Southwest Airlines prides itself for
its strong corporate culture. They
define their principles in the trilogy of “Living the Southwest Way by
displaying the Warrior Spirit, acting with a Servant’s Heart, and embracing a
Fun-LUVing Attitude” (Nuts About
Southwest website, n.d.). Aside from
a blog, Southwest Airlines also has a series of youtube videos, facebook pages and
what they call the culture committee. With
Southwest, culture is not just reflected in the policies, but in the attitudes
and actions of the employees (Oswald,
2009). Southwest has a reputation
for being fun, spontaneous and a little nuts. In fact, their blog is even called Nuts About
Southwest. Flights include such
experiences as flight attendants serenading you through the public address
system, live music from well-known artists in midair, and spontaneous vendors, such
as Dish, handing out free ipads.
In the youtube video "A Day in
the Life of Culture Committee" we see a perfect example of what the
Southwest culture is all about. The
Southwest culture is not only targeted towards its customers, but it’s also
about employees appreciating employees (NutsAboutSouthwest, 2008). After watching this video and others in the
NutsAboutSouthwest series, it is clear that the culture committee is effective
in establishing cultural norms.
The corporate culture of Southwest
goes back 40 years and is attributed to the co-founder and CEO Herb Kellehe (Oswald, 2009). And the Southwest culture is alike to Google
and Polaroid in that the culture is a direct extension of the original founders
of the companies. In fact Brown tells us
that many successful companies can trace their cultural framework to an
influential founder (2011). In the case
of Southwest, the pillar of culture is Mr. Kellehe. An example that epitomizes the type of culture
that he formed is the time when Mr. Kellehe entered an arm wrestling match
against the CEO of Stevens Aviation over the legal rights of the slogan “Plane
Smart” (Oswald, 2009). Instead of
engaging in a messy legal battle, he decided to not take things so seriously
and have fun. This type of attitude is
what epitomizes the Southwest culture today.
The mission of the culture committee is
to create an environment of goodwill amongst fellow employees and maintain a
nurturing spirit with each other and the community. Not only is the culture committee a welcoming
committee for new hires, they are also the guardians of the Southwest spirit
and are tasked with ensuring that the spirit lives on for future generations of
employees (Haasen & Shea, 2003).
I think the culture committee could be
applied to my organization very successfully.
My organization, as far as I know, does not have a distinguishing
corporate culture. I believe that part
of it may have a lot to do with geographic distances. My organization is comprised of 150 smaller
centers worldwide that provide educational services to military service member
and online students. Once a year, my
region comes together during our regional graduation ceremony and tries to have
some kind of semblance of unified values and beliefs that could constitute
culture; but the fact is, we all do things differently within the general
guidelines of following policies and procedures. For example, in my office where there are just
two of us, we are known to be more of a maternal culture. We do a lot of hand holding for our students
and go beyond our general responsibilities to help our students. Although we have been scolded for “spoiling”
our student body, there is no corporate culture to dictate how we should
behave. Yet, we have heard stories from
our very own students who have been at some of our other centers and they have
claimed that our colleagues there are less helpful and engage in a more passive
attitude with their students. I feel
that incorporating a culture committee within my organization would be an
excellent way to bridge the gap between us geographically and also create a
standard guideline of values, beliefs and norms on how to behave and interact
with each other. After watching the
video, I realize how important corporate culture is in unifying groups of
people and setting examples of behavior and work ethic.
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