Company culture is the secret sauce that sets great businesses apart from the rest. It’s more than just a mission statement on the wall—it’s the very fabric that shapes your employee experience, brand personality, and business performance every single day. 

When your teams share a cohesive culture built on common values, amazing stuff happens. Employees feel empowered, motivated, and committed. They rally behind shared goals and work together like a well-oiled machine. Customers connect with your brand on a deeper level. And ultimately, business thrives.

But the second you bring on an outside business process outsourcing (BPO) provider, maintaining that culture gets tricky. Outsourced teams operate outside your office walls, without direct oversight. Before you know it, misalignment starts brewing across cultures, miles apart. 

What can you do to keep that special sauce intact? Plenty, it turns out! In this post, we’ll uncover smart strategies to align your BPO provider under one happy cultural umbrella. With a little extra care and feeding, your values can stretch across organizational boundaries and deliver a seamless employee and customer experience. Read on for practical tips to keep your culture humming!

What Exactly is Company Culture?

Before we dive in, let’s get clear on what company culture really means.

Culture is the personality of an organization. It’s “the way we do things around here.” The unwritten rules of behavior that shape your office environment day to day.

More specifically, culture comprises these key ingredients:

– Values: The core principles like trust, innovation, and collaboration that guide decisions and norms. Your organizational conscience.

– Practices: The behaviors, habits, and actions that bring your values to life. Like recognizing employees publicly for good work. 

– Traditions: Rituals and celebrations like annual holiday parties or onboarding events that reinforce the culture over time. 

– Communication: How information flows through the company, like whether teams openly share ideas or decisions happen top-down.

– Policies: Formal guidelines around work styles, ethics, benefits, and codes of conduct that reflect your values.

– Environment: The physical workspace and tools that shape the employee experience and productivity. An open office or remote work policy, for example.

When these elements align, they form a cohesive culture that reflects your brand personality and guides how work gets done.

Of course, culture extends beyond the office walls to impact external stakeholders too. Customers want to engage with brands that share their values. So do investors and partners. A thriving culture creates value across the board!

Why Company Culture Matters So Much 

Why is culture such a big deal for business success? There are a few key reasons:

It directly shapes the employee experience. The single strongest driver of culture is people. Studies show the 1 predictor of employee satisfaction is organizational culture. When done right, culture creates a positive, fulfilling work life for teams.

It boosts performance and retention. Happy, engaged teams show up motivated and knock goals out of the park. Employees invested in the culture tend to stick around longer too, reducing costly turnover. Strong cultures equal strong results.

It builds an emotional brand connection. Your culture communicates your brand personality inside and out. Customers want to engage with brands that share their values and ideals. Culture forges that emotional bond.

It enables alignment. A cohesive culture gets everyone marching to the same beat, even across departments or geographies. This smooths coordination and decision making enterprise-wide.  

It offers guidance. In gray areas, employees look to your cultural values like a True North compass to guide behavior and choices. Culture brings clarity.

It provides continuity. Leaders and strategies come and go but a healthy culture remains constant. It’s the thread weaving your past, present and future together in shared purpose.

Bottom line? Company culture and business performance go hand-in-hand. Nurturing culture must be a key priority from day one—even (or especially) when expanding operations through a BPO partner.  

The Big Challenges of Keeping Culture with a BPO

Partnering with a BPO can throw a wrench in maintaining your culture, though. Handing over key operations to an external company creates physical and organizational separation from your staff. Before you know it, cultural divides emerge that impact the employee experience.

Here are some of the top challenges that crop up:

– Physical distance. Outsourced teams operate offsite without day-to-day contact, which can cause misalignment. Absence doesn’t exactly make the heart grow fonder.

– Management gaps. BPO staff don’t report directly to your internal management chain. You must rely on the provider for oversight and alignment.  

– Workflow mismatches. BPOs have their own workflows for serving multiple clients. Practices don’t always mesh neatly with your cultural norms.

– Policy differences. Rules around work styles, ethics, holidays, and codes of conduct can vary between organizations. Conflicts might arise.

– Staffing churn. Frequent employee turnover disrupts cultural continuity. Regular retraining takes resources. Knowledge walks out the door.

– Corporate culture clashes. The BPO has its own culture that may or may not groove with yours. Different perspectives can lead to clashes. 

– Brand disconnects. Lack of day-to-day immersion in your brand history and identity can cause outsourced teams to drift from it over time.

– Communication barriers. Differences in language, time zones, or context can impair transparent collaboration and monitoring of alignment.

– Data security risks. Handing data access to third parties creates potential compliance and data protection vulnerabilities. This could violate security-focused cultural values.

Left unbridled, these challenges can chip away at the cultural foundation and create divisive “us vs. them” mentalities over time.

But when approached strategically, you can totally bridge cultural gaps with your BPO. Let’s explore some best practices next! 

Strategies to Maintain Your Culture

With focus and care, outsourced teams can blend right into your cultural framework. Consider these tactics:

Communicate Your Values Clearly

First things first: Teach your BPO about your cultural DNA. Make sure they fully grasp your core values, brand personality, history, and policies from day one. Give them every chance to appreciate why your culture makes you special. 

Share any materials that capture your essence, like your employee handbook, brand guidelines, or company website. Have leaders speak directly to outsourced teams about culture priorities. Set clear expectations for aligning values and practices going forward.

Openly communicating cultural basics upfront lays a solid foundation for harmony down the line.

Make Culture a Priority in Partner Selection

Don’t leave culture fit to chance during the BPO selection process. Look for providers with complementary cultural values and people practices. Ask probing questions about how they manage culture for clients. Get a feel for their environment and work styles firsthand if you can.

Aim for an outsourcing partner invested in cultural continuity as much as you are. Taking time here prevents mismatches and conflict later on.

Invest in Ongoing Training

Help embed your culture through immersive onboarding and regular training for outsourced staff. Teach them your cultural history, brand personality, policies, workflows, tools, and performance standards. Communicate expected behaviors and decorum. 

Make sure new team members get cultured-up through the same training as they come aboard. Ongoing learning opportunities sustain alignment as times change.

Encourage Open Communication 

Open lines of communication between your company and the BPO will uncover cultural disconnects before they spread. Build in regular check-ins between managers and outsourced teams to discuss challenges, progress, new policies, or projects. 

Make yourself accessible for candid feedback. And request anonymous feedback from offshore teams to surface any concerns early. Fostering an ongoing cultural dialogue reinforces your bonds.

Build Strong Relationships and Trust

Personal relationships and trust between in-house and outsourced staff strengthen cultural alignment. Enable teams to collaborate directly through visits, trainings, meetings, and team-building activities. 

Outsourced workers will invest more in your culture when they know teammates personally and feel like valued contributors. Trust also encourages sharing of honest feedback about sticking points.

Recognize and Reward Alignment

When you spot outsourced staff demonstrating your cultural values in action, call it out! Recognition is powerful positive reinforcement. Thank them publicly in company meetings when they achieve milestones. Implement performance incentives for cultural priorities met. 

Celebrating wins big and small motivates offshore teams to internalize your values. They’ll aspire to emulate your culture through and through.

Keep a Close Eye on Progress

Don’t just set culture alignment and forget it. Routinely monitor cross-cultural progress through surveys, metrics, audits, and feedback channels. Measure how satisfied internal teams are with outsourced collaboration. Watch for dips that indicate problems.

Course correct quickly if you spot misalignment brewing before it boils over. Consistent vigilance ensures your BPO partner sticks to your cultural blueprint.

Conclusion

At its heart, company culture is a competitive advantage that energizes your workforce, captivates your customers, and enables organizational success. But without careful nurturing, that advantage can disappear faster than you think when injecting outsourced teams into the mix.

The good news? With the right strategies, your culture can stretch seamlessly across geographical and organizational boundaries. By selecting aligned partners, communicating values clearly, training immersely, engaging personally, and monitoring routinely, you can synchronize distributed teams under one happy cultural umbrella.

Sure, it takes focus and follow-through. But preserving your special cultural sauce through a BPO partnership is completely possible—and well worth the effort. When your entire workforce feels motivated, empowered, and connected in purpose, that’s when the magic happens for your business and brand.