How culture defines a company’s success

MANILA, Philippines — If you want to know whether a company will succeed or not, you don’t have to pore through its financial records – observing the culture it imbibes and champions will clearly give you an immediate view of its future.

The long-standing corporate mindset of employee performance driving company culture has been turned on its head. We’re now seeing more and more companies paying closer attention to their company culture because they realized, through years of experience, that mindset should have always been the other way around.

Culture is a shared experience within an organization. At its best, it motivates, encourages, and inspires employees to become high-performers and great examples to their co-workers with little, to no effort. At its worst, it demoralizes and cripples the organization – employees are unengaged and demotivated, work performance is stunted, and eventually the company is left limping with less than ideal results.

Based on a study released by an online job portal, Filipinos are now less happy in the workplace. Although the reasons differ, they all point back to company culture – how engaged employees are and how much they see the value in their work. Contrary to popular belief, that’s not just a “millennial thing”.

If the lifeblood of the business is its employees, culture is the adrenaline that charges them up toward prosperity in the years to come. When cultivating company culture becomes a priority to the whole organization, winning becomes a possibility for every moment they have as they run toward the future.

Young and agile

 Our goal in BPI-Philam is to protect every Filipino and what matters to them through accessible and inclusive insurance. For us, there’s this urgency to do so as we want every customer to live the best and the most of their lives worry-free.

That’s why our culture is hinged on tenacity, seizing the day. We always greet each other “Good morning!” regardless what time of the day it is. It sounds very simple, but it’s a regular reminder for our employees to stay alert and agile throughout the day, and that today can always be the day – individual successes, client breakthroughs, company milestones, any moment worth winning can happen today. We’re all about energy and grit – our own translation of the homegrown word “gigil” – a strong desire, tenacity, hunger not just to perform, but outperform.

It’s through that shared desire to genuinely improve the lives of others that we’ve built a solid corporate culture which enables our employees to break records and reach new heights year after year.

 2017 for us was peppered with successes – we maintained our position as the country’s top bancassurance firm based on revenue and net worth, we opened our first customer service center and launched new innovative products in the market, and culminated all that with an award from World Finance magazine calling us the Best Life Insurer of this country. All these milestones in just a year for a relatively young company like ours is no easy feat. Our people not only believed in what the company was trying to achieve. They also lived it and were more than willing to join in on the dream.

Company culture

 Our CEO, Surendra Menon, is a firm believer in the importance of cultivating a strong company culture, inculcating it effectively to our employees than just executing strategies to improve the bottomline. He understands that at the end of the day, a business strategy won’t work if people can’t rally behind it.

 We have many plans to drive our organization’s growth, but strategies often change in an agile and sporadic workforce such as ours. Ninety percent of our employees aren’t housed in the same building, and without something to unite and anchor them, the organization won’t be functioning as well as it does today.

Our culture is our strongest recruitment and engagement tool. We know this because our employees themselves are bringing in applicants through word-of-mouth which make up 65 percent of our total new hires.

In recruitment, we paint for our prospective employees a picture of what it would be like to work for us by immersing them in our culture for an entire day. We run down what a day would be like for them to give them a clearer view of what their career path would look like with us.

Throughout their employment we continually integrate the company’s advocacies into their work life. We champion to them total wellness in health and wealth with Philam Vitality – the company’s wellness program. We provide them with wearable devices and phones equipped with free Vitality. This is also the same advocacy we are servicing our clients with. Wellness activities are scheduled for them four days a week which are all free. Among our employees we promote financial literacy, providing them with retirement benefits and investment options that help in managing and building their wealth.

We employ these methods because we don’t want them to sell products, we want them to believe in transforming lives together through experience.

 Monica Bondoc is the head of Human Resources of BPI-Philam.