Keep your culture adaptable
Building and maintaining a solid company culture can be a
delicate balance. On one hand, the basic principles around
which you’ve formed your culture and the way you do business
probably won’t change. On the other hand, your company and
culture need to stay mobile enough to adjust with the times.
Nelligan makes a differentiation between changing and evolving
when it comes to culture.
“To me, change seems like a little bit of an inflection point, that
I’m going down one path, then I make the decision to go down
another,” he says. “It’s a trend break, as we might call it in our
business.”
Evolution, on the other hand, are the adjustments any business
needs to make as technology progresses and markets shift.
As with just about anything else that pertains to culture, your ability to evolve comes back to your employees and their ability to withstand — and embrace — change.
Nelligan says he wants adaptable, forward-thinking people in key
management positions with the company. The more easily people in high-profile management positions can adapt, the more
easily the rest of the company can adapt.
“We believe that we can set the environment, but it’s ultimately
the employees who are responsible for their own careers,”
Nelligan says. “We’ll provide them opportunities for skill development, for challenging roles and projects, but they have to work
with the tools we provide to move ahead.”
Nelligan says you can’t just hand employees the tools of the
trade and forget about them. You need to measure their
progress and, by extension, the progress of the company.
That’s why IMS Americas places a high degree of importance
on human resources metrics.
“We look at everything from the number of people who have
been promoted to attrition rates,” he says. “On an 18-month cycle,
we do an employee survey. We go out and ask a number of questions about the environment, the culture, do they understand the
strategy, do they feel it’s a great place to work, do we provide
career opportunities.
“We literally take that survey and use it as an opportunity to
go build strategies and incremental priorities on how we want
to go drive improvements and achieve employee satisfaction.”
There are many ways to build a culture that promotes great customer service, discourages silos and remains adaptable with changing conditions. But before you start down the road of building or
improving your culture, Nelligan says you need to remember two
things: cultures are built and maintained by employees, but the
foundation for the culture is built by management.
“Leadership has to set the agenda,” he says. “You have to set
the frame. You have to create the foundational pieces that
make that happen, and that has a lot to do with human
resources. Above all, you need to communicate, put the right
people in the right jobs and then let those people do their
jobs.”
HOW TO REACH: IMS Health Inc., www.imshealth.com