“No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team”, - says Reid Hoffman. While teamwork is essential for an organization to achieve its goals, organizational culture plays a crucial role in a team and is the backbone of any successful companies. This is because there was an official certification in 2016, Adobe was recognized as one of the ‘100 Best Companies to Work For’ for the 16th time in Fortune Magazine. Therefore, I believe that Adobe Systems Incorporated is definitely a workplace to any employee’s preference.
Adobe Inc. founded in December 1982 and known until October 3, 2018 as Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically focused upon the creation of multimedia and creativity software products, with a more recent foray towards digital marketing software (Wikipedia, Adobe System Inc).
However, as one of the leading software developers of the world, Adobe has been praised for the strong company culture they have grown over the years. From its humble beginnings in 1982, Adobe has grown into a multinational company, with over 13,500 employees. So, what’s so special about Adobe’s culture?
Content of Company Culture
Innovation and Risk Taking
Companies with cultures that place a low value on innovation expect their employees to perform their job in the same way like how the company has trained them, despite focusing on improvement and creativity. On the contrary, companies with cultures that usually place a high value on innovation will encourage their employees to take risks and put efforts on the innovation part in their job performance. This is likely to provide the employees a platform to express themselves freely as well. For instance, Adobe makes no secret of the fact they have a very creative outlook when it comes to work. Adobe knows that fostering their employees creativity and giving room for experimentation is the key to an innovative workforce (Undercover Recuiter, Oct 29, 2015).
Why is innovative so important? First off, innovation helps to boost productivity. Since employers are given the freedom to express themselves, they may come out with unconventional ideas to solve the problems in new and innovating ways. As such, the quality of the works is improved, and works can be done at a faster rate. To give an example, in the working environment of Adobe Systems Incorporated is fun and inspiring, they will make some paints and creativity design on the walls itself to make it feel more like it not just a workplace but a place like coffee shop for employees to enjoy in their jobs with no judgements.
Besides, Adobe also invests in developing talents with training and mentorship for their employees. The company will challenge them with impacts and build their skills. Moreover, in order to have a maximum productivity from the employers, a fun and inspiring working environment is provided, for instance, the walls in the workplace are painted with creative designs to ensure a more relaxing working environment.
People Orientation
As a people-oriented company, Adobe offers perks like discounted gym memberships and tuition reimbursement, plus paid sabbatical and subsidies for commuters just for their employees. First off, good work is recognized and rewarded. Employees even receive patents for their ideas and are awarded bonuses for those creations at the annual banquet. Not only that, Adobe will be giving various recognition rewards to recompense their team members as well, they are offering patent award program to the employees, service awards and founder’ award, which is an annual global award program to recognize employees who consistently epitomize Adobe’s core values throughout the year and make an outstanding contribution to the company (Adobe > employee discounts and pecks > recognition).
In addition, Adobe does invest a huge investment in employee success and growth. How does Adobe do it? It is important to ensure that there is a return on investment (ROI). The actual training ROI is different for every organization and team, and changes depending upon the desired goals.
In short, Adobe values their employers highly as they commit to the wellbeing of the employers. Adobe’s wellbeing program is recognized as one of the key factors in establishing an award-winning company culture. By introducing wellbeing perks, Adobe’s businesses can all benefit from healthier, happier employees that are more committed to going the extra mile in their roles (azrights, September 2019).
Team Orientation
Team orientation represents the degree to which work activities are organized around teams rather than individuals. Adobe could be a role model to learn from. Then, you should probably look at Adobe productively and quality. How Adobe changes in performance management practice to work it more productive and quality. Adobe was evolving as a company and its practices had to reflect the changes: agility, ongoing innovation and team orientation. The People Resources leadership team would need to shape an alternative and to ensure that people are building their ability to give and receive feedback (Worldorwork Journal Second Quarter 2016, page 4,5).
Adobe supports the ‘Work Hard Play Hard’ mentality. The workplace is great, Adobe offers gym room, cafeteria and other amenities make it an enjoyable work environment. It feels more like everyone is working with life balance.
What really sets Adobe apart, though, is how its values communication across the company between departments. Regular team events, like a speed networking event, encourage employees to get to know one another. With the close relationship between the departments of the company, work definitely gets to be done efficiently and effectively. Not only that, Adobe has created a company-wide community for their LGBTQ employees. This can be a place for members of those communities to socialize and have discussions, and several Adobe employees even contributed videos to the popular ‘It Gets Better’ movement aimed toward LGBTQ teens (Enplug Blog, 03 AUG, 2015).
Aggressiveness
‘Aggressive’ can mean many ways in business, somehow Adobe is aggressive in following a competitor. Adobe always believes that a competitive mind is one of the strategies for winning in business. Both Microsoft and Adobe are the same executive software company in the global. While Microsoft and Adobe have largely been competitors thus far, Adobe has not ever tried to give up but it was trying other programs to emulate the competitors. For instance, Adobe improves in working on Photoshop for iPad with ‘aggressive schedule’ to add desktop class features. Adobe is so committed to making Photoshop for iPad as powerful as possible that it's attracted more people's attention to get it ready on an ‘aggressive schedule’ (Redmond Pie, Oct 22, 2019).
Another point about the aggressiveness in marketing. In 2013, Adobe switched to a SaaS model, offering cloud-based solutions for a monthly fee. This enabled unaffordable users use them at a lower price however long they needed them. Adobe had four million new subscribers after working in just 2.5 years (Single Grain, Case Studies). However, how they actually do something to attract the people in general marketing tactics. Adobe does a great job of carrying on a clean, minimalistic and gorgeous design applied on their homepage. The design is tidy and attractive, and clearly communicates what the brand is all about, it brings a good, unforgettable impression as well. Certainly, they provide good user experience and smart product acquisitions and other services to the users too. Overall, in 2018, Adobe annual revenue hit a record $9.03 billion and their market cap is $134.5 billion, it has grown significantly by having the best product.
Stability
Stability of a successful organization is the state or quality of being stable and having a consistent status quo in contrast to growth. As for Adobe, it is not easy to emphasize and maintain the status quo in the global field. Adobe has been earning a spot in the ‘100 Best Companies to Work For’ for 20 years with 16 certifications and other numerous rewards globally.
Adobe system is a digital marketing and media solutions company with a reported net revenue of $6.1bn in 2017, representing an increase in sales of over $1bn and revenue, asset portfolio size, and profits all reached a 10-year high (Gigabit, Apr 19, 2018). Until today, Adobe is ranked within the top 20 of global software leaders in terms of revenue and also ranked software-as-a-service (SaaS) revenues of Top 50 software companies based with $7.7 billion in annual revenue.
Conclusion
After looking at the organization culture and efforts that Adobe has done, it’s undeniable stuff that Adobe Systems Incorporated genuinely won the outstanding results in the global and achievements all the time. As the maxim goes, “if you get the company culture right, most of the other stuff will just take care of itself”, by Tony Hsieh.