In business it’s always important to build the right culture to enable the business to move forward, to effectively champion and embrace change, and to be agile enough to meet future customer needs.
We have previously discussed the ingredients that help create a good culture. Following on from that piece we now look at some first-hand examples of great culture in action, and what we can all learn. We start with a tech giant.
They clearly focus on driving innovation, but at its core is empowering their staff to innovate with customers. One of those empowering tools is called Google 20% time. The purpose of this is to empower teams to think outside the box and spend 20% of their time to trial new initiatives which in turn enhance team morale and buy-in. Here is a great example of this in action where they collaborated with the finance sector to hone the capabilities of AI to develop an interactive drone challenge. This was great for business including a 5-year relationship with KPMG and greater work with the Finance sector. It all came from empowering staff to do things differently.
They are not only a highly innovative business but they consistently rate as one of the best places to work. But what are they doing to stand out? Well, they are an incredibly open business undertaking in-depth staff and customer insight surveys which they use to drive business change. One of those initiatives across all parts of the business is to consciously embed and develop a true sense of community across everything it does. This ranges from its best practice Trailblazer customers sharing best practice to market-leading benefits packages (as frequently mentioned by Glassdoor). So in short they are about infusing good culture in all areas of the business and this is embedded not only in their core values but also as key performance metrics for staff linked back into the customer insight surveys.
Unilever has frequently been cited for a consistently positive culture which is all the more impressive when you think how broad-based its business is. Its reviews on Glassdoor give a great insight into why with many citing its empowering approach to how work is done and when alongside a great social side as key. If we look more deeply we can see that the culture is a key focus of successive CEOs and was a pioneer of hybrid working using social and business purpose to drive profits rather than following all commercial opportunities. In short, they were happy to say No to things that didn’t meet these tests which has helped them to succeed where others have failed.
So how are we living best practice here? Well, our prime drive is to inspire others by the way we work, and believe it’s important to practice what you preach mirrored by our values. But we will let others be the judge. Here is one example of our culture inspiring fellow FSB members:
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