Culture is undoubtedly one of the aspects that all administrators seek to consolidate in their organizations. In fact, it is one of the most important questions when evaluating the business: how do we manage to consolidate a service culture in our company?
To start this very important topic, it is worth the opportunity to reflect on the concept of culture and its focus on the issue of customer service.
A very practical and simple definition of culture is one that indicates that this is the set of shared assumptions.
And of course we are going to understand those beliefs that a community has on a defined topic. Within these beliefs are values.
In this sense, for a particular group of people to culture there, they must share these assumptions (beliefs and values). And it is here where the subject of culture has to do with service. Since for the workers of a company to have a culture of customer service, they must share common values that go in that direction.
The values must be defined by the company based on its mission. However, there are values that we could call “universal”, since they can be applied to any type of organization, let's see what they can be:
- Tolerance: ability to respect and cope with all kinds of situations.
- Courtesy: use rules of civility and in good manners.
- Honesty: giving and receiving what is fair, in accordance with ethics and coexistence.
- Empathy: skill in understanding and knowing how to listen to the client.
- Communication: ability to establish assertive dialogues.
This stage constitutes the base of the culture. Defining values is looking for the foundations on which culture will be “built”.
The next step has to do with how the workers will adopt these values. On this there are no recipes. Each organization is different, however it will be prudent to define some points related to this topic.
1.- The Human Resources areas must ensure that they work based on values. This means that the hiring of new workers must be developed based on this approach. If it is possible to hire personnel with values similar to the values that the culture wishes to implement, the work is done in more than fifty percent.
2.- In case of transforming the culture towards the new values, the organizations will have to weigh the process that they will follow. Will you invest in the workers you have or will it be necessary to do without them? This only companies can define. What is clear is that investing in personnel who do not meet the requirements for the new values could be wasting resources.
3.- Companies must undertake values training and education programs. The practical and experiential workshops seek to achieve the desired results. It helps a lot in this to define a priori the expected behaviors for each of the values and based on it to design the strategies of formation in values.
4.- Some suggested strategies could be:
4.1.- Create help material, such as magazines, comics or booklets, through which experiences are experienced in values that the company wishes to reflect.
4.2.- Create murals of values, by means of blackboards where information about values is placed.
4.3.- Take advantage of business extension activities in communities, through which workers become aware of values.
4.4.- Develop training sessions on values. Through workshops and seminars on the subject.
It is never too late to start the service quality improvement processes and we hope that these notes help with that purpose.
