Thursday 28 Mar 2024
By
main news image

WHEN the Telenor Group, a Norway-headquartered telecommunications giant, started its expansion into different markets, it had two possible routes to take with regard to corporate culture and shared values.

It could have gone the top-down route, dictating how things were going to be done in its subsidiaries. Or, it could have maintained business as usual in all the markets its subsidiaries operated in.

The group decided on a more collaborative route, making it a two-way street with subsidiaries coming up with values and culture that would eventually come to represent its identity as a multinational firm.

And in doing so, Telenor — a company that started in 1855 — allowed itself to change and be changed by the diversity that comes with having a workforce of 33,000 employees working in more than a dozen countries.

 At a recent media briefing, Telenor executive vice-president Hilde M Tonne says from the beginning, it was important for the group to respect the cultures that their various subsidiaries operated in.

“We never forced ourselves with our Western culture onto the local markets. It was extremely important for us to respect the local marketplace for the customers, the people working there and the growth that they can create by seeing opportunities around themselves.

“We wanted to really be humble and understand that the business was local,” Tonne shares during her recent work visit to DiGi’s headquarters in Selangor.

 The Oslo Stock Exchange-listed group has mobile operations in 13 markets, mostly in Eastern Europe and Asia.

In Asia, Telenor has interest in mobile operators such as Telenor Pakistan, Telenor Myanmar, Grameenphone in Bangladesh, dtac in Thailand, DiGi in Malaysia and Uninor in India, while the group’s ownership in VimpelCom Ltd extends its reach to 14 countries including Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Zimbabwe and Italy.

While all things global and international were the rage at the time, Telenor constantly reminded itself that business was done day to day on a very local and personal level.

“Our business is local, our customers are local. We have to meet them on the streets, in the shops, eye-to-eye. So if we aren’t able to be local, we aren’t able to utilise the strength that we have,” says Tonne, who also heads Telenor’s Group Industrial Development Department.

 She describes the process as creating a portfolio that consisted of Telenor’s “Scandinavian heritage moving into the Central Eastern Europe region and taking a very clear footprint of Pan-Asia”.

“We need to establish a global core of how we do business business-wise but the culture part of this… that’s where everything happens.”

Over the years, Asia has become an important market for Telenor. According to its website, Asia contributed 43% to the group’s third-quarter revenue this year. The number is significant even though revenue from Europe contributed 48% to the group’s total revenue, half of which came from operations in its home ground Norway.

“So Asia is important for us and over the years, I would really say that Asia, and also Malaysia and DiGi, have really influenced the group’s culture,” she adds.

Diversity and mobility

 According to Tonne, it was one thing to have diversity in the group. What followed was the need for mobility and for people to move around.

After spending some time in Asia, Tonne returned to Telenor’s headquarters to head its Group Industrial Development Department.

The department, by Tonne’s own admission, comprised about 93% Scandinavians, which she says is “very homogeneous” and not reflective of the kind of organisation Telenor was worldwide. So Tonne set out to recruit people from different backgrounds and markets that understood the group’s culture and values. Now, the department has a more diverse team with about 30% non-Scandinavians, she notes.

 “On a larger scale, you can actually see we have many Asians working at the headquarters and we also have more and more Scandinavians working in Asia. We also see this interaction is influencing our canteens and menus,” Tonne jokes.

 She reckons that the multicultural diversity has lent a new dimension to the Telenor brand.

“It’s more creative and dynamic than other Scandinavian brands. So we are no longer Scandinavian, we are very much influenced by Asia.”

Crafting the Telenor Way

Today, DiGi and Telenor’s corporate culture is known for being open, flat in hierarchy and collaborative.

The hallmarks include flexible working hours, open-plan offices, workforce diversity and staff well-being.

But what the group has today is the result of a deliberate and collaborative designing of what it calls “the Telenor Way” since 2003.

According to Tonne, the core values include: be respectful, be inspiring, keep promises and make it easy.

“The Telenor Way is the sum of the parts of all the markets we’re in but it’s also something in itself.

 “If you ask the DiGi management, they will say that they have influenced the Telenor Way and they are also being influenced by it.”

A work in progress, the Telenor Way is continuously being fine-tuned and revised, Tonne says.

This year, about 150 leaders in the Telenor Group met in Stockholm to discuss the leadership attitudes the organisation wanted. Next year, a similar discussion will take place in a different market.

“We ended up wanting to explore, telling our leaders that they should empower their people and that it is important for them to engage everyone, and asking them to focus on execution.

“This is what we call the E4 now: explore, empower, engage and execute,” she says.

 This will then spark off smaller discussion groups in all the business units for the values to be shared and communicated. It is a combination of bottom-to-top and top-down approaches, Tonne adds.

 Of course, all these have been learned and tested throughout the years since Telenor started its expansion.

“You can imagine 10 to 15 years ago, we came from a big Scandinavian flat structure to a hierarchy-based one in East Asia. But now it’s amazing to see how, when we strike the right balance of empowerment, with the right knowledge of our business environment and culture in each of our local markets, energy and productivity can be created.

“And if we are really able to strike that balance, we will really differentiate ourselves and create a competitive advantage,” Tonne says.

 

This article first appeared in #edGY, The Edge Malaysia Weekly, on November 24 - 30, 2014.

Save by subscribing to us for your print and/or digital copy.

P/S: The Edge is also available on Apple's AppStore and Androids' Google Play.

      Print
      Text Size
      Share