By RACHNA LAL
For Vodafone Fiji, the winner of 2013 President’s Award for Fiji Business Excellence Award, it was the need for a strong corporate culture that drove organisational performance excellence.
Vodafone Fiji managing director, Aslam Khan, yesterday made these comments as he shared his company’s excellence journey at the 2014 Fiji Business Excellence Awards – Better Business Conference.
The conference was organised by the Fiji National University’s National Training and Productivity Centre at the Holiday Inn Suva.
Mr Khan said the challenge lies in fostering a culture that is truly exceptional.
“Companies with exceptional cultures attract and retain the best employees,” he said.
“Therefore, nurture and promote strong and lasting customer relationships towards creating a strong performance culture.
“This is turn will deliver consistently solid business results.”
Irony in pursuit
Mr Khan however said that ironically, the pursuit of these successes often sets the stage for a poor culture, which in turn undermines any chance of business excellence.
“It is an unfortunate truth that the importance of building and maintaining a great culture often gets lost in a deluge of other business tasks perceived to be more urgent,” he said.
Mr Khan stressed driving revenues and controlling cost are important to the success and growth of a business.
But, he said when a company’s culture erodes, profits and overall performance will soon deteriorate to a level beyond repair.
“A weak or uninspired business culture leads to unsatisfied and despondent employees – disengaged, unhappy people who do not foster and promote excellence.”
Performance culture
Mr Khan pointed out a poor or deteriorating culture is common when the workplace is chaotic, company values are unclear, employees feel unappreciated and managers are ineffectual.
“These conditions often occur when management focuses solely on bottom line results, rather than on culture, the basic driver of high performance,” he said.
“The evidence shows that businesses are stronger, healthier and more profitable when leaders and managers pay attention to developing a high performance culture rather than just focusing on the bottom line.”
Best persons
Mr Khan believes one of the factors of success in organisation is having the right people.
“Business success is about finding, engaging and keeping the right people. The whole Business Excellence framework revolves around people to make it successful,” he said.
He therefore urged the leaders to recruit the best people.