The Post-Internet Era Has Made All Aspects Of Your Company, Culture, And Products, Entirely Transparent To Your Demographic
There are at
least two reasons to fix your workplace culture: 1) your company culture will
inform your brand experience and even product innovation and design, and 2) you
can’t fake being happy, and I suppose c) is that
you can’t hide a dysfunctional culture, either.
It used to
be that your organization could pretend to be something it is not. That’s not
possible now, and – just as I advise fixing your product – it’s better to fix
your company and culture than try to fool people, or deny the direct impact
your corporate culture has on your brand perception or product design,
innovation, and development.
Anybody in
the San Francisco Bay knows that Kaiser Permanente is an over-grown, toxic,
bureaucratic, hell-hole, that offers security for (largely) risk-averse people,
and ‘status’ for uninspired upper management; it’s basically like government,
except worse, since you don’t get the comfort of ‘service’. Is that
mean? I don’t care – it’s true.
Kaiser
survives by virtue of being inextricably linked to the healthcare-industrial
complex, through its own momentum, ill-gotten wealth, legacy contracts, and
existence as an institution. So, the ‘thrive’ message in their commercials,
with the West Wing lady, the
wellness
model tagline, is baloney. And that mismatch is ridiculous. They don’t
care, not really. And if you work for
Kaiser or know people who do, I don’t relish this reality.
How do I know this to be the case? From research, from word-of-mouth, and from their
employees. If I had cause to go there as a patient, all that information is right there, on the Internet. You can’t hide anything – not anymore.
We know HP
and IBM are dying companies, despite their ads about ‘Watson’ curing cancer or
whatever. They’re, also, populated by unhappy people, who don’t innovate. And
they lumber on because they buy up intellectual property (from innovators), and
usurious contracts with wastrel, enterprise clients (which also have miserable
employees). How do I know? Their employees, and also, the Internet. See the
pattern?
Your product
is your culture, in part, because – today – you are visible from
all sides, in the Internet Era, and
because there are internal channels of communication that weren’t there 25
years ago. Every employee you have talks to people and on social media, and can
run communications to anybody else within the company. In a sense, every
employee is, therefore, part of your sales/marketing team, customer success,
and potentially,
product development
– since they can convey feedback on products to engineers and designers,
internally.
This means
low morale, frustrated talent, petty politics, bureaucracy, micro-managed and
unhappy employees, do-nothing consultants – will all eventually wend their way
into public awareness of your brand. I promise. Every company is now operating
in a fish bowl; word will get out and the Internet never forgets.
There is a direct connection between your workplace culture, employee health, attendance, productivity, payroll demands, product development and innovation; these are inextricably linked to your brand and product quality.
There are at least a few ways for problems with your workplace culture to bleed into your product design quality, innovation, and reliability.
Zackery West is a marketing and business consultant, and CEO of
FlashPointLabs, and author of upcoming books (2019) The Paleo Workplace and Dopamine Marketing. email: zack@flashpointlabs.com, Twitter: @PaleoEngineer.
