Full speed ahead...If a company is able to create a culture that is unique and employee-centric, it is a safe bet that it will attract valuable talent and retain them.
Great companies have unique cultures, and you want yours to be well-articulated so you can recruit and obtain the optimum fit.
If you make your culture the best it can be, you will attract employees who are the most valuable to you. Below, I will be going through some factors that affect company culture to give some insights to keep your ship steady and ensure smooth sailing. These factors include: supply and demand, recessions and depressions, insourcing and outsourcing, local and global factors, company size and ownership.
When jobs are plentiful, employees can be choosy because demand exceeds supply. So if they have a skill that many companies want or few people have, at least at their skill level, they’ll be in demand. But if lots of people are looking for only a few available jobs, employers can be fussy.
That was the situation at the start of the Industrial Revolution: far more people were available than jobs, so employers could hire whomever they wanted and impose less-than-favourable conditions on them. When supply is greater than demand, companies can be less generous (and usually are). When demand is greater than supply, better working conditions, higher salaries and other perks are needed to get the best employees.
- Recessions and Depressions
This may seem obvious, but many job-seekers fail to take recessions and depressions into account. Yet it figures that when the economy is booming and business is good, companies not only hire more people, they offer them more perks.Conversely, when the economy is faltering and business is poor, they hire fewer people and reduce the goodies.
- Insourcing and Outsourcing
Big issue today. I won’t comment on the political angle, but I will say that when companies outsource work that’s not part of their core competencies, they create fear within their cultures. Yet,it might be far more profitable to do so. This is a serious debate within the workplace these days: how much should we keep in house and how much should we outsource to others?
Melting pot of cultures...In creating a common culture, companies must take these regional and country differences into account.
In today’s global economy, a company is not like a small town, where everyone goes to the same schools and churches, dresses similarly and speaks the same dialect. The culture in that kind of environment is cosy and familiar. But in a company, people working together are more diverse, come from various backgrounds and have differing sensitivities, all of which company executives, management and employees must take into account.
Further complicating matters, a company might have operations in different parts of the world, with cultures that vary. In creating a common culture, companies must take these regional and country differences into account. Particularly challenging is coming up with an image that crosses all boundaries. International corporations struggle with imaging successfully across all cultures. What makes this difficult is that a word or a phrase or a visual may mean one thing in one country and something else entirely—perhaps with a negative connotation—in another. Even colour choices matter.
In a small company, people get to know each other, and so communication tends to be easier than in a large outfit. When I was young, I was lucky to work for companies that were small enough for me to get to know their CEOs. In a large company, groups and departments are more distant from one another, making communication more difficult and problems more plentiful. Also, chief executives are less likely to know individual employees. In Stacy Perman’s book about In-N-Out Burger, owner Lynsi Snyder lamented the fact that the company had grown so much she no longer knew everyone by name.
Also important is how the company owner or manager treats employees. I’m going to share a couple of my experiences working for two medium-sized, privately owned companies in New York, Marlene Blouse and IPCO. Marlene Blouse was one of my first jobs, IPCO my last before I left New York. Marlene Blouse was a manufacturing company owned by two brothers named Meltzer. At the time, I was a showroom model and receptionist for the company, and one of my tasks was to make sure the showroom was staffed at all times. Sometimes I was one of those staffing it (that is, performing inside sales), and at other times—say, if I was on the switchboard and couldn't get a substitute—I’d call on someone else.
One day a buyer from a southern company came in. The showroom was crowded and I was on the switchboard at the time so I called the inside phone-sales department and asked for someone to come out and help this man. They sent an African-American woman who was the best of the inside phone people. This customer refused to let her wait on him, and said some nasty things about her.
Well, I decided to try to sell this guy. Meanwhile, one of the owners who had been told what was going on, came out. He watched the man sign a huge order, then walked up to him and
looked it over. He praised the man on making such a substantial order, right before ripping it up, and said, “You can't treat my employees that way. Never come back here”. And with that, he had my loyalty forever.
Then there was IPCO. Working there was an incredible experience. I started out in credit and collections, managed the accounts payable and receivable departments, then developed and ran the customer service department. But here’s the story I want to share with you.
I tended to be a workaholic who came in on Saturdays and stayed into the evening on weekdays. But I was taking courses in typing and shorthand across town two nights a week, and so on those days, I had to leave at exactly 5 o’clock.
I worked in a bullpen and everyone going to the elevators had to pass my desk. One day Max Lowe, the company’s CEO, saw me rushing toward the elevator and stopped me. He asked why I was in such a hurry to which I explained my situation. He then offered to get his chauffeur to send me to class. And from that day on wards, I got a ride in a chauffeured limousine. To and from school, two nights a week. Now there was a CEO who cared about people as well as the bottom line.
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Arlyne Diamond Ph.D is an Organisational Development and Human Resource Consultant with over 30 years experience. The article above is an excerpt from her book titled “Culture Inside the Company and Outside the Country”. She can be reached at ArLyne@DiamondAssociates.net.
