Companies still adhering to the traditional way of doing business risk falling by the wayside if they don’t inject digital solutions into operations. And this was apparent during the pandemic, where businesses would almost entirely interact with their customers through digital means.
Moving forward, several companies have transformed their operations to include digital processes, allowing for more efficient productivity and better customer satisfaction.
As such, more firms have given themselves over to data-driven decision-making, agility and consumer-focused operations. However, some still lag in the race to digital transformation.
And in so doing, they risk being surpassed by their competition as they fail to meet the clients’ now heightened expectations. Read on to discover how to transform your company culture to include digital solutions in relevant processes across the business operation.
How best can one build digital culture into the company?
While going digital seems like a sensible direction for your company culture, it can still present some challenges especially when it comes to implementation. Therefore, it pays to gradually bring everyone around to accept the new way of doing business.
Here is how you can make digital transformation a part of your company culture:
Craft a digital business strategy
Restructuring a firm’s culture to include key digital aspects requires a concerted effort. Pulling off such a shift requires a clear business strategy that aligns with the company’s values and goals. A clear digital business strategy shows employees and clients that the change in operations is geared towards concrete deliverables that boost business performance.
An ideal digital business strategy outlines and expounds on the organizational leadership put in place to steer the company towards a more technology-centric operation.
Additionally, the transformation should highlight the qualities and new responsibilities expected of the existing employees. This strategy also highlights the digital tools and technology to be introduced and how they impact the workers’ roles when executing tasks.
Bring everyone into the fold
In many instances, employees may seem resistant to substituting the prevailing way of doing things for tech. After all, they view digital tools as their potential replacements. As such, you might find that the employees don’t adequately adopt your digital transformation efforts.
However, leaders can lean on emotional intelligence to detect any unease among workers.
This allows companies to be proactive, educating employees on the benefits of integrating digital solutions into their regular tasks. In fact, conducting interviews with employees can unearth their pain points. This allows management to craft a digitization process that addresses concerns and makes it easier for personnel to accomplish their tasks.
Establish digital-oriented leadership
Employees are less skittish about embracing technology in the workplace when they have strong leaders driving the digitization effort. Such a leader should be dedicated to the cause, providing an attainable vision based on the desired digital culture at the company.
The servant leadership style draws in employees, enabling them to trust their leader. This situation creates thought diversity, generating ideas that lend themselves well to digitally transforming the culture. Also, when leaders practice the newly implemented changes, it gives the employees confidence to edge closer towards tech-based work processes.
Train all personnel across the organization
Implementing a company-wide shift from a traditional to a digital culture requires a big adjustment in the way employees execute tasks. Therefore, businesses need to address this knowledge and skill deficit by educating workers on changes and how they affect their roles.
However, this doesn’t mean that you should offer boilerplate manuals or basic training techniques across the workforce. Instead, you should craft different comprehensive training programs that cater to the various employee groups and departments.
This allows workers to receive data that caters to their workplace needs. Also, employees appreciate a flexible training program. Online portals allow workers to gain more skills at their convenience, enabling them to avoid burnout if they do the program during work hours.
Procure the right digital tools
Employees are under the impression that digital tools are more efficient at executing tasks. Consequently, different personnel expect technology to make their work significantly easier to implement. Earlier, we mentioned interviewing employees to determine their pain points.
You can win them over to the digital side by providing digital solutions to help them execute their tasks. When they discover how the new technology impacts their daily activities, they will eventually be more attracted to the prospect of digitizing the entire business.
Measure and test the results of the digital transformation efforts
Rolling out a digitization drive doesn’t stop after the implementation process. Instead, companies need to monitor progress and measure the initiative’s results. Therefore, you need to identify smaller goals that your teams can accomplish utilizing new digital solutions.
This provides measurable objectives that can show you if the measures provide the desired improvements. If they fall short, you need to optimize the digital culture implementation, offering digital solutions that have more potential to get the best out of your employees.
Even with these new methods, management needs to still monitor and assess progress continuously. At the end of it all, the best solutions are maintained. However, because the digital world is constantly changing, you need to be on the lookout for more additions to your technology-centered company culture transformation in order to keep up with the trend.
Why should business leaders progress the digital culture?
Shifting your company culture towards a digital direction doesn’t always happen on the first try. Indeed, digital shift is a process that you should embrace to ensure that your business utilizes the latest tech advancements to hurtle past – and keep ahead of – the competition.
Embracing tech like Big Data analytics, machine learning and cloud computing can significantly change the way you do business. However, getting these integrated requires patience and dedication from top because if done right, both employee and client satisfaction increases.
What are the takeaways?
- Companies need to transform their culture towards digital if they intend to leverage technology to boost business success and customer experience.
- Company culture shift requires buy-in from all personnel. Businesses need to institute forward-thinking, innovative and encouraging leaders to inspire the workforce to go digital.
- Developing a digital culture is a never-ending effort. Benefiting from a digital culture requires continuous execution, monitoring and optimization of digitization endeavors.
Gerald Ainomugisha is a freelance Content Solutions Provider (CSP) offering both content and copy writing services for businesses of all kinds, especially in the niches of management, marketing and technology.
