Corporate or Startup — Culture Matters!

The foundation required for an individual to thrive, build their skills, and in turn contribute towards a larger vision is — company culture.

What is culture?

A culture is a set of values and principles that sets the tone of the organization. These values and principles are not just words that are used by HR during induction but they are reflected across all digital and physical touchpoints, processes, products, or people that a person encounters within the organization.

Businesses work optimally when culture is designed around 3 Ps — passion, process, people.

As a service designer, when I work with companies big or small, they always focus on customer experience and fail to realize that their employee is their first customer. If the people who work for you believe in what they are a part of, it reflects indirectly in the experience they provide for your customers.

Employee experience is a design challenge that keeps evolving: People do not work like clockwork. Gone are the days when Henry Ford came up with the most productive process management. Assembly line. Where an individual was assigned a specific task that had to be carried out like a clockwork.

Though even today there are employees who are working in an assembly line structure, most of the employees do not have a mechanical job. They are expected to bring creativity to the table.

This also leads to a new form of work-life balance. But unfortunately, companies do not cater to change in employee behavior and processes.

Photo by Edgar Chaparro on Unsplash, : As a service designer I feel like the above artist every single day when working on building a culture!

How are cultures built or modelled?

There are different strategies organizations use to build a set of core values and model culture in order to align the people who are working with them.

1. Design after your favorite organizations — Google, Netflix, or Pixar to name a few. In this approach as designers, we often find it difficult to do a direct translation since the culture of these organizations might vary from country to country as well as department to department. If your organization or department is small, as a designer you can only draw inspirations and never agree to a direct translation. This would also require understanding the current ecosystem built within the organizational system and how far the current culture is from the desired culture.
2. Design based on the kind of contributors your company is planning to attract. If your organization is designed around creatives and innovation, the culture should have the flexibility to experiment, draw inspiration, and innovate. If it is modeled around mechanical functions, research, or testing, your space and culture should facilitate and support the kind of work environment that would allow for such work. Often during this approach as a service designer, I start by researching the current culture within an organization and the values embedded in the current contributors, and map these traits with behavioral analysis and ethnographic research.
3. Design based on a future vision for the company. If the core team members of the organization agree that they want to build an organization that would enable XYZ….. which they lack currently, then the service and experience designers have a clear objective or goal to work with the HR team to plan processes and activities that would eventually help the company build their culture.
4. Designed around the personality of the founder. This approach is the most fascinating and honest in my opinion. Because the founder/the anchor individual is definitely the person who is most instrumental in inspiring investors and other people to buy into their vision. Hence the culture should be an extension of their personality. When we hear C-suite executives talking about building a company like Apple , the image associated with it is Steve Jobs. Tesla — Elon Musk, Infosys — N.R Narayan Murthy, Microsoft — Bill Gates /Satya Nadella.

In one of the videos, N.R Narayanmurthy mentions that the culture around which he modeled Infosys (a multinational corporation in India) is along the same lines as Abraham Lincoln’s definition of US democracy —“of the people, by the people, for the people.” He said Infosys is an Indian Company of the professional, for the professional, by the professional.

Infosys even today has the personality of the founder where everything is highly professional, transparent, and emphasis on knowledge is at its core. This is clearly seen in the one-year induction plus training program that is conducted for the fresh minds who join Infosys.

How do employees adopt this new organizational culture?

“The first impression is the last impression” is a famous saying that applies to any situation be it dating or joining a new organization. The first impression a new affiliate has of the company is made during induction. It is the first opportunity an organization has to build a bond of trust and transparency with their employees. Usually, a company’s core values, processes, and principles are explained to the employees at the time of induction.

Very few organizations big or small are able to establish a relationship with their contributors (I prefer addressing “employees” as contributors, keep reading to know why). This is because the HR representatives who are conducting these inductions are handling groups of people (close to 150 in one batch in the case of large corporations, this could be as small as 20 people as well) in batches and repeating the same story in the form of a presentation. This usually turns out to be a repetitive task for HR. Due to this, there is a lack of individualized attention given to every new contributor.

So on the first day, most employees start planning when they will leave the organization or they realize they are replaceable and lack a sense of invaluable commitment or excitement that you see with people contributing to Google.

What is the role of a Service Designer in building a Culture?

Photo by Les Triconautes on Unsplash

If you are new to Service Design and would like to explore the work scope for a Service Designer at a Startup, MNC or a Design Studio in India, check out my book Navigating Service Design.

Employee experience is an integral part of any company’s success or failure.

As service designers, we work on two parallels:

Systems structure — Defining processes which are a complex arrangement of elements, people, touchpoints — offline and online at enterprise level.

Organizational theory — Investigating how structures and systems affect organizational behavior.

We work from the point of defining vocabulary for an organization to the point of structuring applications and processes within a larger business ecosystem.

Hence I avoid the terminology of “employee” because according to the thesaurus, an employee is defined as a person being paid for working for another or a corporation. This indirectly affirms that you are replaceable, you are just another cog in the wheel and the company is doing you a favor by paying you.

Instead, addressing people working for you as a “contributor” emphasizes that they are valuable to the organization, their effort is making a difference and the organization would like to acknowledge their contribution through a remuneration.

It could be a small word change but a complete cultural change in how your company is being perceived. If you do not have a service designer working in your company, its high time to recruit them. They will help your organization build a cultural ethos for people to stand shoulder to shoulder in order to achieve organizational goals.

Please feel free to write to me (juneza.niyazi@gmail.com) if you have other ideas or methods that you tested and succeeded or failed at!!!

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