Company Culture - Who Even Cares?

As part of our most recent Leading Lights forum Committee, one of the teams investigated company culture witin the industry

Key findings from the report:

Culture has a place as a ‘carrot as well as a stick’, and that it is useless if it lives only on a whiteboard from an executive strategy day. Applying insights around culture for businesses gives them an exciting new framework not just for existing clients, but for potential new clients, new relevance, new relationships and new revenue – ultimately using culture as a beacon for the right behaviour to ensure firms’ resilience for the future.
Simply resigning to the narrative that ‘culture is amorphous and means different things to different people’ is not action – it is inaction, and people notice.
When it comes to culture, what you do matters just as much as what you don’t do. A firm’s culture matters even more when things are not going well, or when people are not performing, rather than when everything appears to be working perfectly - it will impact individual’s actions, attitudes and choices.
There is an interesting example of an ultrahigh- performance organisation that embeds culture in the way they treat each other - The Mercedes F1 team who state that they “blame the process and not the person”. This speaks directly to the interface between culture and performance and serves as a healthy principle to set against firm’s cultural design, implementation and continued application.