Many businesses are making strong commitments to behave ethically and contribute to economic development while improving the quality of life of the workforce and their families as well as that of the local community and society. In the photo: Companies with a remarkable contribution to COVID-19 containment are honored at VCCI’s ceremony to celebrate Vietnam Entrepreneurs’ Day

Building a business culture is strengthening business competitiveness

Dr. Le Thi Bich Thuy from Ho Chi Minh National Academy of Politics said that business culture is the totality of cultural values created and accumulated by business entities (entrepreneurs) in running their business activities, interacting with the business environment, contributing to the creation of business identities and entrepreneurial culture. Business culture is constituted by such factors as business philosophy, business ethics, entrepreneurial culture, corporate culture and behavioral culture in business activities.

Accelerating industrialization, modernization and international integration have brought many opportunities and posed many difficulties and challenges to the economic and business development of Vietnam. Building a business culture is important to enhance corporate competitiveness and consumer decisions.

Currently, Vietnam has more than 850,000 businesses and above 5.4 million business households. Vietnamese entrepreneurs are growing rapidly in number and quality. More entrepreneurs are holding higher education levels and applying cutting-edge technology to production and business activities. Many enterprises and entrepreneurs have expressed their bravery, creativity and dynamism in the market mechanism and advanced to compete in regional and global markets.

Many companies have built a corporate culture based on commitments to values and principles of sustainable development and obtained sure success, for example, FPT Corporation, Vinamilk Corporation, Viettel Group, Vingroup and Vietnam Airlines. At these corporations, social activities such as charity and environmental protection are highly appreciated. Business commitments and philosophies are seriously implemented. At the same time, personal behavior in the workplace is built based on given principles and a beautifully decorated corporate image makes a strong impression and creates a comfortable feeling for customers and partners. That expression has made business identity and created brand success.

Humans are important to business culture

According to Dr. Le Thi Bich Thuy, building a business culture is both a goal and a big challenge for any business and entrepreneur. In order to build a strong business culture and business ethics in the true sense, "having progressive cultural and ethical standards and good management and business qualifications" is necessary to consistently and flexibly perform solutions.

“In order to successfully build a business culture, it is essential to involve all members of the company. Therefore, the company needs to further promote communications and education and inspire employees to fully and deeply understand the role and meaning of business culture development in each activity to engage them in building and developing corporate culture. Each enterprise needs to diversify forms of communication and education such as meetings, conferences and summaries to enhance the knowledge of corporate culture for employees, especially new recruits,” she added.

Besides, enterprises should recruit employees fitting their business culture, promote human capacity and concretize business culture criteria into business performance review criteria. When building a business culture, they all want to maintain and promote their strengths and outstanding values with their own characteristics. Therefore, they need to build an open and friendly working environment that allows people to confidently share information and knowledge gained in working practices, facilitate highly effective business development, and address existing limitations related to communication and behaviors among their employees. They need to develop more specific and clearer regulations on work and process for each job position and build an image of open and friendly management to employees in communications and behaviors.

Furthermore, businesses need to seriously implement their pronounced commitments to partners and customers regarding the quality of products and services provided and keep credibility to customers and partners. At the same time, they need to have a harmonious balance of corporate interests and social benefits, actively exercise social responsibility such as environmental protection, community support, and aid to disadvantaged and vulnerable people; and develop common standards on business culture and implement the Vietnamese code of business ethics across their companies.

“Building a business culture is a process that requires the ongoing effort of companies for implementation. Business culture values are not fixed and can be changed to match their evolving business realities and social changes. Therefore, each enterprise needs to regularly press the implementation of corporate culture, check and evaluate the quality and effectiveness of corporate culture in business to promptly figure out positive and appropriate cultural values that need to be further promoted, while eliminating inappropriate values and replacing them with new suitable ones," Dr. Thuy affirmed.