Kalvis Gavars

Marketing and Communications Leader, PwC Latvia

One of the preconditions for securing positive customer experience is a robust organisational culture. Customer satisfaction is critical to any company seeking to maintain long-term profitability and competitiveness on the market.

In today’s business environment, organisational culture has become a key component that may determine your company’s success and sustainable growth. Organisational culture is a set of values, beliefs, norms, attitudes and behaviours that make up your company’s working environment. Organisational culture influences staff behaviour, motivation, mutual collaboration, working methods and attitudes, including towards customers, and determines how processes are performed in your company, how decisions are made and how they will impact customers, their needs and requirements.

According to the Baltic CEO survey published by PwC this year, Baltic CEOs mentioned a robust organisational culture as the most important precondition for driving an organisation’s competitiveness and growth.

Key advantages and challenges

A properly designed organisational culture may have many positive effects, such as improving staff satisfaction, motivation and productivity, driving innovation and efficient collaboration, and securing stability. When workers share their company’s values and goals, see their contribution and get due recognition, they have higher motivation to show better performance. A flexible and innovative culture stimulates the creation and use of new ideas, which helps the company create new goods or services and develop competitiveness. Organisational culture also influences workplace quality, which drives staff satisfaction and wellbeing. If culture is based on mutual respect, support, open communication and work-life balance, this creates a positive working environment and helps the company attract and retain talent. Also, organisational culture builds and strengthens the company’s identity and brand. Culture can reflect the company’s values, goals and attitudes that help create its image, raise its profile and build customer trust.

A systematic and well-planned approach

Embedding organisational culture in a company requires a systematic and well-planned approach. When it comes to embedding culture in your company, it’s important to pay attention to structural aspects, such as policies and procedures, and informal aspects, such as communication, management and behaviours. This takes time and patience, yet building a healthy and supportive organisational culture helps companies achieve better performance and greater staff engagement. Open and efficient communication is an important aspect of this process. Workers should be informed of the company’s goals, strategy and customer needs. At the same time, workers should be provided with opportunities and channels to offer their feedback, suggestions and ideas that encourage innovation and improvements to customer service quality.

The leader’s role

To build and maintain organisational culture, it is necessary to create an appropriate leadership model. Leaders have a key role to play – the leader’s engagement in building organisational culture is crucial because the leader is able to directly influence it by forming and strengthening particular behaviours and beliefs. The leader should be acting as an ambassador setting an example for other workers and promoting mutual trust, as well as ensuring that workers get the support and training they need.

Organisational culture evolves

Building and maintaining organisational culture requires constant revisions and adaptations. Different variables may create challenges or the need to adapt. You need to consider customer expectations, changing market trends and other factors, such as the latest technology, in order to keep your company aligned with customer needs. This approach gives your company a number of advantages. Firstly, this drives customer loyalty and satisfaction, significantly increasing the likelihood that your customer will use your goods or services again. Secondly, this approach enhances your reputation and attracts new customers – they are willing to recommend your company to others. Thirdly, this helps differentiate you from your competitors and build a competitive edge on the market, and last but not least, these aspects may support a price increase.

Changes to your organisational structure, a merger of companies and other similar cases may cause dissatisfaction and resistance among your workers, which does not make for a shared approach. Lack of leadership – inconsistency, improper behaviour or failure to adhere to the agreed values and norms – may cause confusion in workers and threaten the continued existence or revitalisation of the shared system of values. To meet this and other challenges to organisational culture, it’s important to take deliberate measures that promote an understanding of culture, participation and change.

Embedding organisational culture is a key process that involves creating and strengthening a system of values, behaviours and attitudes in the organisation. To put organisational culture in place successfully, you need to consider various factors and use various means. It’s important to remember that it’s impossible to embed organisational culture in one day, week or month. This takes time, a systematic approach, constant support and confidence on the part of management and workers. And building your culture is a continuous process that should be maintained in the long run. By building a culture that is oriented towards the customer, supports efficient communication, reflects values, drives innovation and adaptation to customer needs, companies can build strong and sustainable customer relationships, which lead to trust, loyalty and success in the long term.