Question

The importance of culture is readily apparent when things go wrong. When two large companies merged last year, for example, it became clear that one company had a culture of “low cost” while the other had a culture of “quality service.” Employees received mixed signals for months until the new management team took the time to carefully diagnose and redefine many business processes throughout the company. Given the importance of culture and the consequences of cultural issues, many companies are proactively defining culture and issuing culture “manifestos.” The Netflix culture presentation, often used as an example, has been downloaded more than 12 million times since 2009. The presentation clearly describes a culture that combines high expectations with an engaging employee experience: Generous corporate perks such as unlimited vacation, flexible work schedules, and limited supervision balance a strong focus on results with freedom and appreciation for the expected

achievement. The financial services industry, still restoring its brand after the 2008 financial crisis, is sharply focused on culture. One organization is using a variety of initiatives to help employees understand “how the bank does business,” including offering speaker series on topics such as compensation packages, customer satisfaction, and maintaining regulatory standards. Citigroup has an entire committee focused on ethics and culture and has implemented a series of web-based videos detailing real workplace ethical dilemmas. Bank of

America is focusing its corporate culture transformation on encouraging employees to report and escalate issues or concerns, as well as incorporating a risk “boot camp” into their current training. Wells Fargo is increasing its efforts to gather employee survey feedback to understand current trends and potential areas of weakness in its culture. A new industry of culture assessment tools has emerged, enabling companies to diagnose their culture using a variety of well-established models. Yet despite the prevalence of these tools, fewer than 12 percent of companies believe they truly understand their culture. That’s where HR can help. As businesses try to understand and improve their culture, HR’s role is to improve the ability to curate and shape culture actively. An organization’s capabilities to understand and pull the

levers of culture change can be refined and strengthened. HR has a natural role to play in both efforts. As operations become more distributed and move to a structure of “networks of teams,” culture serves to bind people together and helps people communicate and collaborate. When managed well, culture can drive execution and ensure business consistency around the world. HR has an opportunity to assume the role of champion, monitor, and communicator of culture across, and even outside, the organization. Once culture is clearly described, it defines who the company hires, who gets promoted, and what behaviours will be rewarded with compensation or promotion. Nordstrom has formed a People Lab Science Team in an effort to define and curate a culture that will attract top talent and enable the retailer to compete with tech companies such as Tableau and Microsoft. The team takes a multidisciplinary approachto designing programs to define and reinforce Nordstrom’s culture. Starbucks analyzed thousands of social media entries to gain an objective view of its culture through the eyes of its employees and take specific actions to reinforce its cultural strengths and address cultural weaknesses. Securitas Belgium has defined the behaviors associated with its vision for culture, performed an analysis of its current state, and developed a detailed, measurable change plan for 150 of its managers. Software giant SAS was recently rated the best place to

work by the Great Place to Work Institute. It is also highly successful, with 37 consecutive years of record earnings (it earned $2.8 billion in 2012). SAS has identified trust as a critical cultural attribute and regularly surveys its employees on elements of trust: communication, respect, transparency, and being treated as a human being. Once an organization develops a clear understanding of its culture and decides on a direction for cultural change, it is critical to move rapidly from analysis to action. Moving from talking to doing is the only way to build

momentum. For companies pondering a cultural transformation, the time to start is now— because many companies are already way ahead.

case study Question Discuss the role of Religion and Education in modern business transformation

with appropriate examples.

Answer 1

The importance of religious beliefs and education is given to the child right from the schooling stage. People develop the beliefs over religious principles and there by building their personality and spread their thoughts to the society. The religious thoughts bring in diversity in work place. In multinational companies people originate from different countries, culture and race, yet they are encouraged to work unitedly with common goals. The culture cannot be built within a short period time but can be done only on repeated trainings and close monitoring of the systems in place. All the below practices are being done during schooling stages in order prepare the young people to become good citizens of tomorrow.

Let us take the examples of some of home grown and family owned companies, which adapt their religious thought process with the employees working with them.

a) Worshipping god and spiritually celebrate events during specific working days at the company premises. This will done as per the religious beliefs of the owner of the company. Irrespective of religion and beliefs all employees will asked to attend the event and finally gifts and sweets would be distributed to employees after the ceremony gets over. So here, all the employees are forced to take parts in the event, but finally as a token of happiness management of the company gives gifts to all which will satisfy most of employees. Company unites people with such event and ensures that a good working culture is promoted.

b) Company offers holidays to employees during important religious festivals. This gives opportunity for employees to celebrate the festival with their families and unite with each other in the community.

c) Human resource division of the organization celebrate the important festivals within the organization. The celebrations are carried out through events such as art, cultural competitions and traditional games to emphasize the importance of culture and tradition followed.

d) Organisation never preaches hard about religion, as in modern times companies belive in building strong brand and increase the profitability. They do not organize meetings nor trainings that talk about religion.

All the above initiatives are taken by the Human resource division of the organization to unite people and spread the good practices followed in a religion.

With education, front people from different religion have been successful. The importance of literacy and the importance of gaining knowledge has been key elements to build a strong economy. However, the competition among religious community have led to disruptions at the same time build education institutions, which offer high quality education. In business transformation, the many successful businesspersons believe in religious aspects to become successful. Strong intent over religion have led to united workforce, self motivated talents, focused team working continuously to overcome competition. Diversity in organization play an important role in smaller organization whereas in larger organization it takes time to build such united workforce. Companies do not emphasize or more talk about religion to avoid unnecessary conflicts among people. Organisation conflicts will reduce productivity there by affecting profitability. Human resource department will also not hire people based on the religion, as this will not meet its customer demands in market.