“Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” said the highly-regarded management consultant Peter Drucker.
And he’s right, but as Managing Partner at Smith+Co, Tim Wade, highlighted at the Rant & Rave Year of Emotion event, very few businesses make decisions based on culture.
They’ll turn instead to strategy, metrics and tactics, but relying solely on the words within a business plan and applying them to every commercial decision that needs to be made will neither protect nor enhance a business’s most valuable asset - its culture.
Wade presented a brilliant example of why it is essential for businesses to define the culture of their organisation. When a company is intentional about the culture it creates, he argued, a great customer experience will follow.
Hotel chain, Premier Inn, is intent on making guests feel brilliant through a great night’s sleep. It recognises that its customers visit Premier Inn hotels because they have something else going on, be it a wedding, corporate event or important business meeting. Their internal motto is ‘Premier Inn - a place made by you’, and that motto defines the culture that enables its staff to deliver a great night’s sleep for its guests.
If you’re not making strategic decisions about your business based on its culture, here are 3 reasons why you should be doing exactly that.
1. Playing by the rules doesn’t win you any friends
During his talk, Wade highlighted a decision made by Disney that perfectly demonstrated the benefit of doing so from a cultural perspective.
Disney’s purpose is centred around creating happiness. With that in mind, consider a child who has spent all year looking forward to finally having a go on the Tower of Terror ride at Disney World. He reaches the front of the queue only to find out he is 1cm too short to experience the thrill of a lifetime. Disaster!
Rather than send him packing, Disney staff realised that such situations represented an opportunity to create happiness. So, by making a decision based firmly on their culture, they decided to give such kids a special pass that enabled them to play bellboy and be part of the Tower of Terror story. They get to wear a costume, watch their family take part in the ride and receive a Mickey Mouse-signed pass enabling them to jump to the front of the queue when they’re tall enough to ride it themselves.
If the decision had been made purely on rules and regulations, kids falling foul of the height rule would have simply had their dreams quashed along with Disney’s desire to create happiness.
2. You’ll play on a natural human instinct
It is natural for humans to want to create connections with people. The brilliant experiences we remember and cherish are usually those that involve some form of human connection. By making decisions based on the organisation’s culture, you’ll always take advantage of our natural instinct to create human-to-human moments.
Employees should be encouraged to bring their personalities to work and let them flourish, and that simply won’t happen if decisions are made based purely on numbers and statistics.
3. It creates a sense of alignment throughout the business
Hotel chain Best Western sets itself the tricky task of making a collection of disparate, privately-operated properties appear united in extolling the virtues of their umbrella brand. Best Western achieves this by making decisions based on their company culture.
Recognising that guests are best placed to recognise great customer experience, Best Western gives its loyalty scheme members points which they are encouraged to award to the staff members they deem to have offered the best customer experience.
This creates a sense of alignment throughout the business, as Best Western hotels are empowered to bring the Best Western story alive through great service which is in turn recognised by their guests.
Frontline teams can have the greatest impact on the emotional experience of customers. If the decisions being made above them are based purely on numbers within a spreadsheet or statistics from some industry white paper, their sense of purpose and emotional connection to the organisation will be diminished.
Businesses should be aligned around a single sense of purpose, so whenever you make a commercial decision, ask what value it will play in the lives of your customers and employees. For further inspiration on crafting a great customer experience check out our latest eBook 'The Anatomy of a Great Customer Experience'!
