How does an employee know when to go beyond the job description to delight a customer? Or when a process needs to give way to an understanding of what the customer needs in that particular moment?
For Sanjay Bose, EVP & head-HR, ITC Hotels, this is where organisational culture stops being an abstract idea and becomes visible in behaviour.
Speaking at the first HRKatha Inner Circle, held in partnership with Culturelytics, Bose argued that culture is perhaps the hospitality industry’s biggest differentiator. Processes can establish consistency, but they cannot prescribe every interaction between an employee and a guest.
“There is one set of processes and there is something which comes from within,” he said. What comes from within, he added, is developed, encouraged and built by the culture an organisation espouses.
That distinction matters particularly in hospitality, where the quality of an experience can depend on an employee sensing a customer’s mood, adapting their behaviour and occasionally stepping beyond what the rulebook specifies.
But Bose’s argument also places responsibility higher up the organisation. Culture, he said, is built through the actions of those “in the deciding seat”: what leaders say, the choices they make and, most importantly, what they actually do “when the chips are down”.
The harder question is whether something so deeply expressed through everyday behaviour can also be measured scientifically. Can organisations put numbers to culture, understand where they stand today and define where they want that culture to go?
That was one of the questions explored at the HRKatha Inner Circle on the Culture–Performance Equation, where senior people leaders examined whether culture can move from organisational belief to business evidence.
Watch Sanjay Bose explain why culture matters most when the rulebook can no longer provide the answer.
