Canada’s 10 Most Admired Corporate Cultures

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Top 10 corporate cultures shine

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

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This week, leaders from the country’s most admired corporate cultures got together to share their secrets for building and sustaining a successful corporate culture. As a company that is passionate about continuously improving our own corporate culture, we soaked it all in.

In this post, Razor Suleman, founder and CEO of I Love Rewards, shares with us what we can learn from these admirable companies.

Great corporate culture = results-driven organization

In terms of three-year compounded annual revenue growth, the companies named as Canada’s 10 Most Admired Corporate Cultures of 2009, outpaced the S&P/TSX by an average of over 300%. Proving that despite the economy, companies with a healthy, vibrant corporate culture (that includes strong leadership) drive results.

The leaders have spoken: corporate culture gives an edge

Waterstone Capital, the organization behind Canada’s 10 Most Admired Corporate Cultures, surveyed 500 executives to get their take on corporate culture. Some of the standout survey results include:

85% of executives believe that a new leader can change an organization’s culture.
75% of executives believe cultural fit is more important than necessary skills in finding candidates for their organization.
65% of executives believe corporate culture drives sales.

Speakers Corner: Razor’s key takeaways

Marc Tellier, President and CEO, Yellow Pages Group

Marc spoke about how Yellow Pages, a “100 year-old start-up”, rebuilt its culture. Some of his key points on how to rebuild corporate culture include:

Leaders must use the right tone to communicate to their employees, and disseminate information in an open, honest and timely manner.
Build an A Player team because A Players hire A Players, which boosts performance in the workplace.
Compete to win. Rally your team to strive for excellence and empower them to make fact-based decisions – “Indecision is the worst decision”.

Ferio Pugliese, VP of People, WestJet

Okay, so you’ve built a great culture…now how do you sustain it? Here are Ferio’s tips on maintaining and enhancing your culture.

Celebrate your culture by making it possible for employees to share stories and dialogue through open forums, blogs and at meetings. Celebrating and talking about the things that make up your culture will embed it further into the workplace.
Recognize your culture with an event. In 2007, WestJet threw a party to acknowledge their ranking on the Canada’s 10 Most Admired Corporate Cultures list. It went a long way in showing employees how much WestJet values a vibrant corporate culture.
Remember, your corporate culture extension of your brand. Your culture reflects your values and mission as an organization, as much as your brand does.

A special shout out to our clients who were honored by Waterstone Capital – Avivia and Workopolis. Congratulations! To find what makes Avivia a most admired corporate culture read, Ask, Listen And Do’; Aviva; Values create performance environment.

For more information on Canada’s 10 Most Admired Corporate Cultures including the 2010 awards program, visit http://www.waterstonehc.com/cmac/canadas-10.