Culture and the Customer Experience

Your corporate culture is a critical part of your company’s nature, but defining it is an elusive task. Everyone talks about what culture is, but no one can really put their finger on it, either.

You can think of a company’s culture as the set of values and beliefs about the business and its mission that are informally passed on from one employee to another. Corporate culture is something that unites a group of employees in a joint undertaking (i.e., the company they work for), over and above whatever job titles or responsibilities they have. At its root, the culture at a firm can be summed up simply as “how things are done around here,” or perhaps more colorfully, corporate culture is “what employees do when no one’s looking.” 

But while this may be a decent way to express what a culture is, it doesn’t really give us insight into how any particular company’s culture came to be. At some organizations, managers take a proactive role in trying to guide or shape their own corporate cultures, attempting to ensure that the informal beliefs and values of employees and managers support the organization’s broader mission. But unless the effort begins with the very founding of the company, is constantly reinforced with training and communication, and is visibly exemplified in the actions and statements of a firm’s senior executives, such management-led actions often aren’t very successful.

Regardless of whether you try to manage it or not, however, every business – including your own – does have a corporate culture. And poor or conflicting cultures tend to be a big reason why it’s difficult to gain traction with a change management effort. It explains why big corporate strategy initiatives often fizzle (including CX initiatives), and why mergers and strategic alliances are prone to failure.

In 2002, for instance, IBM bought PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting (PwCC) and merged the operation into its own professional services business, which had a roughly similar number of consultants. But while the mission statements and values of the two firms seemed very similar, the combined organization, some 55,000 strong, soon found that their unwritten corporate cultures were quite different.

PwCC’s culture favored self-initiative on the part of individual consultants, celebrating and rewarding them for bringing in big clients even if sometimes they had to break a few rules or run over a few bodies to get it done. IBM, however, was an organization constantly in tune with its own broader efficiencies, and consultants took pride in the fact that processes only had to be invented once at IBM before being shared around, while strategies were followed quite carefully, even when that sometimes meant foregoing lucrative targets of opportunity.

The culture at each company was an asset, but in different and conflicting ways. Successful lone rangers were heroes at PWCC, but they were outlaws at IBM. And the task of blending these two very different organizational cultures together became the subject of Sara Moulton Reger’s captivating book on how culture works: Can Two Rights Make a Wrong?

One thing IBM found, for instance, was that sometimes decisions and strategies would simply be traded off by their consultants, who were all trying to figure out how to get along – “we did it your way last time, so this time let’s do it my way, and next time I’ll owe you one.” Needless to say this kind of behavior confused and baffled the company’s clients, who never knew quite what to expect.

The PwCC acquisition represented a landmark moment in IBM’s journey, transforming itself from being just a computer manufacturer to being a multifaceted provider of information services for large enterprise clients. And according to IBM’s then-CEO Lou Gerstner:

Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization’s makeup and success – along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like….I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game – it is the game.

In the end, the consultants from IBM and PwCC who worked on the transition project developed some substantive new tools for assessing and gradually adjusting their corporate cultures. They even filed patents for some of them. And the experience taught everyone an important lesson about the role of corporate culture, particularly when the organization’s employees are high-end professionals:

In assessing the quality of your customer experience, business processes make a difference, but culture rules.