Where Should You Focus Culturally to Accelerate Your Strategy?The Covid crisis caused many companies to look inward to ensure the safety of their employees and forced other companies to look outward to change the way they serve clients. While both perspectives are important, should your culture look more inward or outward to succeed over the next 12-24 months?
Culture Definition Let's start with defining culture. We define company culture as the way things get done in an organization on a day-to-day basis – especially when no one is looking. Culture is the way employees behave on the job and is based on intangibles such as the values, beliefs, and attitudes that characterize a company and guide its practices.
Culture Matters Our organizational alignment research found that culture accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performance in terms of revenue growth, profitability, customer loyalty, employee engagement, and leadership effectiveness. Culture acts as the glue that aligns a company’s business strategy with their people strategy.
Cultures Vary From one company to another and even across different regions and functions, there can be a variety of workplace cultures and subcultures. It depends upon your unique business and people strategies.
In terms of cultural focus, many companies who focus internally strongly believe in the service-profit-chain theory which links employee satisfaction directly to higher levels of customer loyalty and profitability. Conversely, externally focused companies put the customer at the center of everything that they do.
Both approaches have merit.
The real question is which approach is better for your unique situation so that you are aligned to get the right work done in the right way? | 
