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The Business Case for Company Culture

• December 2, 2020

Strong company culture has become a major selling point — right up there with salary and healthcare benefits — for companies looking to recruit the best and brightest talent. But what exactly is company culture? Contrary to popular belief, company culture is not simply defined by quarterly happy hours and office snacks. Rather, company culture relates to the ways in which employees think and act on a daily basis.

While Microsoft, Zoom, and HubSpot are infamous for their high-performing company cultures, many companies outside of the tech world are stepping up to the plate. Novelis, the world’s largest producer of flat-rolled aluminum, received significant praise for its commitment to operational excellence through culture management.

“You can never overestimate the impact a strong culture has on an organization,” said HR (Shashi) Shashikant, Senior Vice President & Chief Human Resources Officer. “If you are genuine and use every means at your disposal to reach and engage your workforce toward specific business goals, the results are astounding.”

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The numbers prove it: companies that effectively manage their culture have 63% more successful product launches and their employees are 90% more likely to recommend their organization as a great place to work. These companies also deliver nearly 20% higher returns to shareholders relative to comparable companies over a five-year period.

But reaching results isn’t the only advantage of culture management. Here are five additional benefits leaders reap when they intentionally cultivate their culture:

1. Strategic Clarity

A company’s organizational goals, or Key Results , define what they hope to achieve. But to successfully achieve the “what,” employees need to understand the “how.” This is the culture component.

Culture and strategy work in tandem to provide employees with a clear roadmap of expectations. By pairing three to five meaningful, measurable, and memorable organizational goals with four to five supporting cultural beliefs , leaders ensure employees understand exactly how they are expected to think and act to reach results.

Without cultural beliefs, employees continue old patterns of thinking and behavior that don’t align with top priorities. On the flip side, without highly targeted, strategic goals, cultural beliefs are like a boat without an anchor — there’s nothing to tie them to. It takes both culture and strategy to succeed.

Case Study: Petronas

PETRONAS, a Malaysian oil and gas corporation, was founded in 1974 as a small, 15-person company with big dreams. Today, the company employs more than 53,000 people working in 80 countries and across multiple business pipelines, including accounting, engineering, retail, oil fieldwork, and beyond.

While differences in location and job description abound, there’s one thing every PETRONAS employee has in common: a shared commitment to the PETRONAS company culture.

Accomplishing this unified culture wasn’t always easy. When Tan Sri Wan Zulkiflee Wan Ariffin was appointed CEO of PETRONAS in April 2015, oil prices had been plunging steadily for nearly a year. Wan Zulkiflee knew that to survive in the market, his company would need both clear strategic direction and a cultural transformation to execute it.

Wan Zulkiflee worked diligently with his team to identify highly targeted key business results surrounding shareholder value, stakeholder knowledge, transparent procurement procedures, and the growth of professional relationships. Once strategic clarity was established, he introduced six cultural beliefs to anchor and rally the company towards achieving their organizational goals:

• Results Matter: I stretch my limits to deliver superior results.
• Own It: I own the results and don’t blame others.
• Focused Execution: I plan, commit, and deliver with discipline.
• Nurture Trust: I always keep my promise and build mutual trust.
• Tell Me: I seek, give, and act positively on feedback.
• Shared Success: I collaborate for the greater good of PETRONAS.

This strategic and cultural clarity charted a course forward for the company, helping them rise above the economic downturn.

“The upside of a crisis is that you are compelled to do whatever is necessary to ride out the tough times. This includes taking a hard look at your organizational culture . Is it one that helps you weather the storm, or does it need to be strengthened?” said Wan Zulkiflee in a recent interview. “Culture plays a critical part in bringing strategy to life. It’s the foundation that sustains all of our change initiatives.”

2. Top-to-Bottom Alignment

Working in silos can be extremely beneficial for a workforce, allowing employees to become experts in a specific task and take pride in their work and ownership over moving the needle in a specific area. But there’s also a downside to this type of structure. Rather than looking at the big picture — the overall success of the company — siloed teams end up with a very narrow frame of focus. They are unable to keep pace with desired organization-wide results.

According to the Culture Accountability Index, only 36% of employees believe that individuals within their organization are aligned around a common set of cultural beliefs. What’s more, only 31% of individuals deeply understand how their work connects to their company’s strategic goals. Without a sense of alignment and purpose, business results can quickly slip through the cracks.

Culture management gurus don’t just describe what the strategic goals are and how employees should think and act to accomplish them, they also explain why it all matters. This instills a sense of purpose in employees and leads to greater alignment among even the most siloed teams. In fact, employees at companies that intentionally cultivate their company culture are 76% better at working together across the organization to quickly and efficiently handle new projects.

Case Study: Richland Community College

A few years back at Richland Community College, cross-functional collaboration was hard to come by. Departments operated in silos, rarely communicating with one another, while faculty and staff remained strictly divided. The only thing uniting all parties was confusion over the institution’s overarching goals.

This lack of alignment led to an absence of good, productive conversation. It also didn’t bode well for the health of the institution as a whole — the student retention rate had dropped to 46.24% for the following term and 8.46% for the full fall-to-fall calendar year. It was time for a significant culture shift.

For Richland Community College, that meant rallying all employees behind a single, unifying set of goals:

• Trust: Develop a mutually respectful and empowering work environment based on trust, individual and shared accountability.
• Grow: Grow institutional enrollments by 7% in 3 years.
• Thrive: Establish and maintain fiscal viability and sustainability.

Leaders at the college explained that every department would have to step up to the plate and work together if they wanted to see these goals realized. One department could not survive if the others failed — the health of the entire college was on the line.

Culture champions were appointed within each department to nurture inter-office relationships and conduct routine check-ins and team-building activities. As connections and trust strengthened, the teams stopped viewing one another as unique entities, but rather as part of one, united body. They understood what they needed to accomplish, how they were expected to get there, and why it all mattered.

It wasn’t long before goals that once seemed impossible started falling into place. Retention for the next term increased by 41% while fall-to-fall retention increased by 370%.

3. Personal Accountability

Individuals often externalize the need for change, and it’s easy to see why — it can be uncomfortable to take accountability and closely examine the issues right in front of us. But it can also be empowering. According to The New York Times bestseller, The Oz Principle , accountability is a “personal choice to rise above one’s circumstances and demonstrate the ownership necessary for achieving desired results.”

In organizations with effective company culture, employees are astutely aware of their organization’s top priorities, why they matter, and how they play a part in accomplishing them. As such, they are empowered to take greater accountability when challenges arise. In fact, companies with strong workplace cultures see 53% more personal investment in achieving organizational Key Results among employees.

Accountability-driven employees embody the Steps To Accountability (See It, Own It, Solve It, Do It) that promote ownership and propel change. For example, an accountable employee in a warehouse setting is one who sees that a machine is broken, takes ownership over the problem, develops a solution, and then puts that solution into place. They don’t say, “not my problem,” and wait for someone else to intervene, but rather do what’s needed to fix the issue.

Case Study: McElroy Manufacturing

McElroy Manufacturing is a family-owned business dedicated to providing the highest quality fin tube and pipe fusion products. Founded in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the company has grown from a small-town enterprise to a globally recognized brand.

Due to the nature of the high-hazard industry in which employees at McElroy work, safety has always been a top priority. When one of McElroy’s initial OSHA inspections identified over 40 serious safety hazards, members of the leadership team knew something had to change. They developed Lean into Safety , which is less of a program and more of a comprehensive cultural mindset.

“The culture of safety at McElroy is integrated into everything that we do. […] Because we put such a big focus on it, employees hold each other accountable,” said Barry Calogero, Vice President of Operations at McElroy. “If an employee sees something that doesn’t seem safe, they have an obligation and a responsibility to say something and they try to get it fixed right away. They don’t say that it’s management’s responsibility — they take ownership of it.”

McElroy employees are given 30 minutes a day to clean their workstations and make short safety and improvement videos using their phones. Several of these videos are then shared at the company-wide meeting each morning, ensuring all employees are aware of a dangerous situation or a new safety best practice that has been identified.

4. Employee Engagement

Accountable employees take ownership for driving their own improvement. They proactively seek feedback, adjust performance, and deliver better results. As such, accountable employees are also engaged employees . They feel a sense of purpose in their work and understand how they play a part in the overall success of their company.

According to the Culture Advantage Index, organizations in the top quartile of accountability have 28% higher rates of employee engagement and 31% more growth potential. To bring this data to light, let’s look at Novelis, the company introduced at the beginning of this paper.

For several years, Novelis had been posting dismal financial performance, pursuing conflicting priorities, working in uncommunicative silos, and suffering from a lack of accountability for results. To make matters worse, despite several years of unprecedented investment totaling more than $2 billion, the company had still failed to produce a favorable return on invested capital.

CEO Steve Fisher knew something had to change — the survival of the business depended on it. At the company’s Global Leadership Summit, Fisher said “There is a blue ocean of opportunity in front of us. However, as a company, I’ve become convinced we will drown in that ocean if the people in this room don’t change. Accountability must be our vehicle for change.”

“Accelerating change by getting accountability right, C-suite to the front line,” became the company’s primary propeller for growth. Under Fisher’s leadership, the senior team at Novelis led and achieved an astonishing transformation by getting people to take greater accountability for their results. As employees gained a renewed sense of direction and purpose, employee engagement scores rose to historic levels, return on capital employed nearly tripled, and profitability increased by 26%.

5. Organizational Agility

Nearly 72% of executives believe their business model will be under threat within the next five years. As high as that is, that data predates the disruption of 2020. It’s no wonder “agility” has become a buzzword among leaders seeking to navigate the rapid pace of change in the marketplace and the slew demands spurred by emerging technologies, a global pandemic, and a total upheaval to way of life.

As business strategies adapt and align around disruption, so must company cultures. An organizational mindset that is flexible, forward-thinking, and resilient is crucial. Just look at the mindsets behind the CEOs of companies like McDonald’s, Netflix, and Microsoft — all three have led organizational culture shifts designed to facilitate innovation.

Microsoft in particular has earned a reputation for developing a growth mindset , in which challenges are viewed not as threats, but as opportunities to go above and beyond. For Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, that means asking himself how successful new products are, how effective the company is at adapting to change, and what kind of culture is in place at any given moment to facilitate the company’s success. He encourages employees to ask themselves these questions regularly, refusing to settle for the “status quo” and constantly striving for new opportunities to learn and grow.

In a letter to his employees , Nadella wrote, “Our industry does not respect tradition — it only respects innovation. This is a critical time for the industry and for Microsoft. Make no mistake, we are headed for greater places — as technology evolves and we evolve with and ahead of it.”

Reaping the Benefits of Effective Company Culture

While each of the benefits listed in this paper — strategic clarity, top-to-bottom alignment, personal accountability, employee engagement, and organizational agility — is unique, they are also all related. Together, they form the basis of effective culture management and put companies on the path to sustainable success.

In companies that get their culture right, employees are 73% more enthusiastic about going to work and 69% more willing to navigate changing situations. They are proud of their companies and proud of themselves for the role they play in attaining organizational goals. But while studies prove that strong company culture is crucial for success, so do our clients.

After undergoing a significant culture shift that united more than 950 employees across 27 branches, leaders at Redstone Federal Credit Union were met with the fruits of their labor — 55% growth in annual non-interest income and 1,052% increase in loans. They also increased their monetary donations to local communities by 1,600% and increased members’ average annual cashback rebates by 7,251%. Their efforts had paid off.

“We’ve created a culture that’s going to ensure the success of this cooperative and its community for generations to come,” said Redstone CEO Joe Newberry. “It’s the culture that will propel us, and we can promise that no matter what happens in the future, Redstone will be here for its members.”

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• Original Article
• Open access
• Published: 19 December 2017

GOOGLE: a reflection of culture, leader, and management

• Sang Kim Tran 1 , 2  

International Journal of Corporate Social Responsibility volume  2 , Article number:  10 ( 2017 ) Cite this article

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This paper provides a viewpoint of the culture and subcultures at Google Inc., which is a famous global company, and has a huge engineering staff and many talented leaders. Through its history of development, it has had positive impacts on society; however; there have been management challenges. The Board of Directors (BoDs) developed and implemented a way to measure the abilities of their managers, which helped to identify problems. This paper will analyze the case study of Harvard Business Review, Oxygen Project, and clarify the management problem in Google’s organization. It will also compare Google with Zappos, a much smaller organization, and present how the BoDs of Zappos assesses its culture and subcultures. In this paper, we will recommend eight important points to building an organizational culture that is positive for stable growth of a company. We believe that much of what be learned could be useful to other business leaders, regardless of company scale.

Introduction

In a large society, each company is considered a miniature society (Mawere 2011 ). Similar to large societies with large cultures, small societies also need to build their own cultures. A culture is influenced by many factors and determines if it is a great culture. Corporate culture requires both the attention to the efficiency of production and business and to the relationship among people in the organization closely (Bhagat et al. 2012 ). Regardless if it is a large or a small organization, it must encounter issues of cooperation among individuals and groups. There are many factors leading to the success of business process re-engineering in higher education (BPR), the main four elements are culture, processes, structure, and technology. Culture is listed as number one (Ahmad et al. 2007 ). Hence, culture becomes the most important factor to the success of the development of a business. Organizational culture is the set of shared beliefs (Steiber and Alänge 2016 ), values, and norms that influence the way members think, feel, and behave. Culture is created by means of terminal and instrumental values, heroes, rites and rituals, and communication networks (Barman n.d. ). The primary methods of maintaining organizational culture are through the socialization process by which an individual learns the values, expected behaviors, and necessary social knowledge to assume their roles in the organization. In addition, (Gupta and Govindarajan 2000 ) and Fig.  1 in (Ismail Al-Alawi et al. 2007 ) illustrates that culture was established by six major factors, such as information systems, people, process, leadership, rewarding system, and organization structure. Therefore, there is a wide variety of combined and sophisticated cultures in the workplace, especially in big corporations like Google, Facebook, Proctor & Gamble, etc. Each organization tends to have a common goal, which is to create a culture that is different from other companies and to promote their teams to be creative in developing a distinctive culture (Stimpson and Farquharson 2014 ). Clearly, we can see that Google’s culture is different than others. What makes this company unique and different from others, as well as the dominant cultures and subcultures existing at this company? How do leadership behaviors impact the organizational culture? By operating a case study of a Harvard Business Review to analyze its organizational culture, subsequently, having compared it with Zappos’ culture, this paper will clarify the similarities and differences in managing organizational cultures between them and consider whether the solutions for the problems can be applied to other business models, and for tomorrow leaders or not?

Trends of using product by information searching

Company overview

This part shows how Google became famous in the world and its culture and subcultures made it a special case for others to take into consideration. Google is one of the few technology companies which continue to have one of the fastest growth rates in the world. It began by creating a search engine that combined PageRank system, developed by Larry Page (ranking the importance of websites based on external links), and Web search engine, created by Sergey Brin (accessing a website and recording its content), two co-founders of the company (Jarvis 2011 ; Downes 2007 ). Google’s achievements absolutely do not come from any luck. Google has made extra efforts in creating an index of a number of websites, which have been up to 25 billion websites. This also includes 17 million images and one billion messages to Usenet group (Downes 2007 ). Besides searching for websites, Google users are able to search for PDF files, PostScript, documents, as well as Microsoft, Lotus, PowerPoint and Shockwave files. Google processes nearly 50% of search queries all over the world. Moreover, it is the number one search option for web users and is one of the top five websites on the Internet, which have more than 380 million users and 28 billion visits every month, and more than 50% of access from countries outside the US (Desjardins 2017 ). Google’s technology is rather special: it can analyze millions of different variables of users and businesses who place advertisements. It then connects them with millions of potential advertisements and gives messages of advertisement, which is closest to objects in less than one second. Thus, Google has the higher rate of users clicking advertisements than its opponent Yahoo, from 50 to 100%, and it dominates over 70% market share of paid advertisements (Rosenberg 2016 ). Google’s self-stated mission: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful (Alves n.d. ).” Nowadays, it is believed that people in the world like “Google” with words “the useful-lively information storage”.

Predominant culture at Google

The dominant culture in the organization depends on the environment in which the company operates the organization’s objectives, the belief system of the employees, and the company’s management style. Therefore, there are many organizational cultures (Schein 2017 ). The Exhibit 3.1 at page 39 in (Schein 2009 ) provides what culture is about. For example, employee follows a standard procedure with a strict adherence to hierarchy and well-defined individual roles and responsibilities. Those in competitive environments, such as sales may forget strict hierarchies and follow a competitive culture where the focus is on maintaining strong relationships with external parties. In this instance, the strategy is to attain competitive advantages over the competition. The collaborative culture is yet another organizational way of life. This culture presents a decentralized workforce with integrated units working together to find solutions to problems or failure.

Why do many large companies buy its innovation? Because its dominant culture of 99% defect-free operational excellence squashes any attempts at innovation, just like a Sumo wrestler sitting on a small gymnast (Grossman-Kahn and Rosensweig 2012 ). They cannot accept failures. In fact, failure is a necessary part of innovation and Google took this change by Oxygen Project to measure the abilities of their multicultural managers. This means that Google itself possesses multiple different cultures (see Google’s clips). Like Zappos, Google had established a common, organizational culture for the whole offices that are distinctive from the others. The predominant culture aimed at Google is an open culture, where everybody and customer can freely contribute their ideas and opinions to create more comfortable and friendly working environment (Hsieh 2010a ).

The fig.  2 .1 in chapter two of (Schein 2009 ) and page 17 in part one of (Schein 2017 ) provide us three levels of culture which are Artifacts, Espoused values and Underlying assumptions helping us to understand the culture at Google. At page 84, in (Schein 2009 ), the “artifacts” are identified such as dress codes, level of formality in authority relationships, working hours, meeting (how often, how run, timing), how are decisions made, communication, social events, jargon, uniforms, identity symbols, rites and rituals, disagreements and conflicts, balance between work and family . It seems that Google is quite open in these artifacts by showing a respect for uniform and national culture of each staff individually and giving them the right to wear traditional clothes.

Ad Blocking Incidence

Working at Google, employees enjoy free food served throughout the day, a volleyball court, a swimming pool, a car wash, an oil change, a haircut, free health care, and many other benefits. The biggest benefit for the staff is to be picked up on the day of work. As assessed by many traffic experts, the system set up by Google is considered to be a great transport network. Tad Widby, a project manager and a traffic system researcher throughout the United States, said: “I have not seen any larger projects in the Bay Area as well as in urban areas across the country” (Helft 2007 ). Of course, it is impossible for Google to “cover up the sky”, so Yahoo also started implementing the bus project for employees in 2005. On peak days, Yahoo’s bus also took off. Pick up about 350 employees in San Francisco, as well as Berkeley, Oakland, etc. These buses run on biofuels and have Wi-Fi coverage. Yet, Danielle Bricker, the Yahoo bus coordinator of Yahoo, has also admitted that the program is “indirectly” inspired by Google’s initiative (Helft 2007 ). Along with that, eBay recently also piloted shuttle bus transfers at five points in San Francisco. Some other corporations are also emerging ideas for treatment of staff is equally unique. Facebook is an example, instead of facilitating employees far from the workplace; it helps people in the immediate neighborhood by offering an additional $10,000 for an employee to live close to the pillar within 10 miles, nearby the Palo Alto Department (Hall 2015 ).

When it comes to Google, people often ask what the formula for success is. The answer here is the employees of Google. They create their own unique workplace culture rules to create an effective work environment for their employees. And here are the most valuable things to learn from Google’s corporate culture (Scott 2008 ) that we should know:

Tolerate with mistakes and help staff correct

At Google, paying attention to how employees work and helping them correct mistakes is critical. Instead of pointing out the damage and blaming a person who caused the mistake, the company would be interested in what the cause of the problem was and how to fix it as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Also as its culture, we understand that if we want to make breakthroughs in the workplace, we need to have experimentation, failure and repeat the test. Therefore, mistakes and failures are not terrible there. We have the right to be wrong and have the opportunity to overcome failure in the support of our superiors and colleagues. Good ideas are always encouraged at Google. However, before it is accepted and put into use, there is a clear procedure to confirm whether it is a real new idea and practical or not?

Exponential thought

Google developed in the direction of a holding company - a company that does not directly produce products or provide services but simply invest in capital by buying back capital. In the company, the criteria for setting the ten exponential function in lieu of focusing only on the change in the general increase. This approach helps Google improve its technology and deliver great products to consumers continuously.

Of course, every company wants to hire talented people to work for them. However, being talented is an art in which there must be voluntary work and enthusiasm for the work of the devotees. At page 555 in (Saffold 1988 ) illustrated that distinctive cultures dramatically influencing performance do exist. Likewise, Google, Apple, Netflix, and Dell are 40% more productive than the average company which attracts top-tier employees and high performers (Vozza 2017 ). Recognizing this impact, Google created a distinctive corporate culture when the company attracted people from prestigious colleges around the world (West 2016 ; Lazear and Gibbs 2014 ).

Build a stimulating work environment

When it comes to the elements that create creativity and innovation, we can easily recognize that the working environment is one of the most important things. Google has succeeded in building an image of a creative working. Google offices are individually designed, not duplicated in any type of office. In fact, working environment at Google is so comfortable so that employees will not think of it as a working room, with a full area of ​​work, relaxation, exercise, reading, watching movies. Is the orientation of Google’s corporate culture to stimulate creativity and to show interest in the lives of employees so that volunteers contribute freely (Battelle 2011 )?

Subculture is also a culture, but for a smaller group or community in a big organization (Crosset and Beal 1997 ). Google, known as the global company with many more offices, so there are many subcultures created among groups of people who work together, from subcultures among work groups to subcultures among ethnic groups and nations, multi-national groups, as well as multiple occupations, functions, geographies, echelons in the hierarchy and product lines. For example, six years ago, when it bought 100 Huffys for employees to use around the sprawling campus, has since exploded into its own subculture. Google now has a seven-person staff of bicycle mechanics that maintains a fleet of about 1300 brightly-colored Google bikes. The company also encourages employees to cycle to work by providing locker rooms, showers and places to securely park bikes during working hours. And, for those who want to combine meetings with bike-riding, Googlers can use one of several seven-person (Crowley 2013 ).

Leadership influences on the culture at Google

From the definition of leadership and its influence on culture; so what does leader directly influence the culture existed? According to Schein, “culture and leadership are two sides of the same coin and one cannot understand one without the other”, page three in (Schein 2009 ). If one of us has never read the article “Google and the Quest to create a better boss” in the New York Times, it is listed in a priority reading. It breaks the notion that managers have no change. The manager really makes a difference (Axinn 1988 ; Carver 2011 ). In fact, a leader has a massive impact on the culture of the company, and Google is not an exception. The leaders of Google concerned more about the demands and abilities of each individual, the study of the nature of human being, an appreciation their employees as their customers. At Google, the founders thought they could create a company that people would want to work at when creating a home-like environment. It is real that they focus on the workplace brings the comfort to staff creatively and freely (Lebowitz 2013 ).

In my opinion, a successful business cannot be attributed solely from a single star; that needs the brightness of all employees. It depends very much on the capacity and ability to attract talented people. It is the way in which the leader manages these talents, is the cornerstone of corporate culture. One thing that no one can deny is that a good leader must be a creator of a corporate culture so that the employees can maximize capabilities themselves (Driscoll and McKee 2007 ; Kotter 2008 ).

To brief, through the view of Google’s culture, BoDs tended and designed to encourage loyalty and creativity, based on an unusual organizational culture because culture is not only able to create an environment, but it also adapts to diverse and changes circumstances (Bulygo 2013 ).

Company growth and its impact

“Rearrange information around the world, make them accessible everywhere and be useful.” This was one of the main purposes set by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they first launched Google on September 4th, 1998, as a private company (Schmidt and Rosenberg 2014 ). Since then, Google has expanded its reach, stepped into the mobile operating system, provided mapping services and cloud computing applications, launched its own hardware, and prepared it to enter the wearable device market. However, no matter how varied and rich these products are, they are all about the one thing, the root of Google: online searching.

1998–2001: Focus on search

In its early years, Google.com was simply one with extreme iconic images: a colorful Google logo, a long text box in the middle of the screen, a button to execute. One button for searching and the other button are “I’m feeling lucky” to lead users to a random Google site. By May 2000, Google added ten additional languages to Google.com , including French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish, etc. This is one of the milestones in Google’s journey into the world. Google.com is available in over 150 languages (Scott 2008 ; Lee 2017 ).

2001–2007: Interface card

A very important event with Google around this time was the sale of shares to the public (IPO). In October 2003, Microsoft heard news of the IPO, so it quickly approached Google to discuss a buyout or business deal. Nevertheless, that intention was not materialized. In 2004, it was also the time when Google held a market share of 84.7% globally through collaboration with major Internet companies, such as Yahoo, AOL, and CNN. By February 2004, Yahoo stopped working with Google and separately stood out for engine search. This has led Google to lose some market share, but it has shown the importance and distinctness of Google. Nowadays, the term “Google” has been used as a verb just by visiting Google.com and doing an online search (Smith 2010 ). Not stopping at the homepage search, Google’s interface tag began to be brought to Gmail and Calendar with the links at the top of the page. Google homepage itself continues to use this style.

In 2006, Google also made an important acquisition to buy YouTube for $1.65 billion (Burgess and Green 2013 ). However, the company decided to keep YouTube as a separate brand and not to include it in Google Video search. Thanks to the backing of an Internet industry giant, YouTube has grown to become the world’s largest online video sharing service (Cha et al. 2007 ).

2007–2012: Navigation bar, Google menu, Google now

Google began to deploy a new navigation bar located at the edge of the screen. It includes links to a place where to look for photos, videos, news, maps, as well as buttons to switch to Gmail, Calendar, and other services developed by the company. In the upper left corner, Google added a box displaying Google + notifications and user accounts’ image. Google Now not only appeared on Android and it’s also brought to Chrome on a computer as well as iOS. All have the same operating principle, and the interface card still appears as Android it is.

2013–2014: Simplified interface

Google has moved all of the icons that lead to its other applications and services to an App Drawer button in the upper right hand, at the corner of the screen. In addition, Google.com also supports better voice search through the Chrome browser. Google has experimented with other markets, such as radio and print publications, and in selling advertisements from its advertisers within offline newspapers and magazines. As of November 2014, Google operates over 70 offices over 40 countries (Jarvis 2011 ; Vise 2007 ).

2014–2017: Chrome development and facing challenges

In 2015, Google would turn HTTPS into the default. The better website is, the more users will trust search engine. In 2016, Google announced Android version 7, introduced a new VR platform called Daydream, and its new virtual assistant, Google Assistant.

Most of Google’s revenue comes from advertising (Rosenberg 2016 ). However, this “golden” business is entering a difficult period with many warning signs of its future. Google Search is the dominant strength of Google and bringing great revenue for the company. Nonetheless, when Amazon surpassed Google to become the world’s leading product in the search engine in last December, this advantage began to wobble. This is considered a fatal blow to Google when iOS devices account for 75% of their mobile advertising revenue (Rosenberg 2016 ).

By 2016, the number of people installing software to block ads on phones has increased 102% from 2015. Figure  1 illustrates that by the year’s end, about 16% of smart phone users around the world blocked their ads whilst surfing the web. These were also two groups having the most time on the Internet, high-earners and young people; however, these people have disliked ads (see Fig. 1 ).

Figure  2 shows the young people have the highest ad blocking rates. It is drawing a gloomy picture for the sustainable development of the online advertising industry in general and Google in particular. Therefore, in early 2017, Google has strategies to build an ad blocking tool, built into the Chrome browser. This tool allows users to access ads that have passed the “Coalition for Better Ads” filter so as to limit the sense of discomfort (see Fig. 2 ).

For the company impact, the history shows that speedy development of Google creates both economic and social impacts to followers in a new way of people connection (Savitz 2013 ). In this modern world, it seems that people cannot spend a day without searching any information in Google (Chen et al. 2014 ; Fast and Campbell 2004 ), a tool serves human information seeking needs. Even though when addressing this paper, it is also in need the information from Google search and uses it as a supporting tool. Nobody can deny the convenience of Google as a fast and easy way to search (Schalkwyk et al. 2010 ; Jones 2001 ; Langville and Meyer 2011 ).

Research question and methodology

In order to get the most comprehensive data and information for this case analysis, a number of methods are used, including:

Research data and collect information were mostly from the Harvard Study (Project Oxygen), which has been selected because it is related to the purpose of our study.

Data collection and analysis has been taken from Google Scholar and various websites related researches. We look at the history of appearance, development, and recognize the impacts of this company, as well as the challenges and the way the Board of Directors measures the abilities of their manager when the problem is found.

Analyzing: It was begun by considering expectations from the Harvard Study. Subsequently, considering the smaller organization (Zappos) in comparison of how its cultures and subcultures are accessed as well. Since then, the paper has clarified the management problem that Google and Zappos confront and deal with it so as to help other businesses apply this theoretical practice and achieve its goal beyond expectations.

In our paper, we mainly use the inductive method approach by compiling and describing the other authors’ theories of corporate culture, especially Google and Zappos in merging and comparing, analyzing them and making our own results.

From the aspects of the research, the questions are suggested as below:

What is the most instrumental element found from the Harvard study?

Is there any difference and similarity between a huge company and a smaller enterprise in perspective of culture and subculture?

What makes Google different from others, the dominant cultures as well as subcultures existing? How do leadership behaviors impact on the organizational culture?

How organizational culture impacts on business achievements?

The Harvard study

Project oxygen summary.

This project began in 2009 known as “the manager project” with the People and Innovation Lab (PiLab) team researching questions, which helped the employee of Google become a better manager. The case study was conducted by Garvin (2013) about a behavior measurement to Google’s manager, why managers matter and what the best manager s do. In early days of Google, there are not many managers. In a flat structure, most employees are engineers and technical experts. In fact, in 2002 a few hundred engineers reported to only four managers. But over time and out of necessity, the number of managers increased. Then, in 2009, people and team culture at Google noticed a disturbing trend. Exit interview data cited low satisfaction with their manager as a reason for leaving Google. Because Google has accessed so much online data, Google’s statisticians are asked to analyze and identify the top attributes of a good manager mentioned with an unsolved question: “Do managers matter?” It always concerns all stakeholders at Google and requires a data-based survey project called Project Oxygen to clarify employees’ concern, to measure key management behaviors and cultivate staff through communication and training (Bryant 2011 ; Garvin et al. 2013 ). Research −1 Exit Interviews, ratings, and semiannual reviews. The purpose is to identify high-scoring managers and low-scoring managers resulted in the former, less turnover on their teams, and its connection (manager quality and employee’s happiness). As for “what the best managers do”, Research-2 is to interview high and low scoring managers and to review their performance. The findings with 8 key behaviors illustrated by the most effective managers.

The Oxygen Project mirrors the managers’ decision-making criteria, respects their needs for rigorous analysis, and makes it a priority to measure impact. In the case study, the findings prove that managers really have mattered. Google, initially, must figure out what the best manager is by asking high and low scoring managers such questions about communication, vision, etc. Its project identifies eight behaviors (Bulygo 2013 ; Garvin et al. 2013 ) of a good manager that considered as quite simple that the best manager at Google should have. In a case of management problem and solution, as well as discussing four- key theoretical concepts, they will be analyzed, including formal organizational training system, how culture influences behavior, the role of “flow” and building capacity for innovation, and the role of a leader and its difference from the manager.

Formal organizational training system to create a different culture: Ethical culture

If the organizational culture represents “how we do things around here,” the ethical culture represents “how we do things around here in relation to ethics and ethical behavior in the organization” (Key 1999 ). Alison Taylor (The Five Levels of an Ethical Culture, 2017) reported five levels of an ethical culture, from an individual, interpersonal, group, intergroup to inter-organizational (Taylor 2017 ). In (Nelson and Treviño 2004 ), ethical culture should be thought of in terms of a multi-system framework included formal and informal systems, which must be aligned to support ethical judgment and action. Leadership is essential to driving the ethical culture from a formal and informal perspective (Schwartz 2013 ; Trevino and Nelson 2011 ). Formally, a leader provides the resources to implement structures and programs that support ethics. More informally, through their own behaviors, leadership is a role model whose actions speak louder than their words, conveying “how we do things around here.” Other formal systems include selection systems, policies and codes, orientation and training programs, performance management systems, authority structures, and formal decision processes. On the informal side are the organization’s role models and heroes, the norms of daily behavior, organizational rituals that support or do not support ethical conduct, the stories people tell about the organization and their implications for conduct, and the language people use, etc. Is it okay to talk about ethics? Or is ethical fading the norm?

The formal and informal training is very important. The ethical context in organizations helps the organizational culture have a tendency to the positive or negative viewpoints (Treviño et al. 1998 ). The leader should focus on providing an understanding of the nature and reasons for the organization’s values and rules, on providing an opportunity for question and challenge values for sincerity/practicality, and on teaching ethical decision-making skills related to encountered issues commonly. The more specific and customized training, the more effective it is likely to be. Google seemed to apply this theory when addressed the Oxygen Project.

How culture influences behavior

Whenever we approach a new organization, there is no doubt that we will try to get more about the culture of that place, the way of thinking, working, as well as behavior. And it is likely that the more diverse culture of a place is, the more difficult for outsiders to assess its culture becomes (Mosakowski 2004 ).

Realizing culture in (Schein 2009 ) including artifacts, espoused valued and shared underlying assumptions. It is easier for outsiders to see the artifacts (visual objects) that a group uses as the symbol for a group; however, it does not express more about the espoused values, as well as tacit assumptions. In (Schein et al. 2010 ), the author stated: “For a culture assessment to be valuable, it must get to the assumptions level. If the client system does not get to assumptions, it cannot explain the discrepancies almost always surface between the espoused values and the observed behavioral artifacts” (Schein et al. 2010 ). Hence, in order to be able to assess other cultures well, it is necessary for us to learn each other’s languages, as well as adapt to a common language. Moreover, we also need to look at the context of working, the solution for shared problems because these will facilitate to understand the culture better.

According to the OCP (Organizational Culture Profile) framework (Saremi and Nejad 2013 ), an organization is with possessing the innovation of culture, flexible and adaptable with fresh ideas, which is figured by flat hierarchy and title. For instance, Gore-Tex is an innovative product of W. L. Gore & Associates Inc., considered as the company has the most impact on its innovative culture (Boudreau and Lakhani 2009 ). Looking at the examples of Fast Company, Genentech Inc., and Google, they also encourage their employees to take challenges or risks by allowing them to take 20% of their time to comprehend the projects of their own (Saremi and Nejad 2013 ). In (Aldrich n.d. ), it is recorded that 25%–55% of employees are fully encouraged and giving a maximum value.

The famous quote by Peter Drucker , “Culture eats strategy for Breakfast” at page 67 has created a lot of interest in (Manning and Bodine 2012 ; Coffman and Sorensen 2013 ; Bock 2015 ). Despite we all know how important culture is, we have successively failed to address it (O'Reilly et al. 1991 ). The organizational research change process from the view of Schein ( 2009 ); it is a fact that whenever an organization has the intention of changing the culture, it really takes time. As we all acknowledge, to build an organizational culture, both leader and subordinate spend most of their time on learning, relearning, experiencing, as well as considering the most appropriate features. Sometimes, some changes are inevitable in terms of economic, political, technological, legal and moral threats, as well as internal discomfort (Kavanagh and Ashkanasy 2006 ; Schein 1983 ). As the case in (Schein 2009 ), when a CEO would like to make an innovation which is proved no effective response, given that he did not get to know well about the tacit implications at the place he has just come. It is illustrated that whatsoever change should need time and a process to happen (Blog 2015 ; Makhlouk and Shevchuk 2008 ). In conclusion, a new culture can be learned (Schein 1984 ), but with an appropriate route and the profits for all stakeholders should be concerned by the change manager (Sathe 1983 ).

It is true that people’s behavior managed by their types of culture (Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002 ). All tacit assumptions of insiders are not easy for outsiders to grasp the meaning completely (Schein 2009 ). It is not also an exception at any organization. Google is an example of the multicultural organization coming from various regions of the world, and the national or regional cultures making this multicultural organization with an official culture for the whole company.

In this case, the organizational culture of Google has an influence on the behaviors of manager and employee. In addition, as for such a company specializes in information technology, all engineers prefer to work on everything with data-evidence to get them involved in the meaningful survey about manager (Davenport et al. 2010 ). Eventually, Google discovered 8 good behaviors of manager, which effect to the role of “flow” also (Bulygo 2013 ; Garvin et al. 2013 ).

The role of the “flow” and building capacity for innovation

More and more people are using the term of “patient flow”. This overview describes patient flow and links to theories about flow. Patient flow underpins many improvement tools and techniques. The term “flow” describes the progressive movement of products, information, and people through a sequence of the process. In simple terms, flow is about uninterrupted movement (Nave 2002 ), like driving steadily along the motorway without interruptions or being stuck in a traffic jam. In healthcare, flow is the movement of patients, information or equipment between departments, office groups or organizations as a part of a patient’s care pathway (Bessant and Maher 2009 ). In fact, flow plays a vital role in getting stakeholders involved in working creatively and innovatively (Adams 2005 ; Amabile 1997 ; Forest et al. 2011 ). An effective ethical leader must create flow in work before transfer it to employees for changing the best of their effort to maintain, keep and develop “flow” in an engineering job, which job be easier to get stress. Definitely, Google gets it done very well.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the knowledge from my Master course, a credit of managing culture which helps me to write this paper. The author also gratefully acknowledges the helpful comments and suggestions of the reviewers and Associate Professor Khuong- Ho Van, who provided general technical help that all have improved the article.

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Tran, S.K. GOOGLE: a reflection of culture, leader, and management. Int J Corporate Soc Responsibility 2 , 10 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40991-017-0021-0

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Apple’s Company Culture: An Organizational Analysis

Apple’s organizational culture is a key factor in the continuing success of its business. The consumer electronics company’s organizational or corporate culture establishes and maintains the business philosophy, core values, beliefs, and related behaviors among employees. This business analysis case shows that Apple has a work culture that motivates human resources to support strategic objectives for competitiveness. For example, the company’s cultural traits are aligned with the drive for innovation, which is a major factor that determines business competitiveness in the information technology, online services, and consumer electronics industries. With this company culture, business operations facilitate the fulfillment of Apple’s mission and vision . Through the leadership of Tim Cook, the company continues to enhance its cultural characteristics to maximize human resource support for business relevance in various markets around the world. Apple shapes its business culture and uses it as a tool for strategic management and multinational business success.

Apple’s company culture strengthens competitive advantages over other firms in various industries. The company’s products compete with the consumer electronics and online services of Google (Alphabet) , Samsung , Microsoft , Amazon , and Sony . Also, Apple TV Plus competes with the video streaming services of Disney , Facebook (Meta) , and Netflix . These competitors impose a strong external force that influences strategic management among firms in the industry, as illustrated in the Five Forces analysis of Apple Inc . As a result, cultural traits must reinforce the iPhone maker’s business competitive advantages through its workforce. It can be argued that Apple partially achieves this strategic objective through the effects of its organizational culture on workers’ behavior and job performance.

Apple’s Culture Type and Traits

Apple has an organizational culture for creative innovation . The company’s cultural features focus on maintaining a high level of innovation that involves workers’ creativity and a mindset that challenges conventions and standards, such as in consumer electronics design. Apple’s IT business depends on cultural support and coherence, which are determinants of competitiveness and industry leadership, especially in addressing aggressive and rapid technological innovation and product development. The following are the main characteristics of Apple’s culture:

• Top-notch excellence
• Moderate combativeness

Top-notch Excellence . Apple’s organizational culture comes with a human resource policy of hiring only the best of the best in the labor market. Steve Jobs was known to fire employees who did not meet his expectations. This tradition continues under Tim Cook. Such a tradition maintains and reinforces a company culture that promotes, appreciates, and expects top-notch excellence among the technology company’s employees. This cultural trait is also institutionalized in Apple’s organization. For example, the company has programs that recognize and reward excellence among workers in software design. Excellence is emphasized as a critical success factor in the business, especially in product design and development, which is a major growth strategy described in Apple’s competitive strategy and growth strategies .

Creativity . This cultural trait pertains to creating new ideas that help improve the technology business and its products. Apple’s management favors creativity among employees’ knowledge, skills, and abilities. This characteristic of the work culture enables the company to ensure sufficient creativity, especially among employees involved in consumer electronics product design and development processes. Creativity is observable in the design and features of iPhones, Macs, iPads, and other products included in Apple’s marketing mix (4Ps) . Along with creativity, originality is also culturally emphasized as a way of maximizing the company’s intellectual properties, such as patents for new mobile devices. In this regard, the organizational culture helps maintain Apple’s capacity to satisfy and exceed customers’ expectations and preferences.

Innovation . Apple’s company culture supports rapid innovation. The technology business is frequently appraised as one of the most innovative companies in the world. Based on this cultural trait, Apple trains and motivates its employees to innovate in terms of individual work performance and idea contributions for product development, design, and other processes. The work culture facilitates rapid innovation, which is at the heart of Apple’s operations management . Rapid innovation ensures that the company continues to introduce new products that are profitable and attractive to target customers in the global consumer electronics and Internet services market.

Secrecy . Apple has a secretive organizational culture. This cultural characteristic defines the MacBook maker’s human resource development and management practices. Secrecy is part of the company’s strategy to prevent theft of proprietary information or intellectual property, such as designs for the next generations of the iPhone. It is also a strategic management approach that enables Apple Inc. to maximize its leading edge against competitors. Through the company culture, employees are motivated and expected to keep business information within the technology business organization. This cultural trait is reinforced through Apple’s organizational structure (business structure) and related policies, rules, and employment contracts that prohibit the disclosure of information, such as technological breakthroughs in the company’s consumer electronics. In this context, Apple’s work culture helps protect the business from corporate espionage and the negative effects of employee poaching.

Moderate Combativeness . Apple’s company culture has moderate combativeness. This feature is linked to Steve Jobs and his combative approach to leadership. He was known to randomly challenge employees to ensure that they have what it takes to work at Apple. Today, under Tim Cook’s leadership, the company has been changing its corporate culture to a more sociable and a less combative one. Nonetheless, combativeness remains a major influence in the technology business. Apple’s business culture exhibits a moderate degree of combativeness that presents challenges that motivate employees to enhance their output.

Apple’s Organizational Culture: Advantages, Disadvantages, Recommendations

Advantages and Benefits . The combination of top-notch excellence, creativity, and innovation in Apple’s organizational culture supports the company’s industry leadership. The business is widely regarded as a leader in terms of innovation and product design, especially in consumer electronics. These cultural characteristics empower Apple and its human resources to stand out and stay ahead of competitors. This company culture enables success and competitive advantages, as well as the further strengthening of the company’s brand, which is one of the key business strengths shown in the SWOT analysis of Apple Inc . Creativity and excellence are especially important in the company’s rapid innovation processes for continuous competitiveness and business development despite aggressive competition with Samsung and other firms.

Drawbacks and Weaknesses . Apple’s corporate culture brings challenges because of the emphasis on secrecy and the moderate degree of combativeness. An atmosphere of secrecy can limit rapport among workers, while moderate combativeness has the potential to limit or reduce employees’ morale. These cultural issues can reduce business effectiveness and increase employee turnover. Apple Inc. can address this situation by modifying its organizational culture to reduce combativeness, but not necessarily remove it. This recommendation focuses on reducing the disadvantages of combativeness, without eliminating the benefits of combative approaches in the technology company’s operations. Also, Apple can integrate new cultural traits to keep the business relevant, given trends and changes in the information technology, cloud services, digital content distribution, and consumer electronics industries’ environment.

• Choi, Y., Ingram, P., & Han, S. W. (2023). Cultural breadth and embeddedness: The individual adoption of organizational culture as a determinant of creativity. Administrative Science Quarterly, 68 (2), 429-464.
• Apple Inc. – Inclusion & Diversity .
• Apple Inc. – Life at Apple .
• Apple Inc. – Work at Apple .
• Dyer, C. (2023). The Power of Company Culture: How any business can build a culture that improves productivity, performance and profits . Kogan Page Publishers.
• Zhang, W., Zeng, X., Liang, H., Xue, Y., & Cao, X. (2023). Understanding how organizational culture affects innovation performance: A management context perspective. Sustainability, 15 (8), 6644.
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Case Study: Analysis of Organizational Culture at Google

Google Inc came to life with the two brilliant people as the founder of the company. Those two were Larry Page and Sergey Brin . Both of them are a PhDs holder in computer science in Stanford University California. In their research project, they came out with a plan to make a search engine that ranked websites according to the number of other websites that linked to that site. Before Google was established, search engines had ranked site simply by the number of times the search term searched for appeared on the webpage. By the brilliant mind of Larry and Sergey, they develop the technology called PageRank algorithm . PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of document, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of measuring its relative importance within the set. All this in-depth research leads to a glorious day which is on September 15, 1997 where Google.com domain was registered. Soon after that, on September 4, 1998, they formally incorporated their company, Google Inc, at a friend’s garage in Menlo Park California. The name Google originates from “Googol” which refers to the mathematical equivalent of the number one followed by a hundred zeros. In March 1999, the company moved into offices at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto. After that, the company leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View. Ever since then, the location of the headquarter remain unchanged.

Google’s core business is to provide a search engine for the cyber user who would like to go to their desire site. The Google search engine attracted a number of internet users by its sleek and simple design but result in amazing search result. After the initial stage of Google establishing itself in the world, it began selling advertisements associated with the search keywords. The advertisements were text-based in order to maximize the page loading speed. Most of the Google Inc revenue relies on the advertisement and they had been successfully with the help of AdWords and AdSense in their system. After having some experience in the industry, Google itself launched its own free web-based email service, known as Gmail in 2004. This service is established to meet the need of the cyber user in order to store and send their document through online. In the same year, one of the most captivating technologies that Google had launched is the Google Earth. Google Earth is an amazing creation that is a map of the earth based on the satellite image. It requires you to type the desire location that you want to view and it will process the image for you. Furthermore, Google Inc made a new partnership with NASA with even enhances the Google technologies. Google also had its own Google Video which allows user to search the internet for videos. One of the most important things in the Google Inc is that they have a strong organizational culture which brings them closer and stronger compare with other firms. The values that they emphasis on are creativity, simplicity and innovation in order to gain competitive advantage against their competitor.

The Google Culture

Google is well known for their organizational cultures distinctiveness and uniqueness compared to their immediate competitors. On the Google corporate website, they have listed down 10 core principles that guide the actions of the entire organization. These are the values and assumptions shared within the organization. These values are also termed as ‘espoused values’, where it is not necessarily what the organization actually values even though the top executives of the company embrace them.

In Google, the daily organizational life is distinctive and is one that thrives on informal culture. The rituals that portray the organization’s culture as unique and possesses a small-company feel are portrayed daily at lunchtime, where almost all employees eat together at the many various office cafes while at the same time having an open, relaxed conversations with fellow Googlers that come from different teams. Also, because one of the Google culture’s main pillars are the pillar of innovation, every Googler are very comfortable at sharing ideas, thoughts, and opinions with one another in a very informal working environment. Every employee is a hands-on contributor and everyone wears several hats. Sergey and Brin also plays a big part of laying the foundation on what the Google culture is and the founders have continued to maintain the Google Way by organizing a weekly all-hands “TGIF” meetings for employees to pose questions directly at them.

Here are some of a few of their core principles which will provide a look into Google’s management philosophy and the type of culture they want to possess:

In Google, the motivated employees who ‘live’ the Google brand and are aligned to the company call themselves ‘Googlers’. Even former employees of Google have a name which they refer to themselves as ‘Xooglers’. This shows that in Google, their employees are so involved in the organization that they have their own symbolic name that mirrors the organization’s name and image, which is a sure sign of existing strong cultural values that are present within the company.

After tremendous growth in Google, the organization moved from a humble office building in Palo Alto, California back in its early days to its current office complex bought over from Silicon Graphics. The complex is popularly known as the Googleplex, which is a blend of the word ‘Google’ and ‘complex’. Googleplex is the result of a careful selection that serves to establish Google’s unique and individualistic culture in the eyes of the employees and the public. The corporate campus is built to provide a very fun, relaxed and colorful environment both inside and outside. Innovative design decisions provides Google employees 2000 car lots underground so that open spaces above and surrounding the building are filled with unique and interesting architectures that includes an on-site organic garden that supplies produces for Google’s various cafes, a bronze casting of a dinosaur fossil, a sand volleyball court, heated “endless pools” and also electric scooters along with hundreds of bikes scattered throughout the complex for Googlers to get to meetings across campuses. Googleplex is a significant departure from typical corporate campuses, challenging conventional thinking about private and public space. This also points out the alignment of values that are present in Google’s culture such as innovation, fun, laid-back, creativity and uniqueness that clearly shows that their organizational culture is truly unique and different from that of their competitors and other organizations.

Within the Googleplex, a truly attractive, fun and extraordinary workplace environment exists for Google employees. The interior of the headquarters is furnished with items like lava lamps and giant rubber balls while sofas, Google color coded chairs, and pool tables can be found at lounges and bar counters to express Google’s laid-back working atmosphere. The lobby contains a grand piano and a projection of current live Google search queries. The employees’ various needs are also taken care of by facilities such as the 19 cafes on campus which serves a variety of food choices for their diverse workforce, a gym, massage parlor, laundromats, and even micro kitchens, which provides snacks for employees who want a quick bite. This ensures that employees can be more productive and happy without ever leaving the workplace. A manifestation of Google’s creative and innovative culture is shown by the unconventional building design with high ceilings to let natural light in, durable floors made of tiny quartz stones, working British phone booths splashed in Google colors, and lounges that also serve as DIY libraries with cleverly placed low-reach book racks adorned with colorful Lego sets and cubes. All these innovative, creative and colorful designs are symbols of Google’s unique organizational culture that emphasizes on continuous innovation.

Google engages their employees by applying adaptive culture in the organization. From their core competency in search engine technology, Google has responded to customers change in needs by expanding onto the mobile market. The employees analyze, anticipate and seek out the opportunities to improve the organization’s performance by being proactive and quick in coming out with new technologies and solutions for mobile services. It aims to help people all over the world to do more tasks on their phone, not to mention the several different ways to access their Google search engine on a mobile phone. In addition, Google recently entered the smartphone market by launching the Google Nexus One smartphone in response to customer’s increasing need for smartphones, which is gaining ground on popularity because everyone is going mobile in the Information Age. This is the result of Google employees’ common mental model that the organization’s success depends on continuous change to support the stakeholders and also that they are solely responsible for the organization’s performance. The employees also believe that by entering into other markets beyond their core competency, the change is necessary and inevitable to keep pace with an ever changing and volatile technological market.

Google’s organizational culture places a huge importance of trust and transparency by having an informal corporate motto namely “Don’t be evil”. This slogan has become a central pillar to their identity and a part of their self-proclaimed core principles. It also forms the ethical codes of the organization where Google establishes a foundation for honest decision-making that disassociates Google from any and all cheating. Its ethical principles means that Google sets guiding principles for their advertising programs and practices, which is where most of their revenues come from. Google doesn’t breach the trust of its users so it doesn’t accept pop-up advertising, which is a disruptive form of advertisement that hinders with the user’s ability to see the content that they searched. And because they don’t manipulate rankings to put any of their partners higher in their search results or allow anyone to buy their way up the PageRank, the integrity of their search results are not compromised. This way, users trust Google’s objectivity and their ethical principles is one of the reasons why Google’s ad business had become so successful. The founders of Google believe strongly that ‘in the long term we will be better served, as shareholders and in all other ways, by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains.’

Analysis of Google Culture

Satisfied employees not only increase productivity and reduce turnover, but also enhance creativity and commitment. Google is already having a playful variation culture in the organization for the employees. This can enable the employees to have an enjoyment environment and this will be able enhance the relationship between the employees and strengthen their bond to work as a team. An enjoyment environment definitely can let the employees to feel satisfied and subsequently will increase productivity. Apart from that, this will shape a convenient work process for the employees that will smoothen the decision making process for the management team. Google already identified the employees are the organization’s internal customers and this is the reason why it has been constantly giving employees a sense of purpose, enhancing their self-esteem and sense of belonging for being a part of the organization. The company was reorganized into small teams that attacked hundreds of projects all at once. The founders give the employees great latitude, and they take the same latitude for themselves. Eric Schmidt says that Google merely appears to be disorganized. “We say we run the company chaotically. We run it at the edge. This can adapt the culture Google and therefore they can individually to generate the ideas on their own.

On the other hand, Google hires employees that have good academic results but without practical experience and this will be a threat to Google in terms of their organization’s operation. Google is a results-driven organization and if employees with only creative ideas but lacking of skills to realize the ideas they have initially planned, this will absolutely reduce the productivity of the organizations. Google had been public listed on year 2004 and therefore Google had to take the shareholders’ views into consideration before making any decision. The shareholders had been strongly emphasizing on reducing the employee benefits due to the high cost invested on it. This leads to the organizational culture would be degraded and the employees would feel less satisfied and affect their produced results. Employees are very important asset the Google while the shareholders also the contributor of funds for Google. The management team has to weight the importance of both of the stakeholders for the Google as this will create a different organizational culture .

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Measuring Culture

The spring 2024 issue’s special report looks at how to take advantage of market opportunities in the digital space, and provides advice on building culture and friendships at work; maximizing the benefits of LLMs, corporate venture capital initiatives, and innovation contests; and scaling automation and digital health platform.

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10 Things Your Corporate Culture Needs to Get Right

Knowing what elements of culture matter most to employees can help leaders foster engagement as they transition to a new reality that will include more remote and hybrid work.

• Workplace, Teams, & Culture
• Leading Change
• Organizational Behavior

In April 2021, nearly 4 million Americans quit their jobs — the highest monthly number ever recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 1 Employee retention is on the mind of every chief human resources officer, but culture is on the minds of the employees that companies are trying to retain. In a recent study, nearly two-thirds of employees listed corporate culture among the most important reasons they stay with their current employer — or start looking for another job. 2 Another study found culture is the single best predictor of employee satisfaction, ahead of compensation and work-life balance. 3

Our multiyear research into corporate culture using Glassdoor data reveals that cultures vary widely in quality in the eyes of their employees. When people create a review on Glassdoor, they rate their employer’s culture and values on a scale of 1 to 5. We analyzed the average culture score for companies in the Culture 500 — a sample of large organizations, mostly based in the United States. The typical company has an average culture rating of 3.6, but scores ranged widely — from 2.1 to 4.8 on a 5-point scale.

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What distinguishes a good corporate culture from a bad one in the eyes of employees? This is a trickier question than it might appear at first glance. Most leaders agree in principle that culture matters but have widely divergent views about which elements of culture are most important. In an earlier study , we identified more than 60 distinct values that companies listed among their official “core values.” 4 Most often, an organization’s official core values signal top executives’ cultural aspirations, rather than reflecting the elements of corporate culture that matter most to employees.

Which elements of corporate life shape how employees rate culture? To address this question, we analyzed the language workers used to describe their employers. When they complete a Glassdoor review, employees not only rate corporate culture on a 5-point scale, but also describe — in their own words — the pros and cons of working at their organization. The topics they choose to write about reveal which factors are most salient to them, and sentiment analysis reveals how positively (or negatively) they feel about each topic. (Glassdoor reviews are remarkably balanced between positive and negative observations.) By analyzing the relationship between their descriptions and rating of culture, we can start to understand what employees are talking about when they talk about culture.

We analyzed a total of 1.4 million employee reviews using the Natural Employee Language Understanding platform developed at CultureX, a company we cofounded. This natural language processing tool is optimized for a single task: understanding employee feedback. Specialization enables us to classify free text with more than 90% accuracy into over 150 topics while picking up business jargon, idioms, acronyms, and slang.

To identify which factors were most important in predicting a company’s overall culture score, we calculated the SHAP (Shapley additive explanations) value for each topic. SHAP values are based on a game-theoretic model developed by Nobel laureate Lloyd Shapley. This approach analyzes all possible combinations of features in a predictive model to estimate the marginal impact that each feature has on the outcome — in our case, which cultural elements have the biggest impact in predicting a company’s overall culture rating. 5

Before reading on, you may want to pause and consider which aspects of culture you would expect to predict a company’s culture score. The actual results may surprise you. Topics that you might expect to matter, such as friendly colleagues, flexible schedules, and manageable workloads, were commonly discussed but had little or no impact on a company’s overall culture score. (See “The 10 Elements of Culture That Matter Most to Employees.”)

The following chart summarizes the factors that best predict whether employees love (or loathe) their companies. The bars represent each topic’s relative importance in predicting a company’s culture rating. 6 Whether employees feel respected, for example, is 18 times more powerful as a predictor of a company’s culture rating compared with the average topic. We’ve grouped related factors to tease out broader themes that emerge from our analysis.

1. Employees feel respected. The single best predictor of a company’s culture score is whether employees feel respected at work. Respect is not only the most important factor, it stands head and shoulders above other cultural elements in terms of its importance. Respect is nearly 18 times as important as the typical feature in our model in predicting a company’s overall culture rating, and almost twice as important as the second most predictive factor.

The strong and varied language employees use to describe disrespect suggests how deeply it affects them. Employees describe being demeaned and degraded; viewed as disposable cogs in a wheel or robots; or treated like children, second-class citizens, crap, garbage, dirt, trash, scum, idiots, or cattle.

Respect for employees varied by industry. (See “How Employees Talk About Respect in Their Companies by Industry.”) In sectors with a high percentage of professional and technical workers — such as management consulting, enterprise software, and semiconductors — employees were less likely to mention respect compared with all industries (horizontal axis) — and when they did discuss respect, the sentiment was more positive (vertical axis). In industries with a large number of front-line employees — including casual restaurants, grocery stores, and specialty retailers — workers were more likely to mention respect and talk about it in negative terms than were employees in other industries.

Industry is not destiny, however, when it comes to a culture of respect. Even in low-scoring sectors like grocery stores, some companies, including Wegmans, Trader Joe’s, and HEB, stand out for their high levels of employee respect and overall strong cultural ratings. In future research in this series, we will explore which elements of culture distinguish companies that create a healthy culture for their front-line employees.

Nearly half of employees mention management in their reviews, and their collective assessment of the top leadership team is a particularly strong predictor of a company’s culture rating — four times more important than the average topic and twice as important as discussions of an employee’s immediate boss. When it comes to corporate culture, it seems, employees assign more of the credit (or blame) to the C-suite than to their direct boss. And this makes sense. The C-suite is responsible for several of the factors that matter most to employees’ assessment of culture — including benefits, learning and development opportunities, job security, and reorganizations.

Our platform categorizes employee feedback into more than 50 distinct ways leaders are described, including whether they are empowering, organized, emotionally stable, or friendly. Among all of these leadership traits, a few stood out as the best predictors of a company’s culture rating.

2. Supportive leaders. Of all the ways employees describe their managers, the most important predictor of a company’s culture score is whether managers support their employees. Employees describe supportive leaders as helping them do their work, being responsive to requests, accommodating employees’ individual needs, offering encouragement, and having their backs. Leaders, of course, influence all aspects of culture, but being a source of support for employees is especially critical and is the leadership trait most closely associated with a highly rated culture.

3. Leaders live core values. In an earlier article , we found no correlation, on average, between a company’s official culture and how well core values are practiced on a day-to-day basis. 7 Employees are generally (and rightly) cynical about their employer’s core value statements and don’t expect leaders to live these values. When employees complain that “managers pay lip service to core values“ or “a wide gap exists between cultural rhetoric and reality,” their negative sentiment doesn’t ding the company’s culture score much. When employees praise leaders who “walk the talk” or “practice what they preach,” in contrast, their positive assessment provides a big boost to a company’s culture score. Employees don’t expect leaders to live the core values, but they appreciate it when they do.

4. Toxic managers. At the other end of the spectrum from supportive leaders who live the core values are managers whom employees describe as “horrible,” “poisonous,” or “toxic,” among other extremely negative terms. Toxic leadership can take many forms, but employees who describe managers as toxic are also more likely to say they are abusive, disrespectful, noninclusive, or unethical.

5. Unethical behavior. This is a particularly dangerous form of toxic management. Integrity is the cornerstone of most organizations’ official culture — nearly two-thirds of all companies list integrity or ethics among their official core values. 8 Integrity also matters to employees — ethical behavior is more than twice as predictive of a company’s culture rating than the average topic. Pockets of unethical behavior, unfortunately, remain a reality in many organizations. A recent study of managers in brokerage firms found that nearly 10% of them had been involved in financial misconduct, and unethical managers increased the odds that their subordinates would cheat as well. 9

Identifying toxic leaders, digging deeper to understand the context of their behavior , coaching them, or removing them from leadership positions are tangible actions organizations can take to root out people who are undermining corporate culture and potentially exposing the company to reputational or legal risk.

Compensation and Benefits

6. Benefits. When it comes to predicting a company’s culture score, benefits are more than twice as important as compensation. Benefits are important for all employees, but which benefits matter most depend on an employee’s job. Health insurance and benefits are a better predictor of culture rating for front-line workers, while retirement benefits such as 401(k) plans and pensions matter more for white-collar employees.

We are not, of course, arguing that compensation doesn’t matter. Leaders may want to raise compensation, particularly for front-line employees, because it’s the right thing to do — a 2019 study found that 44% of U.S. families did not earn enough to cover their living expenses. 10 Recent research shows that compensation is at least as important as culture in retaining employees, particularly among younger workers. 11 Compensation matters, but it won’t fix a broken culture.

7. Perks. Employees mention nearly 450 different types of perks in their reviews, ranging from arcades to Zumba classes. Among amenities mentioned by more than 50 employees, however, coffee truly is the central perk, with discounted coffee rated positively over 97% of the time. (If you consider less common perks, unlimited meals, onsite breakfast, and free wine have a 100% positive sentiment among employees.)

Employees don’t necessarily expect perks, but they do appreciate them when they’re offered. If a small percentage of employees mention perks, a company’s culture score does not suffer much. When more workers talk about perks, in contrast, companies see a big jump in their culture rating.

Among perks, company-organized social events are a particularly strong predictor of a high culture score. Even when you control for how employees talk about perks in general, social events like team-building exercises, happy hours, and picnics emerge as a reliable predictor of a high culture score. Organizing social events is a promising and relatively low-cost way executives can reinforce corporate culture as employees return to the office.

8. Learning and development. Nearly one-third of all employees mention opportunities for education or personal development in their reviews, making this the third most frequently discussed topic (after management and compensation). Employees in Culture 500 companies are extremely positive about programs to match or reimburse college tuition and opportunities for exposure to senior executives, particularly early in their careers. The analysis also shows that learning and development benefits are relatively more important to white-collar workers than front-line employees.

Job Security and Reorganizations

9. Job security. Managers don’t typically think of job security as part of corporate culture — in our earlier study of how companies describe their core values, not one listed job security. Job insecurity, however, weighs heavily on employees’ minds when they assess corporate culture. The larger the percentage of employees who talked about layoffs, outsourcing, or the possibility of getting fired, the lower the company ranked on culture.

Related Articles

10. Reorganizations. Virtually no one has any good things to say about reorganizations. In the Culture 500 sample, employees talked about reorganizations in negative terms 97% of the time. The fewer people who mention reorganizations, the higher a company’s culture score. While you might associate the mention of reorganizations with layoffs and job instability (and there is moderate correlation here), the data reveals that employee concerns on this issue speak to wider strategic issues for companies. When employees mention reorgs, they are much more likely to also discuss the pace of organizational change as too fast, inconsistency in strategy over time, and a lack of clarity about the company’s evolving strategy.

Leaders face a series of challenges while navigating the post-COVID-19 return to work. They must retain star employees, attract new recruits, and maintain a healthy culture as the workforce adjusts to a new reality that will include more remote and hybrid work. Understanding the elements of culture that matter most to employees can help leaders maintain employee engagement and a vibrant culture as they transition to the new normal.

About the Authors

Donald Sull ( @culturexinsight ) is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and cofounder of CultureX. Charles Sull is a cofounder of CultureX.

1. I. Ivanova, “People Are Quitting Their Jobs at Record Rates. That’s a Good Thing for the Economy.” CBS News, June 21, 2021, www.cbsnews.com.

2. “Mission & Culture Survey Supplement, 2019,” PDF file (Mill Valley, California: Glassdoor, 2019), www.glassdoor.com. The online survey was conducted by the Harris Poll in June 2019 and completed by over 5,000 adults in the U.S., U.K., France, and Germany.

3. A. Stansell, “ Which Workplace Factors Drive Employee Satisfaction Around the World? ” Glassdoor Economic Research, July 11, 2019, www.glassdoor.com.

4. D. Sull, S. Turconi, and C. Sull, “ When It Comes to Culture, Does Your Company Walk the Talk? ” MIT Sloan Management Review, July 21, 2020, https://sloanreview.mit.edu. We reviewed the websites and annual reports of 689 large, mainly U.S. organizations and found 562 that listed official value statements and identified 62 distinct values listed by at least five companies in our sample.

5. We used an XGBoost model to predict the average culture score for the 599 organizations in our sample. Each model included 158 cultural topics. We split each topic into two features and incidence-measured the percentage of total company reviews that mentioned a specific topic. We sentiment-measured the percentage of reviews mentioning a topic that was positive. If fewer than 15 reviews mentioned a topic in a company, we excluded that topic’s sentiment score from our analysis. Imposing a threshold count to calculate topic-level sentiment resulted in missing values for less-frequently discussed topics, and we chose an XGBoost model because it handles missing values well. The model performed well, with an adjusted R2 of 0.81 in the testing set. We used SHAP values to estimate each topic’s relative importance in predicting average culture scores. SHAP values quantify the marginal contribution that each feature makes to reducing the model’s error, averaged across all possible combinations of features, to provide an estimate of each feature’s importance in predicting culture scores. For an accessible discussion of SHAP models, see S. M. Lundberg, G. Erion, H. Chen, et al., “ From Local Explanations to Global Understanding With Explainable AI for Trees ,” Nature Machine Intelligence 2, no. 1 (January 2020): 56-67.

6. Relative importance is calculated by dividing each topic’s SHAP value by the average SHAP value of all 158 topics included as features in our model.

7. Sull, et al., “When It Comes to Culture, Does Your Company Walk the Talk?”

9. Z.T. Kowaleski, A.G. Sutherland, and F.W. Vetter, “ Supervisor Influence on Employee Financial Misconduct ,” SSRN, July 20, 2020 (revised May 21, 2021), https://ssrn.com.

10. S. Liu and J. Parilla, “How Family-Sustaining Jobs Can Power an Inclusive Recovery in America’s Regional Economies,” PDF file (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, February 2021), www.brookings.edu.

11. M. Smart and A. Chamberlain, “Why Do Workers Quit? The Factors That Predict Employee Turnover,” PDF file (Mill Valley, California: Glassdoor, February 2017), www.glassdoor.com; and B. Zweig and D. Zhao, “Looking for Greener Pastures: What Workplace Factors Drive Attrition?” PDF file (Mill Valley, California: Glassdoor, 2021), www.glassdoor.com.

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Mohammed robel, david white, kannan raghavan, louise lambert, stuart roehrl.

Empowering employees to experiment and grow

How culture change and training initiatives have helped insurance company UNIQA start a movement.

Call for change

Accelerating a culture change

UNIQA Insurance Group, established in 1811 and one of the largest insurance companies in Central and Eastern Europe today, knew that attracting and retaining top talent was a critical step to becoming a market-leading service provider.

The company wanted to enable its people to react quickly, learn from mistakes and collaborate beyond conventional boundaries.

To do this, UNIQA established a Culture Office to lead internal cultural change. Using its UNIQA 3.0 strategy as a base, the company prioritized four guiding principles in its transformation: customer, ownership, community and simplicity.

When tech meets human ingenuity

Sparking new beliefs with stories

UNIQA and Accenture developed an unconventional approach to encourage employees to try new things and learn from failure. The Culture Office began piloting culture-change initiatives in which employees could address and solve everyday challenges through storytelling and small experiments.

A "Train the Trainer" program built the capability and confidence of employees to train others. Participants then led 15 cohorts of up to 12 experiment leads to kick-start their own experimentation and storytelling journeys with their teams.

These "micro" experiments—which would eventually number in the hundreds, if not thousands—then laddered up to cultural change in service of UNIQA’s strategic ambitions.

As we spoke to potential partners to help us on our culture journey, Accenture’s capabilities to create an innovative approach to culture transformation truly stood out.

Jacqueline Go / Head of UNIQA’s Culture Office

A valuable difference

The art and impact of storytelling

In mere months, the initiatives had a positive impact on UNIQA’s culture. Participants designed and tested more than 150 behavioral experiments, while UNIQA’s people conducted over 3,000 hours of coaching and workshops during which experiment leads received intensive training to ultimately empower colleagues.

Based on the encouraging feedback from participants, the Culture Office plans to conduct additional training sessions to accredit more leaders.

Employees are now better equipped to face everyday challenges, take ownership and collaborate. Using the art of storytelling, employees share with their colleagues their experiences of risk-taking and innovation—to turn culture change into a real movement.

We were energized about the prospect of doing something different.

• : Consumer Products & Retail , Healthcare & Life Sciences

Articulating & Enhancing a Corporate Culture

Client Profile & Challenge

When the leaders of SCA, a Swedish hygiene and forest products company, decided to split their organization into 2 different corporations, they knew they needed help articulating and defining the culture of Essity, the corporation that would take SCA’s hygiene and health division.

SCA had already initiated a project with us to articulate, strengthen, and further capitalize on its culture. Now that effort transitioned to a more urgent goal: Define the culture for Essity that would retain the best elements of SCA’s established corporate culture, but would also include new beliefs and behaviors to give Essity a competitive advantage.

The challenge was to articulate a culture that could become a pillar for Essity’s strategic plan as the company prepared to go public and face larger established global competitors.

To make the new culture stick, it would need buy-in from all levels of the company — the executive team and associates at every level in multiple geographic markets.

And with the spin-off and IPO looming, the process had to be completed in a short period of time.

Solution & Results

A few months before the IPO, we partnered with Essity executives to begin working through our 6-step process towards organizational culture change:

• Ask strategic questions. We worked with company leaders to identify what the new competitive environment would require.
• Grow from the bottom up.  Essity gathered input from 8 focus groups involving hundreds of employees from several countries and functions to identify common themes and concerns about the old company culture, and see what they thought was important for future success.
• Elicit executive input.  We interviewed 13 senior Essity executives to gather their thoughts on what the company’s culture should and shouldn’t do, ensuring alignment between staff input and the executive team’s strategic perspective.
• Decide on the final articulation of core company values.  The 2 beliefs — care and collaboration — were hallmarks of the legacy SCA culture. In addition, 2 new beliefs, commitment and courage, were chosen based on a consensus for the new company’s success.
• Obtain executive team buy-in.  Essity and CCL held a workshop for the executive team to think through the new beliefs and behaviors and explore how to help the business units start living them in order to bring the new company culture to life.
• Roll out the new culture broadly.  The new beliefs and behaviors were rolled out across the company 3 months after Essity’s IPO. Because they resonated so strongly companywide, acceptance was immediate. Essity leaders quickly integrated the beliefs and behaviors into company hiring, promotion, and recognition practices. And the company shared its new culture with shareholders, suppliers, and customers.

Top company leaders have made it a priority to embrace and model the new culture by:

• Practicing new values and behaviors as individuals and as a team,
• Creating a culture of transparency,
• Defining what “good” looks like, and
• Communicating values through storytelling and anecdotes.

Participants Say

“New beliefs gave us the possibility of having a common ground where we could start to talk and start to see ‘How are we fitting together?’ … It’s easy to connect the beliefs and behaviors to our daily reality.”

Massimo Minaudo

Commercial Director, Essity’s Italian Business

“Everybody in this company should have a relationship to the beliefs and behaviors. … Our senior leaders now talk about the beliefs and behaviors as an integrated part of how we are doing business.”

Karin Nyström

Vice President, Human Resources Development

Partner With Us

Build a culture that makes strategy happen with our  Organizational Leadership Culture Change  service. Start cultural transformation with customized Executive Team Development, and then socialize it throughout the organization.

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CCL researchers are presenting on several topics at this year’s Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) annual conference.

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Data Topics

• Data Architecture
• Data Literacy
• Data Science
• Data Strategy
• Data Modeling
• Governance & Quality
• Education Resources For Use & Management of Data

Case Study: Establishing a Data-Literate Culture

Imagine a rapidly expanding small business with a 20% yearly growth tasked with establishing and maintaining a data-literate culture. Then, add a new Data Architecture upgrade with considerable changes to the business logic to this situation, causing a full-on panic. This journey, marked by confusion over data definitions and anxiety over system changes, describes the situation that Brooke Gajownik, director of […]

Imagine a rapidly expanding small business with a 20% yearly growth tasked with establishing and maintaining a  data-literate  culture. Then, add a new  Data Architecture  upgrade with considerable changes to the business logic to this situation, causing a full-on panic.

At DATAVERSITY’s Data Governance & Information Quality Conference, Gajownik spoke about how she transformed Beck’s Hybrids data headaches into a confident data culture. She expanded on her recommendations to build relationships, foster communication and education, and empower users through self-service.

Company Culture Forms the Backbone

Gajownik’s success story started with her understanding of Becks Hybrid’s corporate culture, which is its backbone. She noted that the company began in 1937 with two people and 80 acres. Today, Beck’s Hybrids is the third-largest retail seed company in the United States, with 15 facilities in 19 states.

She stated that keeping its family culture remains central to Beck’s Hybrids. Partnerships are taken very seriously, making the dealers extensions of Beck’s Hybrids’ core beliefs. These values include growing everything it needs, guaranteeing quality seeds, and helping farmers succeed.

When Beck’s Hybrids talks about growing everything it needs, that includes systems. “It jumps right in, creates software on its own, tries everything at once, and sees what happens,” said Gajownik.

As Gajownik talked about these experiences, she explained the context around Data Literacy adoption. She stressed in her strategy, “We plant a seed of data knowledge, water it with communication and education,” and watch Data Quality take off with successful partnerships.

Put the People Before the Data 

Applying cultural understanding means prioritizing the needs of individuals over the data and working within the organizational structure to identify use cases. At Beck’s Hybrids, the leadership team, which consists of the CEO, Sonny Beck, president Scott Beck, and three other members, has relied on analytical email reports as their primary source of truth since the late 1980s.

While high-level Tableau dashboards exist, executives express a strong preference for email reports instead. They are more familiar with and trust this format. Gajownik explained:

“The leadership team cares that the information hits their inbox as an email and reads correctly. They do not care where the data has come from to get to this email. Instead, they hire data advocates – subject matter experts (SMEs) with a deep understanding of the business and technology – to make the magic happen. Then the leadership can look at it, trust it, and move on with their decisions.”

These data advocates, who hold managerial positions across major departments, take responsibility for delivering accurate and quality data to support executive decision-making. Gajownik’s prioritization of “people before the project and before the data” enables her to understand Data Literacy needs and address them effectively.

Planting a Seed of Data Knowledge

When fostering relationships, Gajownik advised:

“People want to connect and know they are not forced to do something. Instead, ask them to collaborate and be a part of it. Talk with anyone and everyone in the hall and have personal communication where you care about them.”

To Gajownik and her team, this relationship-building work and caring – through fixing and releasing reports and educating the business about data – represents seeds of data knowledge.

Growing Data Knowledge with Communication and Education

In a large company, transparency and communicating the meaning of data are essential for answering questions and fostering Data Literacy. These requirements become particularly evident when Gajownik and her team address internal customer data reporting issues. The data services team must comprehensively understand the data lineage, tracing its origin back to the table where it is stored.

To upskill the business, Gajownik works closely to educate, plan, and lead them through the  Data Governance Initiative . This initiative formalizes and enforces organizational data activities, including training. Gajownik said:

“Through this training, we engage the business cross-functionally and leverage their subject expertise to enhance Data Literacy. Our goal is to provide individuals from various departments, such as logistics, with the opportunity to take online classes tailored to their specific needs. They can also explore other aspects, like production data, if they are curious.”

Beck’s Hybrids implements educational software to effectively communicate and deliver Data Literacy classes to employees. Gajownik’s team has introduced newer courses specifically designed to cover Data Governance and reporting content, which now play an integral role in onboarding.

Watch Data Literacy Grow with Transparency

Beck’s Hybrids continues to expand its Data Literacy messaging and its importance with its dealers and partners. According to Gajownik, the company’s approach includes:

• Going out to field sales meetings and the salespeople to talk about why Data Literacy is important and to train them how to use the data
• Meeting with the dealers and helping them succeed with Data Literacy, as they are an extension of Beck’s Hybrid’s core values and beliefs

Gajownik circled back to the dealers, the core of Beck’s Hybrid’s success and values. She described how the company partnered with  Data Galaxy  to help these farmers get insights into their data.

Through Data Galaxy, a tool extending Beck’s Hybrid’s core values through easy collaboration, “partners dealers strengthen each other in their data knowledge,” said Gajownik. The platform connects stakeholders to Beck’s Hybrids data planning and activity – including its educational content and outstanding user experience.

She said, “I want to have an easy product that we can get in front of our people (employees, partners, and dealers) so they can collaborate with us about the data.” She also chose Data Galaxy to invest in an agile way to co-build products with data that accelerates growth for everyone.

Enabling Self-Service with a Common Language

Gajownik acknowledged that Beck’s Hybrids has a big challenge in enabling self-service because of all the fast company growth. To enable their customers, Gajownik engages a team of technical business partners that sits between the tech team and the business. They help the business look up, understand, and use shared data terminology in their working context, with references like a  business glossary  and a  data dictionary . 

Technical business partners also record requirements, raise awareness of issues, and assist with the software development of a Data Management application. With this arrangement, employees, partners, and dealers understand the data definitions and have better conversations with the data services team. Everyone gets what they want in the form of Data Literacy.

Having a data warehouse as a single source of truth, especially after the logic changes in 2022, has played a key role in getting this Data Literacy. The warehouse keeps expectations from report requests consistent. At the same time, the business glossary extends out from the data warehouse logic as a version of the source of truth.

Gajownik said:

 “We want our customers to own their data, not just what they think they know about it, but actually put in those definitions, ask for reports, and be truly self-serviceable. We want them to speak that common language, along with the visibility of the data.”

Beck’s Hybrids succeeded in its Data Literacy efforts by putting the people before the data. Gajownik applied her understanding of the family culture, her connection with growing products and solutions, and her value of partnerships to do this.

She plants a seed of Data Literacy knowledge from these relationships, waters it with communication and education, and watches the Data Literacy grow. She wants to see her users self-sufficient with her Data Literacy initiatives so they can thrive and excel at their jobs. With this Data Literacy, the company gets the insights it needs, while the data magic happens within the culture that Beck’s Hybrids built.

Want to learn more about DATAVERSITY’s upcoming events, including DGIQ this June? Check out our current lineup of online and face-to-face conferences  here .

Here is the video of the DGIQ presentation:

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Creating a Corporate Social Responsibility Program with Real Impact

• Emilio Marti,
• David Risi,
• Eva Schlindwein,
• Andromachi Athanasopoulou

Lessons from multinational companies that adapted their CSR practices based on local feedback and knowledge.

Exploring the critical role of experimentation in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), research on four multinational companies reveals a stark difference in CSR effectiveness. Successful companies integrate an experimental approach, constantly adapting their CSR practices based on local feedback and knowledge. This strategy fosters genuine community engagement and responsive initiatives, as seen in a mining company’s impactful HIV/AIDS program. Conversely, companies that rely on standardized, inflexible CSR methods often fail to achieve their goals, demonstrated by a failed partnership due to local corruption in another mining company. The study recommends encouraging broad employee participation in CSR and fostering a culture that values CSR’s long-term business benefits. It also suggests that sustainable investors and ESG rating agencies should focus on assessing companies’ experimental approaches to CSR, going beyond current practices to examine the involvement of diverse employees in both developing and adapting CSR initiatives. Overall, embracing a dynamic, data-driven approach to CSR is essential for meaningful social and environmental impact.

By now, almost all large companies are engaged in corporate social responsibility (CSR): they have CSR policies, employ CSR staff, engage in activities that aim to have a positive impact on the environment and society, and write CSR reports. However, the evolution of CSR has brought forth new challenges. A stark contrast to two decades ago, when the primary concern was the sheer neglect of CSR, the current issue lies in the ineffective execution of these practices. Why do some companies implement CSR in ways that create a positive impact on the environment and society, while others fail to do so? Our research reveals that experimentation is critical for impactful CSR, which has implications for both companies that implement CSR and companies that externally monitor these CSR activities, such as sustainable investors and ESG rating agencies.

• EM Emilio Marti is an associate professor at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. His research focuses on corporate sustainability with a specific focus on sustainable investing.
• DR David Risi is a professor at the Bern University of Applied Sciences and a habilitated lecturer at the University of St. Gallen. His research focuses on how companies organize CSR and sustainability.
• ES Eva Schlindwein is a professor at the Bern University of Applied Sciences and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on how organizations navigate tensions between business and society.
• AA Andromachi Athanasopoulou is an associate professor at Queen Mary University of London and an associate fellow at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on how individuals manage their leadership careers and make ethically charged decisions.

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