How do customers learn about the corporate culture? Do they have a complete enough picture to focus on their voice? Employees are often customers of their company and have a more wholistic view of the culture.
As a customer, I can tell a lot about a company's culture by:
- Their sales process. (Is it high pressure? Do they know what they're selling? How do they handle aspects of their product/service that is weak relative to competitors?)
- Who is actually targeted by the sales process. (Do they actively try to court technical individual contributors, or do they try to bypass them and pitch directly to leadership?)
- Their support process. (Do the support reps know the product? Are escalations handled quickly? Are conversations organic, or is it so scripted that you may as well be talking to a robot?)
- General product development. (Are product iterations delivered to market in a timely and consistent manner? Is it a quality product [i.e., does it work as advertised]? Does it seem like there's a consistent vision and design language for the product?)
- General employee sentiment? (Do you have a long-term company contact, or does it seem like your contact changes on a monthly basis? What's the general mood of the people you interact with [i.e., one person may just be having a bad day, but a consistent coldness suggests something more systemic]? Are high-level people generally leaving or joining the company?)
There’s no vote to determine whether or not a company’s culture is good. We have to look at outcomes and then work backwards. Customers play a key role in those outcomes, and therefore determining whether a culture is good or not, despite not knowing anything about it.
I personally don’t think such a system would be competitive over the long term. I look at the most totalitarian countries, that use widespread coercion to encourage productivity, and notice that they aren’t wildly successful from an economic output point of view.
Customers, shareholders, competitors. The goal of good culture, I think, is to create great products. If the employees are all ecstatic and the products suck for customers then I won’t buy them. Similarly if capital returns or poor then as a shareholder I won’t invest.
It seems to me like the goal of any particular culture -- by which I mean the effort of trying to create any particular culture -- will necessarily be in the eye of the beholder. Owners will be looking to maximize profit. Employees will be looking to enjoy their jobs. Customers will be looking for good service.
If the customers don’t buy anything eventually the company goes under and there’s no pie for owners, managers, and workers to divide up. Well, at least unless a government endlessly bails it out, but then the government is de facto the customer.