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'What
does corporate culture mean to your organization? How do you ensure that
the key features of the culture you want, e.g. work-life balance, career
growth, industrial safety and so on, permeate your organization?
Most CEOs want to have strong organization culture and
committed and motivated employees. The analysis of control system must be
tabulated on gap between desire and reality, based on observation and
experience, which often caused by internal & external pressure.
ORGANISATIONS more often than not lapse into a 'default' culture. This is
often shaped by a few employees who have managed somehow to claim their
share of voice within the office and allowed by the vast majority of
employees who give in to this situation. Unfortunately, this 'default'
culture may not always be what the organization needs to succeed in the
near future. Some of the key variables are ::
* RESPECT FOR THE INDIVIDUAL:
Take for example, if a staff has a family relationship problem or
is in monetary difficulties, it affects his morale and performance at
work. At the same time, staff with problems at work can also bring stress
back home. This can end up in a vicious cycle leading to an unhealthy
downward spiral in both work and family life. The approach must be to
instill true belief and adoption, among all the employees, of key
corporate value - that it is the business to offer comprehensive and
efficient data recovery services to all clientele through innovation and
creativity. The organizational cultures in most companies often reflect
the personal values and work ethics of their founders. They are expressed
explicitly through the company's core values, vision and mission
statements. The culture supports the organization's goals and is
inseparable from the leadership style of the CEO. Though the
organizational values do not change, every CEO has his/her own
interpretation, thus, refreshing the corporate behavior.
"MANY people often wonder why GE is consistently voted the World's
Most Respected Company. Some shake their heads in disbelief when they hear
we have had less CEO changes, this past century, than the Vatican has had
Popes. A key reason for this, I believe, is the GE leadership's ability to
create a supportive organizational culture. More importantly, GE is able
to consistently and conscientiously evolve this culture to suit the times.
One of the first tasks for every new CEO of GE is to study the underlying
forces shaping the world at his time, re-shaping 'GE culture' to meet the
challenges and opportunities for the next 10-20 years ahead. Currently, GE
emphasizes a culture of growth. This has several pillars to it. One is to
get all our employees externally focused, re-gearing each and every
employee's focus on what the customers need and value. Two is to encourage
people to take calculated risks and have the courage to move the company
in directions we must go: geographically, technologically and
product-wise. Three is to develop personal expertise in a subject or
functional area, keeping people in place longer to better serve customers
better.
- Colin Low GE Aircraft Engines President,
Singapore, Philippines & Vietnam
* Customer Service:
Creating a culture of customer service in organization is a
challenged innovation. There are definite techniques to erasing the
old ways of relating to fellow managers and employees and instilling a
culture where everyone has both internal and external customers.
This revolves around treating each other with the same amount of respect
that you accord the guest and trusting each other to do the job.
Organizational cultures exist either consciously or unconsciously, we can
choose the culture that we want to work within and transmit to our
employees and customers. A guest can feel a 'culture' within a hotel
just as a passenger can tell if the airline is serious about customer
service.
"Successful organizations build strong service cultures to delight
their customers, attract and retain their staff, creating strong bonds of
loyalty for the future.
"Achieving these results requires world-class training and proven
culture-building techniques."
– Ron Kaufman
The only question that remains is what value do you place on your
guests' experience?
Solution occurs in these questions itself …
o Measuring Parameters of Customer services culture in an organization
o What are the technologies improved the customer experience in most
companies?
o Is It Possible To Measure or Assess Excellent Customer Service?
o What Common Mistakes Are Made When Choosing Customer Service Metrics?
o What Should Customer Service Training Include?
o What Are The Most Essential Customer Service Skills?
o What Types of Customer Service Situations Should Employees Be Trained in
and Prepared For?
o Why is a systems approach so important to improving customer service?
o What's the relationship between "internal customer service"
and customer service to paying customers?
* Dedication to work Towards Excellence:
o Relationship with co-workers
o Security of Employment
o Working time
o Interests in job
o Relationship with the Top Management.
o Welfare provisions
o Workload
o Competence of Management.
o Security of employment
o Training & re-training
o Promotion opportunities
o Pay and fringe benefits
o Welfare provisions
o Allowances
* Decentralized business
Decentralization has three general benefits: (1) It encourages
motivation and creativity; (2) it allows many minds to work simultaneously
on the same problem; and (3) it accommodates flexibility and
individualization. The importance of these benefits varies greatly, but
they are often especially important in certain industries and business
functions. For example, the success of most professional services
organizations (such as consulting, software development, and law) hinges
on the motivation and creativity of their professionals. Consequently,
these organizations are especially good candidates for decentralized
decision making. Creativity and innovation are also often particularly
important in functions like engineering, sales, product design, and
information technology. Here, too, decentralization will often pay off.
Decentralization is the policy of delegating decision-making authority
through out an organization, relatively away from a central authority.
Some features of a decentralized organization are fewer tiers to the
organizational structure, wider span of control, and a bottom-to-top flow
of decision-effecting ideas.
In a more decentralized organization, the top executives delegate much of
their decision-making authority to lower tiers of the organizational
structure. As a correlation, the organization is likely to run on less
rigid policies and wider spans of control among each officer of the
organization. The wider spans of control also reduce the number of tiers
within the organization, giving its structure a flat appearance. One
advantage of this structure, if the correct controls are in place, will be
the bottom-to-top flow of information, allowing all decisions among any
official of the organization to be well informed about lower tier
operations. For example, an experienced technician at the lowest tier of
an organization might know how to increase the efficiency of the
production, the bottom-to-top flow of information can allow for this
knowledge to pass up to the executive officers.
The lower the level where decisions are made, the greater is the
decentralization. Decentralization is most effective in organizations
where subunits are autonomous and costs and profits can be independently
measured. The benefits of decentralization include: (1) decisions are made
by those who have the most knowledge about local conditions; (2) greater
managerial input in decision-making has a desirable motivational effect;
and (3) managers have more control over results. The costs of
decentralization include: (1) managers have a tendency to look at their
division and lose sight of overall company goals; (2) there can be costly
duplication of services; and (3) costs of obtaining sufficient information
increase.
* TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT
The term "Total Quality Management" is actually a bit
misleading. It does mean improving quality (reducing defect rates, meeting
products spec's, etc.) and giving quality at least equal, if not higher,
priority relative to concerns about volume, cost, and schedule, but it
also means much more than that. TQM redefines quality. The new definition
might be summed up as: meeting or exceeding the customer's requirements
with respect to cost, delivery, product features, and quality. This broad
redefinition is markedly different from the traditional business strategy
of most American companies. For generations, American management has been
driven almost exclusively by short-term profit goals and standardization,
focusing on "getting the products out". TQM is driven by
opposite long-term growth goals and flexibility, focusing on the
"bringing the customer in".
A number of general principles, developed by Deming, Juran, Crosby, and
the Japanese, have been adapted by U.S. companies to guide the process of
focusing on the new "quality". The main principles are; (1)
Customer Satisfaction, (2) Continuous Improvement, (3) Extensive
Measurement, and (4) Employee Involvement.
1. CUSTOMER SATISFACTION: the ultimate goal of TQM is to please
customers. Meeting or exceeding customer requirements means shifting
emphasis from the short-term to the long-term, from the product to the
customers-listening to them, adapting to their needs. TQM teaches that
customer satisfaction is not only a measure of quality; it is a whole new
approach to doing business.
2. CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT: American companies have tended to think
in very finite, short-term, and programmatic ways. If a problem arises,
there must be a program to fix it. End of story. The message of continuous
improvement is that, in the global business arena, things are never truly
going to be "fixed".
3. EXTENSIVE MEASUREMENT: For customer satisfaction and continuous
improvement to be possible, proponents of TQM believe it is essential to
measure the results of the company and to perform measurements in
radically new ways. In the past, most firms did relatively little serious
measurement. When they did, they relied mostly on traditional, short-term
financial criteria to measure overall results, and a series of isolated,
somewhat haphazard, micro-measures of departments or functions to evaluate
internal initiatives.
4. EMPLOYEE INVOLVEMENT: Widespread employee participation in local
decision making is central to the logic of TQM. Employees must be
empowered to be flexible and make decisions if customers are to be
satisfied. They must be able to take action to prevent and solve problems,
and be committed to the organization.
TQM leadership from top management
TQM is a way of life for a company. It has to be introduced and led by top
management. This is a key point. Attempts to implement TQM often fail
because top management doesn't lead and get committed - instead it
delegates and pays lip service. Commitment and personal involvement is
required from top management in creating and deploying clear quality
values and goals consistent with the objectives of the company, and in
creating and deploying well defined systems, methods and performance
measures for achieving those goals. These systems and methods guide all
quality activities and encourage participation by all employees. The
development and use of performance indicators is linked, directly or
indirectly, to customer requirements and satisfaction, and to management
and employee remuneration.
Actions based on facts
The statistical analysis of engineering and manufacturing facts is an
important part of TQM. Facts and analysis provide the basis for planning,
review and performance tracking, improvement of operations, and comparison
of performance with competitors. The TQM approach is based on the use of
objective data, and provides a rational rather than an emotional basis for
decision making. The statistical approach to process management in both
engineering and manufacturing recognizes that most problems are
system-related, and are not caused by particular employees. In practice,
data is collected and put in the hands of the people who are in the best
position to analyze it and then take the appropriate action to reduce
costs and prevent non-conformance. Usually these people are not managers
but workers in the process. If the right information is not available,
then the analysis, whether it be of shop floor data, or engineering test
results, can't take place, errors can't be identified, and so errors can't
be corrected.
A TQM culture
It's not easy to introduce TQM. An open, cooperative culture has to be
created by management. Employees have to be made to feel that they are
responsible for customer satisfaction. They are not going to feel this if
they are excluded from the development of visions, strategies, and plans.
It's important they participate in these activities. They are unlikely to
behave in a responsible way if they see management behaving irresponsibly
- saying one thing and doing the opposite.
Product development in a TQM environment
Product development in a TQM environment is very different to product
development in a non-TQM environment. Without a TQM approach, product
development is usually carried on in a conflictual atmosphere where each
department acts independently. Short-term results drive behavior so scrap,
changes, work-arounds, waste, and rework are normal practice. Management
focuses on supervising individuals, and fire-fighting is necessary and
rewarded.
Awards for Quality achievement
The Deming Prize has been awarded annually since 1951 by the Japanese
Union of Scientists and Engineers in recognition of outstanding
achievement in quality strategy, management and execution. Since 1988 a
similar award (the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award) has been
awarded in the US. Early winners of the Baldrige Award include AT&T
(1992), IBM (1990), Milliken (1989), Motorola (1988), Texas Instruments
(1992) and Xerox (1989).
* EMPOWERMENT OF PEOPLE:
o ASSESSMENT OF NEEDS -- the first step. This sounds
simple, but we are often in too much of a hurry. We implement a solution,
sometimes the correct intervention but not always. But we plan, very
carefully and cautiously, before making most other investments in process
changes and in capital and operating expenditures. We need to do the same
for HRD -- implement the appropriate planning. This needs assessment and
planning will lead to several possible ways to improve performance. (Of
course, one of these is to do nothing! -- we may decide to focus on other
activities with greater impact and greater value.)
o PROGRAM DESIGN, DEVELOPMENT & EVALUATION. We need to consider
the benefits of any HRD intervention before we just go and do it: What
learning will be accomplished? What changes in behavior and performance
are expected? Will we get them? And of prime importance -- what is the
expected economic cost/benefit of any projected solutions?
o TRAINING & DEVELOPMENT -- acquiring knowledge, developing
competencies and skills, and adopting behaviors that improve performance
in current jobs, include: adult learning theory and applications,
instructional systems design, train-the-trainer programs, and
instructional strategies and methods.
o ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT -- the diagnosis and design of systems
to assist an organization with planning change. OD activities include:
change management, team building, learning organizations, management
development, quality of work life, and management by objectives, strategic
planning, and participative management. organizational restructuring, job
redesign, job enrichment, centralization vs. decentralization, changes in
the organization's reward structure, process consultation, executive
development, action research, third party interventions, and more. We will
discuss these in future articles.
o CAREER DEVELOPMENT -- activities and processes for mutual career
planning and management between employees and organizations. Changes in
our organizations (including downsizing, restructuring, and outsourcing)
are resulting in more empowerment for employees. The responsibility for
our own career development is downloaded to us. (Translation: career
ladders are gone; career development is now the responsibility of the
individual.) Later in this series we will explore strategies and tactics
to survive and prosper in this new workplace environment.
o ORGANIZATION RESEARCH & PROGRAM EVALUATION -- an exploration
of methods to evaluate, justify, and improve on HRD offerings.
o THE HRD PROFESSION(S) AND PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS -- we plan
to list and briefly describe the principal HRD organizations, their
missions and goals, and their addresses and contacts.
o PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL --Once a talented individual is brought
into an organization, another function of HRM comes into play—creating
an environment that will motivate and reward exemplary performance. One
way to assess performance is through a formal review on a periodic basis,
generally annually, known as a performance appraisal or performance
evaluation. Because line managers are in daily contact with the
employees and can best measure performance, they are usually the ones who
conduct the appraisals. Other evaluators of the employee's performance can
include subordinates, peers, group, and self, or a combination of one or
more (Mondy and Noe, 1996).
o COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS-- Compensation (payment in the
form of hourly wages or annual salaries) and benefits (insurance,
pensions, vacation, modified workweek, sick days, stock options, etc.) can
be a catch-22 because an employee's performance can be influenced by
compensation and benefits, and vice versa. In the ideal situation,
employees feel they are paid what they are worth, are rewarded with
sufficient benefits, and receive some intrinsic satisfaction (good work
environment, interesting work, etc.). Compensation should be legal and
ethical, adequate, motivating, fair and equitable, cost-effective, and
able to provide employment security (Cherrington, 1995).
o EMPLOYEE AND LABOR RELATIONS--Just as human resource developers
make sure employees have proper training, there are groups of employees
organized as unions to address and resolve employment-related issues.
Unions have been around since the time of the American Revolution (Mondy
and Noe, 1996). Those who join unions usually do so for one or both of two
reasons— to increase wages and/or to eliminate unfair conditions. Some
of the outcomes of union involvement include better medical plans,
extended vacation time, and increased wages (Cherrington, 1995).
o SAFETY AND HEALTH--Not only must an organization see to it that
employees' rights are not violated, but it must also provide a safe and
healthy working environment. Mondy and Noe (1996) define safety as
"protecting employees from injuries caused by work-related
accidents" and health as keeping "employees free from
physical or emotional illness" (p. 432). In order to prevent injury
or illness, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was
created in 1970. Through workplace inspections, citations and penalties,
and on-site consultations, OSHA seeks to enhance safety and health and to
decrease accidents, which lead to decreased productivity and increased
operating costs.
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