Transferring the IKEA Culture

Abstract

Every company has its own unique work-culture. Famous furniture seller IKEA, being no different. IKEA is currently active in 52 countries and is still growing strongly, so more and more people of different cultures are coming together because of it. IKEA’s culture has been formed through out the years and has the potential to help achieve great things. However, the IKEA sales coworkers do not have an incentive, nor the time to deepen their knowledge about the IKEA culture and its values. They therefore do not identify with it and do not use it in their every workday actions. This is bad for the IKEA brand and reduces the chances of company success. The IKEA culture is designed at the inter IKEA office, but has a different result on the actual work-floor. In order to bridge that gap, this report takes a unique bottom up-approach, while at the same time maintaining a top-down view. This is achieved by creating solutions for and together with the IKEA sales employees, while keeping the global view of the IKEA office in mind, and is supported by the fact that I (the author) am one of the very few coworkers at IKEA, that has worked in the store and at the office at the same time. Providing me with the opportunity to take the role of both main stakeholders; the end-users (the store coworkers) and the client (the IKEA franchisor). A work-culture is the result of employees living the company's key values in combination with their personal values. It is shaped by stories, artefacts, routines, rituals and symbols. All of which are researched through out this project. After the research grounded in literature, a lot of field research was also done. The main conclusions being that the current knowledge of culture was lacking among IKEA coworkers (for example; only 12 out of the 85 participants could say how many key values IKEA has), that the introduction of new coworkers would be the moment of intervention and lastly, that the intervention can have the biggest impact on sales employees. To support the bottom-up approach a thorough co-creation process took place. Lots of ideas were created in this session. They were clustered and detailed and eventually formed the inspiration behind three concepts; a strategic monthly intervention that addresses all key values, a board game that introduces those values and strategically designed ritual of introducing new coworkers to the IKEA culture. The concepts were presented to IKEA and all of the reactions were very positive, so a final concept was detailed. The final intervention revolves around the moment the new coworker receives his/her coworker uniform and consists of four parts: 1. the story the manager will tell the new coworker, 2. a key values box, 3. the new design of the IKEA clothing, with the key values printed on the inside, 4. a letter for inside the box. For each part a list of design criteria and design examples were given. The intervention can be tested at IKEA Delft, but has the potential to scale up to international levels. It has the opportunity to bring people from all over the world together under a common goal and to, in the end, create a better everyday life for the many people.