My Assignment#5

Running head: Culture

Assingment1: Culture

Cheryl Smith

Strayer University

Professor Stacy Flood

October 18, 2015

Swift Telecommunications Company specializes in designing, manufacturing and marketing personal computers, mobile communication devices and portable digital music and video players. It also sells a variety of related software, services, peripherals and networking solutions. The company employs various selling mechanisms to ensure that its products access a wider market worldwide. These are through its online stores, retail stores, direct sales force, third party wholesalers, retailers and value added resellers. In addition, the company obtains much profit and revenues from the sales of application software, printers, storage devices, speakers, and headphones and various other accessories and peripherals through its online and retail stores.

The company’s business strategy is to control the design and development of hardware and software for all of its products. To ensure that it meets its overall business strategy, the company continually invests in research and development to enhance its innovativeness high technology for its products. The company always works to offer unique products that are superior to the other similar products in the market. The company operates on revenue of more than 150 billion dollars and about 300,000 employees. Swift conducts operations in 200 countries around the world.

The company’s main focus is on providing innovative products and solutions to private consumers and business enterprises, government agencies and creative customers in order to enhance their evolving digital lifestyles and work environments. The company operates on revenue of more than 150 billion dollars. Swift conducts operations in 200 countries around the world.

Due to its high quality products and services, the company has seen an ever increasing market of its products with high customer satisfaction that is also related to good customer care services from its customer care department.

In the last few years, there has been high competition in the telecommunications industry characterized with fast changing technology and entry of many small companies in the industry. This has necessitated changes in the company strategies with respect to its target market and also changes in compensation for its employees so as to avoid losing its valuable employees to the competitors. Moreover, the company has established more subsidiaries to allow for a wider market for its products. Additionally, the company has also invested heavily in advertising mechanisms to create more awareness of its products and services and also to ensure that it remains dominant in the market.

High Tech Communication Company specializes in designing, manufacturing and marketing of mobile devices, headphones, speakers and other associated peripherals. It is a public limited company with about 200 shareholders. The company operates online stores and other retail stores in Ontario, Canada, where it is located. It has no larger revenue base due to the limited number of shareholders. It offers high quality communication gadgets. Moreover, its products and services are always kept in line with the fast changing technology as a necessity in any communications industry.

The company also invests in research and development so as to ensure that its products are innovative and applies the latest technology. Moreover, it offers products that are of high quality but easy to use. It is the best mobile phones manufacturer in the region and has a higher market share in the mobile phones market in Canada. This is also attributed to the good customer care services from its customer care department. Also the company has the best customer satisfaction rating compared to other companies in the same industry in the region.

Organizational culture can be defined as the pattern of basic assumptions a given group has invented, discovered or developed while learning to cope with external adaptation and internal integration challenges (Page, Withers & Kennelly, 2005). Successful cultural integration begins with an early understanding of the cultural differences and processes that exist between the acquiring and target companies. Each company should be coached to look at how the practices of the other company might be beneficial in the new entity.

After the acquisition, the management should work towards creating a common company culture through unifying the two diverse cultures of the merging companies. This can be done through the following steps (Aquinas, 2010).

1. Evaluating the current culture and performance of the merging companies

2. Clarifying the company’s initial vision after merging

3. Clarifying values and expected behaviors

4. Clarifying strategic priorities

5. Engaging your team in defining smart goals for the company

6. Clarifying and tracking key measures

7. Maintaining management system for priorities and goals

8. Managing communication habits and routines

9. Building motivation throughout the process

10. Continuous review and assessment of the company culture

Each of the above steps is important in ensuring that the desired post acquisition company culture is established in order to facilitate the attainment of company goals and objectives.

1. Evaluating the current culture and performance of each of the merging companies

This enables the management to develop critical performance priorities such as profitability, growth and customer satisfaction that is common for the two companies (Aquinas, 2010). In addition it is important as it helps to identify value/ behavior strengths and weaknesses that are holding back each of the organizations from achieving their full potential with their performance priorities. After which areas of improvement can be identified.

2. Clarifying the company’s initial vision after merging

This enables the company to identify ways of working together to improve the weak areas and drive all the employees towards supporting the company’s purpose. Moreover, it controls the different employees’ behaviors towards achieving the vision.

3. Clarifying values and expected behaviors

This ensures that the expected behaviors are consistently exhibited in the company through living of the clarified values. Since people interpret values from their own perspectives, defining the expected behaviors would help to bring out a common ground for interpreting the values.

4. Clarifying strategic priorities

Defining the strategic priorities provides areas of focus that should be focused on to support the performance priorities included in the company’s initial vision (United States, 2003). For instance, if the performance priority is growth, how will it be achieved? Is it through new products and services, revised sales strategies or market expansion?

5. Engaging your team in defining smart goals for your company

These goals help to support the expected behavior for the weaknesses that may be identified in the new company. For example, if accountability is a weakness, the company goals should include more disciplined plans, measures, reviews and other approaches to support the needed behavior.

6. Clarifying and tracking key measures

This helps in determining if the expected behavior is positively influencing the company’s performance so that it is continually adapted or may be dropped if need be. For instance, if the key measure of performance is increased sales, does a change in working duration positively influence lead to increased sales? (United States, 2003).

7. Maintaining a management system for priorities and goals

This helps to create adjustment to focus in additional time and attention on the top performance priorities and value/ behavior shifts identified in the above steps. The support must be on results and supporting the behavior shift for example through recognition, coaching and removing barriers (Davis & Baldwin, 2005).

8. Managing communication habits and routines

This creates transparency, genuineness and consistent communication that are necessary to work towards attaining company goals and making the employees have a sense of belonging in the company. This also helps to clarify plans, answer questions; exposé rumors and reduce drama in the company. For example, regularly scheduled sessions with two-way communication and extensive informal approaches helps to emphasize the expected behaviors and results through which the company goals can be attained.

9. Building motivation throughout the process

Feedback and recognition are key to establishing the desired company culture. If the employees are motivated throughout the process of unifying company culture, the desired results would most likely be achieved faster (Davis & Baldwin, 2005). For instance, through reward and promotions to the employees who adapt the new company culture and work towards achieving the company goals through the expected behaviors, other employees would be encouraged to also adopt the expected behaviors.

References

Aquinas, P. G. (2010). Organization structure and design: Applications and challenges. New Delhi: Excel Books.

Davis, M., & Baldwin, J. (2005). More than a name: An introduction to branding; with a theoretical commentary by Jonathan Baldwin. Lausanne: AVA.

Page, M. B., Withers, P., & Kennelly, P. (2005). Done deal: Your guide to merger and acquisition integration. Victoria, B.C: Authenticity Press.

United States. (2003). Results-oriented cultures: Implementation steps to assist mergers and organizational transformations: report to congressional subcommittees. Washington, D.C: GAO.