Should You Standardize Your Corporate Culture?

Business leaders at companies around the world are always asking, "how can we standardize corporate culture across all of our locations?" My response is, "do you really want to do that?"

Standardizing corporate culture is a subject that comes up quite frequently during my conversations with business leaders at companies around the world. They want to know how they can make it so that whether a person walks into their company in Australia, Japan, England or the U.S., they see and feel the same things.

But my question is, "do you really want to do that?". People across the world are all going to have different behaviors, customs, beliefs, etc…and that's okay. People in your organization should be able to be themselves at work. So if your office in Sydney, Australia looks different than the one in London, England that's to be expected.

What we really want to standardize across all of our organizations is our values--doing good, collaboration, fun, trust, transparency, integrity--these are the things that should stay the same no matter what location you are walking into. As long as you have those core unifying things at the base of your organization differences in corporate culture should be welcomed and embraced.