The Workplace and Corporate Culture of Honeywell

Honeywell\'s organizational culture emphasizes attention to detail as part of the firm\'s commitment to excellence, growth, and consumer satisfaction. There are four pillars to Honeywell\'s organizational culture and the first and foremost is the one that focuses squarely on the employee\'s need to pay close attention to everything that he or she is expected to do. This includes having leaders who are able to adapt across cultures and be responsive to the complex needs of others who live and work outside the immediate circumference in which the director, leader, manager or lower-level employee is used to operating in (Kelley, 2016, p. 213). This paper will describe how Honeywell\'s culture and commitment to attention to detail has paid off for the company over recent years, as the firm has succeeded in boosting net income to more than $6.5 billion in the most recent fiscal year (Honeywell Annual Report, 2016).

Organizational culture is one of the most important aspects of any firm\'s success (Kissack, Callahan, 2010). As any team leader will tell new employees, it is the small things that count and that can quickly add up -- either in one\'s favor or to one\'s disadvantage. For instance, Greg Smith (2012) gives a perfect anecdote about being a trader for Goldman Sachs\' U.S. derivatives division on Wall Street: for each sale he would make, he would fill out three receipts and triple check the order before placing it. Triple checking every order ensured that big mistakes -- such as the addition or subtraction of a zero -- could lead to big problems down the road. However, attention to detail helped him and the rest of the traders to keep mistakes to a minimum while maximizing revenue for the company. It worked for Goldman, and the same philosophy is at the heart of Honeywell.

Honeywell is engaged in a completely different line of business -- one that produces innovative technological solutions for sustainable environments. Part of Honeywell\'s leadership strategy is to reduce problems by emphasizing this same kind of attention to detail, however; and by doing so, workers can prevent mishaps and missteps from occurring. This is a beneficial practice for stakeholders all the way across the board -- whether consumers, workers, managers, or community members. Attention to detail within the company is a top ideal within the Problem Leadership orientation that the organizational culture carriers promote from within (Ardichvili, Dag, Manderscheid, 2016).

Honeywell stresses the importance of this aspect of its organizational culture through its Problem Leadership development programs as well as its internal commitment to supporting employee development, which is bolstered by the company\'s use of Six Sigma -- a risk management strategy that helps solidify the attention-to-detail culture (Inside Honeywell, 2016). Six Sigma is a service that supports Honeywell\'s Enablers \"to drive sustainable improvements\" in the company\'s operations (Inside Honeywell, 2016). It also sustains the firm\'s administration through oversight and measurement of outcomes. Part of the process of engaging with the Six Sigma method of reducing and managing risk is to make sure that every worker involved in the company\'s operations will \"do it right the first time and eliminate non-value-added steps\" -- which is essentially in line with Smith\'s conduct at Goldman with regard to the triple-check method of filing orders (Inside Honeywell, 2016).

Honeywell\'s organizational culture also promotes independence and autonomy so that workers learn to depend upon no one but themselves. This endeavor is something that cultivates the right kind of mentality -- it encourages accountability and responsibility and reduces employees\' need to lean on others for support, time or other valuable resources that could be expended elsewhere (Inside Honeywell, 2016).

Along with these goals in the attention-to-detail strategy of the company\'s workplace culture is the objective of always providing optimal customer satisfaction. With customer satisfaction as a main driver of worker conduct, the employee is pushed to take extreme care in handling every order, every consumer request, and every detail that comes his or her way. Six Sigma helps to promote this objective -- but so too does the organizational culture that Honeywell promotes within its various departments and divisions spread all across the globe.