Corporate Culture!

Today our company had a huge bash to celebrate its spirit its uniqueness..

we have around 55 thousand ppl working all over the world and around 15 thousand in Bangalore. Out of these 15k, 2000+ came for the party.

Why all these statistics..??? will explain in a bit.. I work in a IT services company. The industry is defined by
1. High salary growth -jumping jobs gives a raise of about 30%
2. Very young employees (mostly joining at 21 yrs)
3. Huge recruitment every week.. (almost a thousand join every month)
4. Consequent to all the above factors - Very high attrition rate.

Now when you see the above numbers, the over stressed HR dept's long term objective is how to improve company's image among ppl who join them, how to increase the esteem feeling about the company and how to motivate them to stay longer to get the RoI on the employees???

How do you go about imbibing these ideas..?? You face multiple problems in this end..

#1. When you have such a varied employees across all age groups, what do you define as a culture of the company?
#2. Is the culture of the company equivalent to the personal/Individual culture and value system.? We have great many examples to this effect - Semcos of the world..
#3. Is culture a top driven thing or bottom up?
#4. How on earth will you find a common thread among people who are spread out across the globe with different aspirations and needs.?

All these problems are typical to any Multinational company.. there starts the debate - transnationals vs. multinationals.

Lots of questions pop in my mind when I see the way our company went about doing this..

What is the role of the top management in all this? Does the shareholding patterns play any role in this? What if one individual owns a majority stake in such a company rather than the retail shareholders?? How different such company should be run vis-a-vis a publicly held one?

How different is this culture factor in a services organization vis-a-vis a marketing one?? Does all the IBMers across the world believe and work the same way.? do they all feel very exited and glad that they work for a gr8 elephant that can dance.? Will it be the same way as a GE worker.?

How innovative can we be in creating such kind of cultural environment? Should a company encourage different kind of culture across different cities and different countries based on the kind of work and demography of the employees.? what if the market dynamics change in that region later?

Last but not the least.. Does this culture and employee perception is the single most differentiating factor for a services (especially IT&ITES) company? If it is, can it be taken lightly and be a follower.. like an Avis & Hertz or a HP & TI.. ?? (referring to Build To Last)

My opinion is that a company should be innovative at any cost in such a crucial thing as finding a single binding theme among the employees.. we are trying to define who are we and what are we.. top management plays a very vital role in such a large company.. it plays a role by doing not by talking.. Doing what and how is the innovation that it has to embark upon.

By being a follower we end up no where.. always trying harder to compete.. it is like running on a treadmill that is malfunctioning.. you need to run harder to keep the same place.. out of nowhere we will have some one beating us square by their innovation..

Need some erudition on this topic.. Wish to see some ideas on this.. from you guys..