Culture and alignment

Culture is crucial to any company, in a sense, culture allows for coordinated actions to be taken and allow for a quick heuristic for actions that will lead to better outcomes in the organisation without expensive computational overhead.

At the core, I believe the culture should be aligned to the work that a company does. A prime example, a healthcare company should have a culture which emobodies the work that it does. Healthcare is about compassion to help people, to be empathetic and to show care and concern, we may not always be able to successfully cure the patient of an illness but we can always provide comfort. In this sense, the internal feeling in the heart of such a company it to be people-oriented is to always show care and compassion and that willingness to help, and altruistic tendency should permeate in all aspects of the organisation. However, the culture of ‘care and compassion’ in most healthcare companies stops at the level of the care providers. For some reason, most companies do not feel the need for such a caring and compassion culture to also be applied at the executive level or to be applied to the HR department. Perhaps there is this thought that ‘care and compassion’ in the HR department, the sales deperatment the business analytics department doesn’t actually impact the customers — the patients and therefore there is no need to apply this culture in departments that are not part of the frontline. This is a huge mistake.

The culture of the company should permeate all aspects of the company at every single level and in all individuals. First, executives should lead by example in showing care and compassion to all employees and even beyond the level in which doctors show compassion to patients, as executives have to lead by example. If healthcare is given in a patient-centred manner, caring about the opinions of the patient and establishing a mutual partnership for the care of the patient, the same philosophy should be applied to the rest of the company. The relationship between the executives and other employees should be ‘employee’ centred where there needs to be a collaborative relationship between executives and the employees to better understand how best to support employees to enable them to do the best work of their ability.

This homogenous alignment is crucial and I argue that such an alignment can produce a 10x in effectiveness in hypercharging the potential of the company. I argue that is the effectiveness of a company is calculated by (talent * hardwork)^culture, having full alignment can have an exponential impact on the effectiveness of the company. It is important to note that talent and hardwork here should be measure via all members of the organisation, this includes the CEO who’s talent and hardwork is required to provide a strong vision for the company. To put this into perspective, it is hard to imagine a situation where the CEO only cares about profits and revenue and sees the employees such as a tool to make more money, when the employees are expected to show immense care, compassion and empathy to the patients. It does not work that way. Before long, employees will realise that if they do not care about their own self-interest they will only get screwed over. As a result, there is a immediate transition from actually caring for patients, to doing the bare minimum in order to maximise self-interest. In contrast, if there is complete alignment in the company, then the CEO should care about the employees just like how the employees care for their patients. Employees are comforted that they are well taken care of and that the CEO would help to fight for their best interests. With that confidence that they don’t have to worry about defending their self-interest, employees can them have full commitment and ability to act in the sense the really puts patients first and fully embody the culture of care and compassion.

There often seems to be a mismatch in terms of the flow of value generation in the company. In most companies, the CEO envisions the kind of experience that the customers should have when using the product or service. To achieve that vision, the CEO relentlessly pushes the employees to the edge to achieve that vision. By achieving the vision, it then drives value for the company and the CEO then yields the upside. This flow is disjointed and the parts are in conflict with each other. Employees have little reason to work as a hard as the CEO expects, in the end, it will boil down to the giving employee stock options to try to balance it out. Even then it is difficult to expect monetarily motivated employees to acheive this vision, afterall these employees are simply trying to keep their job and not get fired and get rewarded monetarily. Such a disjointed flow lacks an alignment in incentives and severely impacts the ability of the company to achieve its potential. Instead, with a completely culture alignment approach, the flow is sort itself out, the flow is naturally smooth and with a smooth flow, incentives are automatically aligned without significant monetary involvement. Under this philosophy, the flow begins with the CEO, the CEO has a vision for the kind of experience the customers should experience when using the product. To realise this vision, the CEO provides the employees with the same experience through daily words, actions and processes. To provide a compassionate healthcare service for patients, the flow starts with the CEO being compassionate to the employees. Naturally, such compassion is infectious and spreads to each part of the company, and eventually it distills into a compassionate service experienced by the patients. There is a certain natural beauty about this flow, in a sense that the experience of the end-customer is not explictly designed, but rather it a natural consequence of the right philosophy from a very high level. The CEO never needs to explicitly state a code of conduct on how to treat patients, the CEO never needs to explicitly give a manual on how to achieve the kind of healthcare that the CEO envisions. But rather, all the CEO needs to do is to treat the employees such as how the CEO wants the patients to be treated. Naturally, this culture of compassion and empathy will flow to the patients.

If patients do not receive compassionate healthcare, then this is an issue with how the CEO treats its employees. The flow is natural and if at the bottom of the river you find that the water is polluted, you go upstream to find the problem, never downstream. Such an upstream problem-solving heuristic will only work if the flow is natural and there is complete cultural alignment.

Culture is a difficult thing to nail. It deals with people are people are very complex, even the most sophisticated neural networks are still unable to predict the feelings and thoughts of an individual (as of now). Sometimes, there is a tendency to combat a complex problem with complex solutions — adding code of conducts, adding more and more rules to follow, adding punishments adding more and more layers of control and authoritarian systems. But really, the most complex problems sometimes really only requires the most simple solutions. Start with culture alignment at the very top, the rest of the culture will flow throughout the company and sort itself out.