How to Change a Company’s Culture

For an organizational company to be successful in its activities, it has to have a working environment culture that guides its employees and operations to help in achieving its set goals. A company’s culture refers to the organizational practices and values shared among the shareholders of the company. A company culture is essential in achieving the company’s goals. The study by Kotter (2012) contends that a company culture that is in line with its operations perform well than its competitors. For any company to achieve its objectives, the company management has to determine well the company’s culture, possible changes so as to move its shareholders towards achieving the desired results. This paper will elaborate Coca-Cola Company’s culture before changing it. It will also cover the steps used in changing its culture and the effectiveness of the steps towards reducing high employee turnover, poor image and detracts for its competitive advantage.

Culture change 

A company’s culture evolve s with time. It changes over time due to the dynamic nature of business operations. Company heads should be aware of culture changes in their organizations. Company cultures evolve, and they change over time. They should understand that the culture changes may be minor or major changes, they may be negative or positive. A company’s culture change may be unintended or intended (Cameron & Quinn, 2011). When company employees get replaced with others, it’s definite that the company’s culture will change though not much in the case where the company’s culture is stable. However, the new employees in the company will come with their ethical values and practices hence changing the company’s culture. A company’s culture change s as it establishes to its maturity with its regulations, laws, environment and climate on which it’s operating changes hence changing the culture also.

Coca-Cola Company aims at marketing its products to refresh all people in in the whole world. The company’s goal is to inspire the world with optimism moments by creating product quality. Coca-Cola Company involves major core values, accountability, leadership, integrity, and passion. The company’s culture also involves quality, collaboration, and diversity. These factors define the company’s culture within reach of its operations. Its product brand and its employees help the company in refreshing the whole world. The company holds a wide range of employees and shareholders with different ideas and skills. Being a global company, Coca-Cola has to sustain its operations and efficiency by critically understanding its organization culture. The management has to develop and adopt a culture that adds value to its operations and also encourage teamwork among its employees. The company’s environment should be fun to work and friendly to its employees. For efficiency, the company has to incorporate effective technological tools and good strategies in its operations.

The company’s culture aims in retaining its employees through programs that include educating the employees to develop diverse talent and offering support systems for employees with diverse backgrounds for sustainable growth. The company puts efforts to develop a fair working environment for their employees. Its associates get diverse regular training s on which they get to understand their shareholders, employees, suppliers, and customers. This will help the company in achieving its success in the marketplace. The company also recruit s young employees who are more interested in working in the company. Young employees explore diverse career fields instead of gluing themselves into a single area of their experience.

Culture before its C hange 

Coca-Cola did not have good technological tools to ease its operations. The working environment was much hazardous to the employees’ health since they were not provided with proper clothing during their operations. This could make the working environment very unfair to its employee’s hence high employee turnover. No employee wants to work in the unsuitable environment. The existence of the low moving product marketing machine was a great challenge to the company before it was equipped with more horsepower. Before its cultural change, Coca-Cola Company did not do much of their product campaigns and packaging. Since its change in the packaging with numerous new campaigns, the company has achieved a greater market share in the beverage industry with better new products pouring out in the market.

Steps to changing the culture 

A company’s culture change may be unintended or intended. The change may aim at creating a positive impact or negative effects to the company. The company management together with the company stakeholders should take charge of changing the company’s culture if need be. The team should make changes to the company’s culture so as to achieve the company's set goals successfully. Coca-Cola management realized that change was essential to sustain its growth in the beverage industry and took the initiative to change its organizational culture after realizing that it was not operating efficiently. The company took some steps in its process to changing its culture to a better one so as to improve its efficiency (Strider, 2015) .

Step 1: Assessing the C ompany’s culture 

There are some strategies in assessing a company’s culture including hiring experts and consultants to assess a company’s culture at a cost. Coca-Cola Company assessed its culture through observation of its employee and shareholders conduct. The first step in changing a company’s culture is an assessment of the company’s culture. The main aim of assessing the company’s culture is to find out the common behaviors among its employees (Doppler & Lauterburg, 2001). More attention was paid to the employees, the company investors, customers, and suppliers so as to determine the company’s culture. Customer feedback both in print and online was important in assessing the company’s culture. Assessment of a company’s culture helps in determining its real culture.

Step 2: Determining the Desired Company Culture 

Different companies and organizations have a different organizational culture within which their operations run. After assessment of the company’s culture, Coca-Cola had to evaluate the desired kind of culture in in its future operations. Coca-Cola looked at what kind of an organizational culture could work for its future operations to sustain its growth in the growth of the beverage industry. For this to be possible, the company had to review its vision, mission, and the company’s core values so as to ensure that the company culture it is designing will support its operations.

Step 3: Assessing different Company cultures 

After a company has determined its particular kind of a company’s culture, it should assess characteristics of other company cultures to decide which work best for its company. Some of the characteristics that Coca-Cola Company used to assess other company cultures include the clarity of the company’s mission, a fair working environment, the commitment of the company employees and a good relation between the management and its employees. Other characteristics such as affecting the company’s employees and the efficiency of the company’s systems and operations. The company’s culture should be able to focus on customers, keep high levels of accountability standards, should be easily adaptable to its users and commit to skill development among its employees. The culture should proof its capability of nurturing innovations, ability to retain a company’s employees and able to state compensations and rewards to performing employees in an organization.

Step 4: Align the Company Culture 

After assessing other company cultures, Coca-Cola aligned its company culture with its mission, vision, and its strategic goals. The company developed actions to link the positive elements in its culture and correcting the particular unaligned areas such as the slow technology and the unsuitable working environment (Strider, 2015) . The company developed strategies to improve its technology machines used in its operations and to the desired behaviors and communicate the new culture to all employees in the company. Aligning the company culture with its strategic goals will help the desired achievements in the long run.

Impacts to employees and effectiveness of the steps. 

Any company aims at working in a culture that will help to sustain its growth and achieve its set goals. The steps involved in changing a company’s culture focus on settling on the desired culture that will promote good teamwork and a fair working environment so as to improve its efficiency in its operations (Connors & Smith, 2011). Implementation of these steps by Coca-Cola into changing its company culture helped in changing the working environment, motivating its employees in working towards achieving the company’s goals (Strider, 2015). The use of new and improved technology helped the company reduce its employee turnover rates and therefore evading extra costs such as recruiting and training costs. Employees were positively impacted as they adopted the changes hence decreased rates of turnover.

Recommendation 

A changed company’s culture will give the ability to retain its employees over time. The goal of the culture is to reduce employee turnover and therefore evading extra costs such as recruiting and training costs (Kotter, 2012). Company officials should implement the key changes in the company culture such as providing a fair working environment to improve the employee retention rates hence decrease in turnover costs. The officials should also incorporate good technological tools to make it easy for employees to work. Employers can also go a notch high to retain employees who are performing well and recruit others with diversified skills and train them towards achieving the company’s goals.

Impact on gross income and profit over a three-year period of in Coca-Cola Company 

All values in US dollars in billions. 

Year	2013	2014	2015
Gross Income	28.36B	28.01B	26.32B
Net Income	8.58B	7.1B	7.35B

In conclusion, companies should have a working culture environment that guides their employees and operations to help in achieving their strategic goals. Careful steps should be taken by company officials in changing the company culture to the desired one so as to increase the retention rates of its employees hence improving its overall performance.

References 

Doppler, K., & Lauterburg, C. (2001). Changing a Company’s Culture. In Managing Corporate Change (pp. 295-308 ). Berlin Heidelberg: Springer. 

Cameron, K. S., & Quinn, R. E. (2011). Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture: Based on the Competing Values Framework, Revised Edition . New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons. 

Connors, R., & Smith, T. (2011). Change the culture, change the game: The breakthrough strategy for energizing your organization and creating accountability for results . New York: Portfolio Penguin. 

Kotter, J. P. (2012). Leading change . Boston: Harvard Business Review Press. 

Strider, J. (2015). Analyzing Coca-Cola's Return on Equity (KO). Retrieved from http://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/122115/analyzing-cocacolas-return-equity-roe-ko.asp