business success.
Pursuing a strategy of innovation in a dynamic market is highly likely to succeed within ‘a self- critique’ culture where management embraces new ideas.
Similarly, pursuing a low cost strategy succeeds within a disciplined culture where the workforce operates in a cost efficient control environment and with a mindset of continuous process improvement.
We should note that culture change is not an overnight process. Culture transition, especially across large and complex organisations, is usually a gradual process.
Volvo  IT and Unilever Brazil are examples of firms that have overcome culture lags and successful implemented employee engagements.
Volvo IT is a global company based in Gothenburg, Sweden. Its primary role is to provide IT services and support teams to the global network of Volvo industries.
The core of the culture transformation process was the Culture Ambassador Program, from 2001 to 2011.
Volvo IT trained more than 500 Culture Ambassadors who actively developed the culture throughout the organisation.
The primary purpose of the Culture Ambassador program was to empower and train all formal and informal leaders to develop their capability to grow a desired culture and nurture their espoused core values.
Additionally, Unilever Brazil, took a ‘merged rivers’ approach—cultural transformation and operations.
We have noted that in order to pursue any change in business strategy, there must be a heavy investment and passion in shaping the work cultures and influencing the behaviors of their workforce.
The process of adjusting business strategies may result in culture- strategy misalignments. Firms that align their culture and strategies as well as engaging their workforce reap enormous rewards.
-The author is the managing consultant at GN Grant Business Consultant, a fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), a Master of Business Administration (MBA) holder and a candidate for the Herriot Watt University (Scotland) Doctor of Business Administration (DBA)