Building an Effective Corporate Culture for the COVID-19 Crisis

The coronavirus pandemic has been disruptive like no other in recent times. Most firms and governments worldwide are struggling to navigate the Omicron crisis. While some organizations effectively respond to the COVID-19 disruptions, others have seen their troubles compounding at an alarming rate. What makes some organizations very effective in dealing with the coronavirus crisis while others don’t?

Our experience suggests that not all organizational cultures are created equal regarding disruption readiness for delivering results—be it financial performance or the execution of any corporate goal. Below, we have first outlined the characteristics of effective cultures for implementation. Second, we provide the aspects of ineffective cultures that are increasingly becoming liabilities across modern organizations. Here are the characteristics of a winning organizational culture for the COVID-19 crisis.

Result-Oriented Culture

Businesses that hope to thrive during a crisis need to be result-oriented. They need to share problems and issues across the entire organization. They need to step up their levels of cooperation and collaboration. By doing so, we believe they will improve their corporate performance. As no firm can go it alone any longer, given the speed of change in the business world and short technology cycles, companies with result-oriented cultures will thrive through open innovations.

Employee-Oriented Culture

Winning in these turbulent times entails learning at the speed of change. In other words, the old wisdom of the past decades that made many organizations successful is increasingly becoming obsolete; companies need to learn more while building an employee-oriented culture for thriving rather than surviving in the disruptions by making employees’ education a top priority. Similarly, organizations need to develop a positive and constructive working environment where people learn. Indeed, the success of many firms is based on the transfer and knowledge management across the entire corporation. To be sure, the success of many Japanese organizations in their heyday was grounded on tacit knowledge transfer.

Open Cultures

Open organization culture is the antithesis of a blame culture. Indeed, an open culture provides the necessary psychological safety for employees by allowing them to speak their minds freely without fear. They are urged to observe problems and issues across the company to improve the performance and execution of the corporate goals through collective insights. Thus, when firms adopt distributed decision-making—by involving others—they will avoid the pitfalls of several types of bias inherent in executive decision-making processes. Therefore, companies can become more objective in data collection and analysis to make informed decisions.

Loose Cultures

The key learning point of loose cultures is that they protect the organization from the dangerous downward spiral of micromanagement, which, as we know, creates a toxic culture based on the assumption that people can’t be trusted. A loose culture creates an environment of individual autonomy and empowers employees to make decisions within a specific budget range or circumstances. It increases employees’ morale while building their confidence in tackling, more considerable challenges within an organization in the future.

Market-Focused Culture

This is one of the most critical elements of a high-performance culture. The culture strives to adapt quickly as the reality in the environment changes through speed and ambidexterity. The hallmarks of this type of corporate culture are customer-centricity, ready to challenge the status quo whenever changes are needed while exploring new trends, ideas, technologies, or innovations. Today, the most well-known innovative firms such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and 3M have well-developed market-focused cultures. Without this element within a culture, innovation becomes a challenge. That’s why they tolerate failures: they have stringent hiring practices, which help them get the best calibers in many fields.

Ineffective corporate cultures are the opposite of effective ones. They wonder why they don’t get results without realizing that their dysfunctional cultures built over decades are their biggest enemies. Also, they don’t know how to build a winning digital culture for the AI age. Similarly, many organizations don’t know how to align their corporate cultures with their strategies. Indeed, bureaucracy is running wild across the board, given that many management concepts have been misunderstood entirely. The line between personal goals and corporate ambitions has been blurred to become a serious barrier to corporate performance. Below, we will discuss some of these harmful pathogens that are hurting modern organizations.

Process-Oriented Culture

Within these companies, the silo mentality – the reluctance to share crucial information for speed, productivity, and performance improvement—is the modus operandi. Self-serving departmental turf wars draining organizational energy are the preferred operating model, creating stress and frustration for all but mediocre employees. The obvious consequences are high employee turnover and a deficit of experienced talent appropriate for the COVID-19 crisis. Even when some employees join within a few months, they leave the firm, which creates an endless cycle of hiring and quitting. With the cost of hiring the leading artificial intelligence experts topping $950,000, a silo mentality can be dangerous for an organization’s financial viability in this age of the coronavirus pandemic.

Job-Oriented Culture

This kind of culture is stingy in resource deployment while hoping to appropriate value from employees. The company is just interested in the tasks done by its employees while disregarding any investments in the workforce for skill improvement. In other words, they expect ordinary people to deliver outstanding results without a financial commitment to training and development. We believe these firms have embraced flawed management and that it is not their job to upskill or reskill their employees. They have bought the ridiculous saying: “If I invest in their training and they leave, what will I do?”

Closed Culture

The problem with the closed culture is that debates and criticism are avoided like the plague. People are more interested in finding each other faults. In other words, the company becomes the epitome of the so-called blame culture—where people are blamed for whatever, even things beyond their control. More time is wasted on fault-finding inquiries or gossip than on understanding the reasons behind the mistakes, lack of productivity, and poor performance. What is the consequence? People hide what the firm needs to know for corrective actions. In other words, the organizational culture becomes an “expert culture” where no mistakes happen. The implications for companies are toxicity-laden cultures.

Tight Culture

This is one of the hallmarks of bureaucratic culture. It emphasizes central decision-making and the accumulation of authority in the hands of a few people within the organization. Employees need permission to do whatever, even menial things. We are not saying that people don’t need permission at all. However, we believe going overboard can be very counterproductive in terms of key leaders’ time management. It can even result in unnecessary paperwork, distracting employees when they could be doing more productive tasks.

Internal Focused

The internally focused organizations are very complacent, their worship stability and the status quo. For this reason, our experience suggests that corporate politics stains most projects that need to be done. The self-serving game distracts the firm from making the necessary changes to adapt to the increasingly changing business environment quickly. Most organizations blindsided by disruptions exhibit these myopic behaviors of an ineffective corporate culture.

We believe that firms with an effective organizational culture will thrive during the crisis. There is no more pity than working within an ineffective culture, given that the degree of toxicity hinders the entire corporate performance. Thus, during this coronavirus pandemic, unhealthy cultures compound the troubles at many firms, given that companies have to be waging two wars simultaneously, surviving through the crisis and fighting another invisible enemy within—toxicity.