Olga Filatova: “Corporate culture must be genuine”
Today, corporate culture is considered one of the key intangible assets of a company. Research by McKinsey and Harvard Business Review shows that organizations with a consciously built culture and interaction principles demonstrate higher performance, lower staff turnover, and greater resilience during periods of turbulence. In conditions where traditional management tools no longer ensure long-term stability, the alignment of people, processes, and goals becomes the connecting link between strategy and results.
How to build an environment that unites employees around shared meanings and connect it with the employer brand—these questions became central in the lectures of Olga Filatova, expert in human resource management and organizational development, Professor at the Department of Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management at HSE GSB. As part of the course “Talent Management,” she presented MBA students with a modern view of corporate culture as a management system that directly affects business sustainability and employee engagement.
In interactive discussions based on real cases, participants identified the types of corporate culture in their companies, compared them with goals and strategy, and analyzed which elements require development. The discussions helped reveal that successes and failures are often linked not to external factors but to how interaction between employees is built within the company, whether the internal communication system works in both directions, and to what extent the declared values are truly supported by the behavior of all employees. A separate block of classes was devoted to the employer brand—not only as a recruitment and PR tool but also as a reflection of authentic culture and a key factor in retaining talent.
Corporate culture is the foundation on which a company’s success is built. It must be genuine and expressed in specific behavioral models. It is useless to hang posters with values on the walls if, looking around, we see fundamentally different behavior. There is no “good” or “right” corporate culture—there is a culture that meets strategic interests and suits each individual employee of the company. It is very important to understand that the employer brand is a reflection of corporate culture, helping to attract and retain the “right” people for the company. And the internal communications system becomes the tool that supports this connection and ensures trust between all levels of the company. Very often, internal communications are perceived exclusively as a mouthpiece of top management, but the most important task of internal communications is the feedback system and the ability for the “voice” of the employee to be heard.
The topics raised in the lectures resonated strongly with the MBA students: participants actively discussed their own examples and looked for solutions that they could apply in their teams.
“The course on corporate culture showed different ways of creating and developing it. Despite the absence of one ‘right’ organizational culture, we got acquainted with general methods of building what is needed for our business. This module, just like the MBA program as a whole, allows me to compare what I do in my company with how the same task is solved in the world. Seeing underdeveloped areas, I know where to start. Noticing recommendations that are unusual for my business, I analyze them and either launch changes or continue previous practices—but I do it more consciously. And when I encounter familiar approaches, I get confirmation that we are moving in the right direction, which gives me additional strength to move forward,” emphasized Andrey Shopin, PhD in Engineering, Director of “SMS-Information Technologies,” MBA program participant.
Modern labor market trends, especially the arrival of new generations who are more demanding of working conditions and atmosphere, make the development of corporate culture and the employer brand a necessary condition for success. A well-thought-out system of internal communications helps build effective interaction between employees and respond more quickly to change.