Deer Season, Coffee, and Maté

It’s common to hear the word “culture” frequently dropped when discussing a specific company’s approach to management and employee relations. Culture is the shared system of values and customs that characterizes how a group of people see the world and interact with one another.

But for all the lip service paid to the importance of organizational culture, it can still be amorphous and difficult to pin down. 

Many times, a company’s culture is exposed when it doesn’t work. Some obvious tells that an organization’s culture is not resonating with its employees are high absence rates, frequent turnaround, and low productivity. It can be difficult to know why this is happening. In some cases with large, nationwide companies, changes to company policies may impact some regional locations and groups of workers differently. One region may have no problem with a given change, while employees in other regions may balk at it. 

Deer Season

I spent 17 years at International Paper, during which I worked on process improvement in the company’s individual plants. One of the divisions in which I worked produced containers. When I started, there were 27 plants in this group; by 2025, that number had grown to 200.

When I arrived, the container plants were under-performing and not generating much revenue. To win more orders for their container plants, the company had to institute better efficiencies that would lower operating costs. The plants operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Typically, there are three shifts working five days a week, and a swing shift covers weekends. It is the most prevalent way of working in these types of facilities today. 
 
To make this process more efficient, we applied heuristics and increased the number of employees on every shift. All employees rotated through each shift, doing different jobs. They were trained to be proficient in all of them, enabling them to increase their productivity.
 
No employee lost their job due to this change, and their hourly wages increased by 5%. This effort across the plants that implemented the new system produced significant results, leading to new efficiencies, additional volume, and increased revenue. Everything was working well in all the plants except two – one in Russellville, Arkansas, and the other in Mobile, Alabama.  
The employees at those plants did not want to change to the new schedule. It was puzzling for some of us until we found out the real reason, which had more to do with regional culture than the new schedule itself. Groups of employees in these two plants preferred to take vacations together to go deer hunting in the weeks they had off, and the new system was not allowing that to happen. The culture of the southern United States is very different from that in the northeast. 

Order of Events

Culture also came into play when I was part of developing a different way of scheduling the production of cartons in a division that produces both milk and juice cartons. We aimed to improve efficiency by decreasing the time spent on individual tasks. When a job for a specific carton was complete, the operators had to clean the ink pans to prepare for the next job. Our team determined that changing the sequence of the types of ink used could decrease the time spent cleaning the pans. 

Producing these cartons is a two-stage process: first, printing and cutting, and second, sealing. The various orders go through the printing and cutting process, which is usually where bottlenecks occur in a pre-determined sequence. The process of determining that sequence was time-consuming, so we defined two objectives to create a more efficient algorithm: 1) maximize the time that jobs of the same degree of difficulty run in parallel, and 2) minimize the number of machine stops. To accomplish this, we followed five steps: pairing, forming composite jobs and composite pairs, blocking, and sequencing. 

When we implemented this change, we gave operators the new sequence of individual jobs to be done in the form of a stack of ordered cards. In response, the operators “conveniently” dropped the stack and reordered the steps in a way they preferred. We were puzzled by this behavior until we learned that the operators were not part of the team that was given the reason we reordered the tasks. After giving the operators a thorough explanation for the changes and addressing their questions and comments, they accepted the solution. Consequently, the operators did more jobs in one day, and the plant’s profitability went up.

Coffee and Maté

While I was a faculty member at Columbia Business School in the early 2000s, we started a program for entrepreneurs in Latin America. As part of the year-long program, we visited large companies in different countries. One time we took them to Pune, India, where we visited the container company Tata & Sons.

The company had a branch in Montevideo, Uruguay. There is an approximate nine-hour time difference between Pune and Montevideo, enabling the company to continually operate using both facilities for nearly 24 hours a day on the same projects. This is not unusual for large firms to do. IBM, which has research facilities in both India and the United States, also operates this way.
 
We asked the head of Tata Consultancy what it was like working with their Uruguayan colleagues. His answer was interesting. He told us that when you call Montevideo at 9am, the employees are drinking their coffee, and when you call them at 10am, they had switched to maté.
  
However, this did not mean that the Uruguayans were lazy and inefficient; rather, they were just as productive as their Indian counterparts. The difference was one of cultural perception. The Uruguay plant did what it was meant to: enable Tata & Sons to run their operations continuously 24 hours a day.
 
Knowing and understanding different cultures across different localities and regions is essential to efficiently operate large national and international companies. Having this knowledge supports effective change management and reduces misunderstanding. Knowing what is and is not culturally appropriate helps align goals with expectations and identifies potential issues early. Keeping local managers aware of why you are doing what you are doing will more likely win their support and result in smoother execution.