Organizational Culture

Service Culture A service philosophy is defined as the values and priorities on which the company places importance when dealing with customers (Meiers, 2009). There are many different approaches to service, so it is important that the company has just one philosophy, that it supports its people in implementing that philosophy, and that the customer expectations it creates are aligned with the service philosophy that the organization has. My last organization saw service as a critical component of competitive advantage.

While it did not explicitly state anything called a "service philosophy," the notion that service staff should give extraordinary service to all customers was embedded in the corporate lore. When you go through training, you were told anecdotes about superior customer service, where people in the company went far and beyond out of their way to solve complex customer problems. This became embedded in the way that everybody in the organization viewed service. 2.

The organization was not unique in seeking to provide good service, but it seemed to do more than competitors to support this idea of exceptional customer service. Customer service was built into training for the organization, and it was built into the way that supervisors rewarded the employees. If someone delivered on exceptional customer service, that was always rewarded.

Indeed, if an employee at some point seemed reluctant to help the customer -- even when the customer was really being quite unreasonable -- then the result was that the supervisor would reinforce the customer service ideal with that person. Standards were always there to be exceeded, and there really was emphasis on delivering consistently high levels of service, and never slipping. 3. No, there were no accommodations for non-English speakers.

Indeed, the company operates in English all over the world, and in foreign countries this is alongside the local language, but always there must be English capability and as a reference language. In most places, English is either the native tongue or is considered a neutral third language, the world's language. There were no ethnicity awareness months or anything like that. It should be understood that this is operating in a major global city with a high immigrant population.

The diversity of the population was reflected in the workforce, and so in a sense in a place like that you never really need to be showy about celebrating diversity because everybody living there lives it every day. That's a little bit different from working in a small town where most people are from the same ethnic group and it is easy to forget that there are other groups of people in the community.

This approach is actually better anyway, because it has everybody in the company accepting diversity in all its forms, rather than seeking to get everybody to conform to some sort of norm (Llopis, 2011). Focusing on "diversity" as a thing really just highlights that people not from generic "white" culture are somehow not part of the group but a separate thing. In our workplace, it simply wasn't like that -- everybody was included and nobody was outside of the main culture because we all contributed to that culture. 4.

There are a lot of different ways to look at employee performance. I found that most employee performance in my organization was at a very high level. People were measured on their performance quite frequently, and that drove them to work hard, but also the corporate culture emphasized a high level of performance. This is consistent with expectations based on research that shows a high-performance culture is tied to high levels of performance (Lee & Yu, 2004). 5.

I did not find that there were factors about the culture that detracted from effectiveness. As you can imagine, it is difficult to provide examples of something that doesn't exit. Basically, the company I worked for is the industry leader and has been for a long time. Finding fault in the company is hard enough, and since the culture is generally correlated with the high performance of the company (Lee & Yu, 2004) I cannot say that the culture created poor performance in any area. 6.

I do not think I would change much about the organizational culture. It was a great place to work and the culture really supported the business objectives. There were things the culture was not great at -- there was basically zero culture of innovation, for example. Innovation is something that typically comes from.