So what exactly is "culture" and how do you gauge your own company's culture? Is it something you can change – and if so, how? Perhaps most importantly, why does it matter?
ABRN posed these questions to eight members of the industry who have thought about, studied or worked to change "culture" at their companies or others. Here's what we heard.
Jack Farnan, senior vice president of human resources at Mitchell International:
A company's culture is comprised of the beliefs, values, standards and views of its employees. It determines how employees approach their job, and how they treat the customer and each other. That's why culture matters.
Shop owners can definitely shape the culture of their company. Once the owner can articulate what they want the culture to look like, it becomes a matter of communicating it clearly and repeatedly to the workforce. Find opportunities to recognize employees supporting the values of the desired culture, and dissuade employees from behaviors that are contrary to the desired state.
Mitchell's values, for example, reflect how we want our employees to work with customers and each other. Marc Brungger, executive vice president of Mitchell's auto physical damage division, points out, "One of our core values at Mitchell is: 'Delight the customer.' That puts everything in perspective for our employees. They stay focused on our customers, trying to exceed their expectations and helping them be successful."
Mitchell reinforces its values by holding employees accountable for demonstrating them. Employees are evaluated during their annual performance appraisal on how they conduct their work relative to the company's values. Customer-facing employees have variable compensation tied to customer satisfaction surveys.
By clearly articulating Mitchell's values, holding employees accountable for living those values, and recognizing and rewarding them for doing so, the company is able to shape and mold its culture.
Steve Feltovich, manager of collision business consulting for Sherwin-Williams Automotive Finishes:
The culture of any organization is based on the group's ideology. These beliefs, values and opinions permeate the entire organization, and influence new and existing employees to conform to the organization's established culture.The culture is expressed through the company's philosophy, work habits and public image. Potential customers may evaluate a company's culture within 15 seconds, based on the attitudes, attention to detail, and level of care they sense from employees. This determines whether the customer has positive or negative feelings about doing business with your company.
Changing culture requires serious leaders who can effectively drive and communicate the necessary changes, leaders who understand that it may take a year or more to get a firm cultural foundation in place.
Collision repair shops embarking on "lean production" implementation often overlook the most vital required component: a continuous improvement culture. They simply do not take the time to learn enough about building the right culture in order to sustain the change to "lean" long-term. So their operational changes will disappear over time. A series of Sherwin-Williams' training classes titled "EcoLean" offer the concepts and skills shops need to lead effective cultural transformations.
Joe Skurka, manager of OEM and industry relations for BASF Automotive Refinish:
There's no doubt that culture is real, that it exists, in every business. I am absolutely convinced that management creates it.Compare UPS to the postal service. I've never run into a UPS driver or anyone in the company that seemed to have a lousy attitude. It's not possible that UPS just happens to hire only the motivated. There's something more driving their employees. To me, it's the culture. It's driven down that, "We focus on customer service." You don't get that same consistently positive experience at the postal service.
In certain collision repair shops there is a culture of, essentially, cleanliness. It's a culture of: "We're not sloppy here. We don't just throw things on the floor. We're a little bit better than the guy down the street, and this is the way we do things." In other shops, maybe someone talks about it, but it's not really part of the whole operation.
One of the offshoots is that in shops with a culture of cleanliness, the level of professionalism in the entire shop starts to rise. Workers feel more pride in what they're doing because of the environment in which they work.
I cannot believe that it's possible through a hiring process to discover only people who are motivated that way. It's driven by the culture from the top down.
Gigi Walker, owner of Walker's Auto Body in Concord, California:
The culture of a business comes from its owner. The business is really an extension or part of the owner. Anything you do in life, people are watching, and they learn from example. It's automatic here, for example, that we recycle. That's a big part of our culture and has been from day one. We designed it that way from the start by saying, "There's a lot of waste in this world. Let's do something about it." That came from my background, probably because of the way my parents raised us. When we went camping, we were the ones who picked up everyone's garbage and cleaned everybody's campsite.
Another part of our culture is that if you have children – and every one of my employees is a single parent – your kids come first. If somebody's kid has a soccer game or a play or a performance, they need to get to it. If you have a sick kid, our culture is: You need to be home taking care of that child without having any guilt at all about not being at work. That was a building block of our corporate culture.
Our customers see those things and they admire it. They like bringing their wrecked truck, van or car to a company who is working hard to make things right for their employees. That's how it's been since "day one," and it's lasted. We'll have been in business 22 years this April.
Debbie Day, senior vice president of marketing and product management for CCC Information Services:
You don't get a culture by accident. If you do, you probably won't like the outcome. You have to create and design a culture proactively. Your choices have to reinforce what you want to produce at the end of the day.
We make software solutions that must work seamlessly together and help our customers work with one another. So we need our own culture to be focused on working together. We designed our company's workspace to help facilitate that, eliminating a lot of the walls and barriers to get our people in working pods, where it's easy to interact with others.
A good first step in working on your company's culture? Focus on the customer. Everything will fall from that. For example, "lean" is about getting waste out of the system, getting to be more productive. But that also means customers will get back in their cars faster. So if you start by focusing on the customer, it will help point you toward the right things: not just "lean," but providing a pleasant office experience, meeting scheduled delivery dates, getting them in a rental car as easily as possible.
Rick Tuuri, vice president of industry relations for Audatex:
Culture is the spoken or often unspoken set of "rules" and behaviors that you and your employees operate under day to day. Culture isn't defined by what you say; it's defined by what you do and how and why you do it. Many companies have written policies and procedures they don't follow; these policies and procedures become the real ones.Every organization takes on the personality of the person in charge. You can learn a lot about yourself by watching the way your organization operates. The owner can always change the culture, but needs to be prepared to change, too.
I know a repairer in the San Francisco area who has developed an outstanding culture. He is an open, honest, genuinely caring guy with a great head for business. He tells you exactly what he thinks and expects – that's what he gets back from his employees. If he makes a mistake, he apologizes, corrects it and moves on. So do his employees. As a result, his business is known to the community in the same way that he is known to his friends. His character is one of his greatest assets, second only to his employees, who share his values and standards.
John Martin, manager of performance learning for PPG Industries:
While culture can be illusive to define, every employee will testify to its reality. Ask any employee if "the way things are done around here" are different from the last shop they worked. They will often respond with a resounding yes!
When defining culture, or "the way things are done around here," employees are really describing the customs, traditions, rituals, norms and values held by their company. These are the basic assumptions that others have learned in order to become an accepted member of the organization. Therefore, culture provides the common, shared experience that enables employees to learn, adapt and integrate to become productive members of the organization.
As the original source of the beliefs and values that form the foundation of culture, it is mandatory for leaders to understand its impact. Without the ability to perceive, create, reinforce and (if needed) change the culture of their companies, leaders leave a dangerous vacuum that will be filled by the shared values of others within the company.
The bottom line for leaders is that if they do not become conscious of the cultures they overtly or covertly endorse, those cultures will still exist and will ultimately gain a life of their own.
Bruce Cooley, business development and industry relations manager for DuPont Performance Coatings:
Culture is how a company views its business model and executes its mission through its employees and on to its customers.Toyota, Disney and Marriott are examples of companies that have developed customer-first cultures. Ask any employee in a Marriott for a pen or bottle of water. They won't say, 'That's not my job." They just get it. Right cultures empower employees to meet customers' needs.
Many consumers are convinced that just about everybody will fix their car well. It's how you treat them, not just their car.
If you want one measurement to help you know if your culture is working, it would be CSI. Make employees feel important when they make your customers feel important. Marsh Gluchow of Valley Motor Center in Van Nuys, Calif., posts his name and personal phone number on a sign in the shop that invites customers to call him if they have any concerns. He's making sure that his employees know that they are empowered to take care of the customer.
Anie Chinarian, senior vice president of human resources for Caliber Collision Centers:
One way to understand the differences among company cultures is to think about the different "cultures" among families sitting around a table for Thanksgiving dinner. Some are pretty quiet, reserved and formal. Others are pretty loud and boisterous. A family member may leave, but that family's personality is still there. Similarly, a business culture takes a long time to build but also takes on a momentum of its own.
Thinking about culture is important if only for employee job satisfaction. Employees tend to be happy and stay at companies with a culture they prefer. It's been documented that having a stable, positive workforce has a direct influence on things like quality, innovation, customer service, growth and profit.
Three primary things impact a company's culture:
- RELATIONSHIPS: How you react and talk with customers, employees, vendors and insurers is something employees see and emulate. What you do every day says much more than what you actually say to people.
- TRADITION: Traditions often start very simply – recognizing an employee's company anniversary, for example – but they become things that people look forward to. They become ingrained, celebrated or valued.
- VALUES: As the business leader, you have to figure out your core values. You have to be able to articulate them to your staff so when they're making decisions when you're not there, you can be confident you'd be making the same decision.
Rick Fifer, service development manager for AkzoNobel Coatings:
We help shops look at culture because implementing "lean processes" requires change, and some cultures are more resistant to change. So we look at things like trust: trust in the leader's vision and ability to communicate it to employees.
As part of our "Process-Centered Environment Boot Camp," we developed a survey to help them understand their company's culture. Shop employees complete the online culture assessment ahead of time; the owners or managers complete it at the boot camp. Then we help them compare their responses with the compiled responses of their employees.
The differences are important because owners or managers are saying, 'Yes, my organization, my culture is ready for this change,' but sometimes their employees aren't saying the same thing.
One of the areas that's often different centers around employee involvement. From employees' perspectives, we're often not asking them to be involved in business decisions and in process improvements. We're not tapping into them for ideas on improvements and not sharing business information with them that allows them to make improvements.
Scanning your company's culture through just such a survey can help identify many of the hurdles you'll need to overcome when making changes, such as moving to a process-centered environment, and help identify how to be proactive in addressing those hurdles.
