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At a time in an increasingly competitive market when many organisations are looking for ways to differentiate themselves, the culture of their business is a key asset and a success factor when it's put at the service of their strategy.

That's why we've dedicated this new Insights edition to corporate culture in professional services firms.

  • First of all, we talk about the reasons that justify working on your corporate culture and the benefits that can be derived from it.
  • We then discuss how you can more formally establish and define your corporate culture.
  • Finally, we conclude on the importance of bringing your corporate culture to life on a daily basis.

As always, we would be happy to discuss your comments or observations on these themes.

We remain at your disposal and, of course, we would be happy to incorporate your suggestions into our future Insights editions.

Why do you need to work on your corporate culture?

A necessity in the proper functioning of a professional services company, corporate culture is a silent language. It allows all employees to be understood implicitly and instantly. It is based on evidence with which everyone in the organisation will agree. It expresses solutions whose origins we no longer know but do not question because we "have always done it this way". It is also the more or less faithful and conscious translation of the ideas and choices of the founders and leaders of the organisation.

Corporate culture either emerges unconsciously over time as a definition of the behaviours and values on which partners and employees agree, or is the result of an active and constant process that aims to define the behaviours and values that partners and employees wish to embody on a daily basis.

This latter approach requires management to be willing to include the definition of an appropriate corporate culture on their list of priorities. The reasons for opting for this approach, which is of course more proactive, are four-fold.

First of all, working on your corporate culture allows you to debate the "how", the modus operandi or the desired working environment. Defining a common framework means you avoid the co-existence of multiple solutions that are more or less faithful to the fundamentals (but different from each other). It allows you to respond in a harmonized way to the challenges the organisation faces, and to facilitate the establishment and maintenance of effective working relations between team members. It is therefore a good way to get all teams to face in the same direction and give them the means to fight effectively against the uncertainty and complexity of the environment they're operating in.

For the founders of a professional services company, relying on the organic emergence of culture over time might result in a failure to align behaviours and values with their vision and strategy. The proactive development of culture helps to counteract this.

Secondly, working on your corporate culture makes it easier to execute a strategy and give it meaning through a purpose. This is particularly the case in firms with a strong culture, marked by a high degree of coherence and strong adherence to common principles. For these organisations, their principles and values guide strategic decisions upstream, and members' adherence to these principles and values facilitates the implementation of these decisions. They are often organizations with their own DNA, traditions, history, rites and values that give the collective its rightful place. These organizations and their management shape their internal culture to make it a vector of performance and a tool for their development.

In addition, working on its corporate culture allows an organisation to formalize a common language for all its members. The adoption of this language and its use establishes a reference base on which individuals will be able to both identify and stand out, and ultimately, more easily develop a sense of belonging. For organisations that approach their internal culture in this way, it increases the commitment of partners and employees, reducing turnover, while generating a ripple effect among customers.

Finally, regularly working on your corporate culture, and evaluating and re-evaluating it, can be a way to prevent its anchoring from becoming an obstacle to change. This is a good way to maintain the degree of agility necessary to adapt your internal culture to the changes brought about by the economic and business environment.

On the other hand, organizations that don't take the time to invest in their corporate culture often face the following obstacles:

  • values that are insufficiently understood and shared,
  • individualistic behaviours within a collective that is little exploited (in the absence of a common and accepted modus operandi),
  • a siloed approach to the development of their expertise, resulting in a lack of coherence and alignment in the application of that expertise, and
  • difficulty when facing corporate challenges or in implementing a strategy.

How do you formalize corporate culture?

In a tropical reef, members of a fish species greet their fellow members by making circles with their fins. When a fish of another species comes and greets by flapping its side fins, they remark on its peculiarity. But they have not realised that their own way of greeting was unique. Sometimes it takes a foreign fish to reveal your own culture...

While everyone recognizes the importance of the culture of their organization, in practice, we realize that for many organizations, the culture is informal and its formalization remains complex, its content having developed over the years and its characteristics being specific to each organisation.

Nevertheless, in practice, a work of base-level formalization is desirable because it makes it possible to characterize the main features of the culture that will serve to establish the framework for working and living together.

The main components of corporate culture are:

  • The meaning or raison d'être that creates the link between (a) the tasks carried out on a daily basis by all the professionals in an organization, and (b) the vision,
  • Values (eg responsiveness, proximity, excellence) that specify what is most important to its members,
  • Behaviours (eg participating in team meetings, sharing information), which are actions guided by values and embody, in particular, the way of working together and collaborating,
  • Elements of recognition that reward those who bring the organization's values to life,
  • Rituals that contribute, through repetition, to emphasize the importance of being part of the group,
  • Benchmarks (eg convictions and beliefs about the organization's development model) that remind you of the direction and ambition to work towards.

Very often, we find that while our clients do not have any real difficulty expressing their organization's values, it is much more difficult for them to translate these values into expected behaviours. For example, the value of excellence – frequently put forward by those in the legal profession – is rarely precisely defined through the establishment of means of quality control or continuous learning policies, which are the only real guarantors of maintaining a level of excellence over time.

Specifying the contours of shared values makes it possible to make what is expected or what is defended more tangible for all stakeholders – the professionals of an organisation as well as its clients. The first step in this work is often to define the priorities of your business, to determine what is fundamental to it, and thus to formalize the "what". Once this "what" has been defined, it is a matter of establishing the rules that the company wishes to set for the exercise of its activities, in other words, defining the "how".

There are several ways to go about formalizing a "homemade" culture. The organizations we work with often entrust this step to a working group, ideally made up of members from all elements of the organization.

In this working group, there are several priorities to consider:

  • Teamwork,
  • Collaboration between centres of expertise,
  • The degree of orientation towards the achievement of financial results,
  • The client approach,
  • Celebrating successes,
  • The ability to learn (or adapt) as a whole.

Regardless of the method you choose to bring this internal culture and the values of your organization to life, if you really want to benefit from it, you need to work with all its members – partners, employees, and clients too – to put it to the test.

It's an important job to make it concrete and truly at the company's and its members' service. This can also be usefully formalized in a "culture book", to which everyone can easily refer.

How do you bring the corporate culture to life?

The corporate culture is certainly not an element that, once formalized, can be forgotten or left without further intervention.

On the contrary, in order to create value, an internal culture must have space or time for exchanges that allow opportunities for employees and all stakeholders in the organisation to familiarize themselves or refamiliarize themselves with its fundamentals.

Continuing to embody and share your company's culture involves several aspects:

  • The affirmation and reminder of values and their variations. It will be a question of explaining and re-explaining the reasons that motivated the choice of this or that concept, as well as their meaning and implication for the organization.
  • The sharing of success stories and the management of events aimed at celebrating the successes of the organisation by communicating, in particular, on the collective dimensions that have contributed to these successes – so highlighting the benefits that result from the implementation of, and respect for, the organization's values.
  • The implementation of a talent management policy that begins with an onboarding period at the end of which the new employee will have a clear idea of what his or her partner(s) and the firm expect from him or her in terms of behaviour and commitment. The objective of this phase is to facilitate the integration of new talents through a well-organized coaching and acculturation process supported by the firm's managers. This talent management policy could also extend to the creation of an alumni network that allows the feeling of belonging to continue even after people depart the organisation. We see this particularly in organizations that have developed a strong corporate culture.
  • The implementation of training and mentoring policies to facilitate rapid learning through the transfer of experience.
  • The establishment of cross-disciplinary teams to combat the risk that each project, activity or team develops its own culture (sub-culture) that ends up becoming autonomous and so divorced from the culture of the whole.
  • The organization of quarterly discussions around the different components of the internal culture in order to adapt it to changes in the market and customer requirements.

Whatever the medium of expression, a company's culture needs at all times to be authentic and in no way a smokescreen masking a completely different reality.

The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.