Organization Culture & Strategy

This is one topic which catches my eyes and attention pretty fast. These 2 factors – Culture & Strategy have always been, in my opinion, the critical factors for success in any organization. They become all the more important if a company is under crisis and is looking for a turnover or for a successful acquisition. Here is my story of an organization that reported to have taken major steps around 2005 to turn-around the company and bring it on a success-path – HCL Technologies.

It is pretty interesting to note that as I am writing this, many investors & analysts are opining that HCL Technologies is the company to be invested in, atleast amongst the top 5 Indian IT players – TCS, Cognizant, Infosys, Wipro and HCLT.  Through my MBA, or probably before that too, turnaround strategies have always enticed me, and when I was selected to HCLT fresh from my college, I wanted to know about this revolutionary concept called – Employees First, Customer Second. There is something special (read catchy) in the name itself.

I was curious and genuinely interested to read this book before I join the company and so did I. Not everyone who joins would do so. In all honesty, that book had all the ingredients to actually turn-around a company, and the references made to historical companies are also interesting to know. Companies like Southwest airlines, who hired people based on attitudes, are proof to the point that employees are the differentiators for most companies in the service space. There have been anecdotes that pilots of Southwest airlines assisted the on-board staff so that they could reduce turn-around time and in-turn increase efficiency. 

Coming back to my previous point – there is something special (read catchy) in the name itself. What makes it so? Clearly, if it was called Employee First, it would not have caught much attention, almost every company knows the employees are key (though treatment & implementation is a different topic altogether), it is the “Customer Second” which caught the attention. People around started wondering about the guts of a company which told Customers are Second in an industry which was ruled by philosophies like – Customers is the king; Customers are always right; Customers come first. This makes the name special.

I am sure, most of you reading would also be wondering that how is it possible for a company which banks on customers, say they are second and yet make an impact and grow. So here is the key difference – EFCS (Employee First Customer Second) is not really a philosophy; I would put it across as a strategy for a company. This is a very well thought off strategy. For any sales guy, a dream run of a client meet would be to get the maximum attention to what he says – and this is exactly what EFCS facilitates – When you say your customer that he is second – you have grabbed his attention, now how you utilize this is on your capability. So in this sense, this makes a great tool and strategy to crack conversations.

But EFCS at the core signifies something more than a strategy. It is essentially empowering an employee without any fears of hierarchy to contribute to customer’s growth and development. It ideally creates an ecosystem for an employee where one can focus only on the value addition for client, and not about the peripheral activities. So an employee’s support system is to be more effective and efficient in order to fully realize the effectiveness of this concept.

With so much about EFCS and high aspirations, I stepped into this organization, to really be part of its success story. In the initial days itself, I realized that EFCS was known merely as a name and not many people in the lower and middle management were actually able to confidently address the topic, and explain its importance in the company’s strategy and how it has been able to grow based on it. This put me in a fix. What are company strategies for? Are they limited to only senior management and the key decision makers? Isn’t important for people working at the grass-root level to be aware of them and realize the value of the same.  But one thing was very clear – the top management was putting in all the efforts to actually spread the word of EFCS and its benefits, key pillars of the strategy through various communication media internally.

This was the point when my focus shifted to another element called the culture of an organization. If this company deserves applause for one thing, my first choice would be the fact that it has actually survived for 36 yrs. Companies with such a history would definitely have developed a long standing unique culture for itself. In the first few days of me joining and interaction with people, I predominantly found only 2 types of people – either they are company veterans (like 8 -15yrs exp in the company) or just fresh in the system (like 0-3 yrs exp in the company). Seldom had I found someone in the mid-range. That made me realize that there is a strong force within the company who are highly experienced and seen the company grow through the times. These folks would probably form the core of the culture in this company. These guys have had the mentality of the erstwhile Indian industry where bosses were made from predominantly experience, and sub-ordinates were expected to do what the boss says (atleast in most scenarios). I could now see how tough was the job of actually fitting the strategy of EFCS into this culture and actually make it work. Invariably top-down approach was the better choice to get this down to the bottom. And the management chose so. There were only minor changes that was made in the culture, for e.g for any IT issue, instead of calling the support team, we were supposed to raise a request online, which made tracking lot more easier.

This is probably the best thing that the management has done right - They did not force a cultural change in order to ingrain the strategy. They made minor tweaks here and there, but even today it is essentially the company of yester years. They leveraged the fact the managers are made of experience and chose high- experienced managers to actually propagate the concept downstream (how many were good is another aspect).

Even today, this strategy still remains to me as an exceptional one only on 100% implementation. It is upon individual companies to understand the culture and fit the strategy with minor tweaks.

For me the biggest lesson was – Never estimate a company based on its strategy, because invariably, culture trumps strategy every time!!!

P.S: All the information written above is purely opinionated, and cannot be held for any discrepancies of perception and/or understanding. This post is my own and don't necessarily represent HCL/any other individual's positions, strategies or opinions.