"Culture eats strategy for breakfast" is a famous quote attributed to Peter Drucker. Culture is about an organization’s belief in its shared Vision, Mission, and Values to drive the behavior in the Company. It is the collective set of behaviors and will that helps in achieving the business objectives. This quote becomes even more meaningful in the era of digitalization in unlocking the true potential of Culture.
Culture isn't about "Casual Fridays" or "Comfy Chairs" in the office. Instead, it's about the shared values and ethos of your organization. It is about how your employees react to high-pressure situations and how they treat their peers, customers, and other stakeholders. An interesting analogy that comes to mind is the book title “Employees First, Customers Second”. Can they really be separated rom each other? My take is that they are joind at the hip and perfect candidates for the Two-in-a-Box Model. Both have to co-exist but the question is whether organizations are doing enough to navigate the paradoxes or are they putting the cart before the horse?
Over the years, technology has been successfully leveraged by brands to drive a culture of customer success. However, can we use the same technology to propagate a culture of employee satisfaction? The simple answer is Yes! Technology can prove to be an indispensable tool to reinforce the organizational culture.
If organizations want Vision, Mission and Values (VMV) to be the cornerstone of company culture, they must ensure that the workforce believes in them as much as the leadership does and they become the ‘Gold Standard’ in the company. Technology makes it easier to communicate and propagate the culture. In the present times, many companies aspire to create a culture of real-time collaboration. But how does one accomplish that? Technology can come in handy in the form of real-time file-sharing and communication tools that make teamwork much more fun and hassle-free, despite the virtual work environment in which we are currently operating.
Lack of recognition is a key source of unhappiness at work. With remote working, the problem is further exacerbated, as employees no longer know where to look for validation while senior team members are grappling with more profound questions of continuity. In such a scenario, a peer-to-peer digital system works nicely to improve productivity across the organization.
Transparency, honesty, and trust in an organization’s leadership are important factors contributing to a positive employee experience. Leaders can leverage dynamic video technology to share their energy and passion with workers in today's virtual environment. Regular webcasts and pre-recorded videos from the leadership can go a long way in calming their anxiety. Leaders can use these videos to spread the message about company-wide measures to protect employee health, wellness and welfare for building employee confidence in these difficult times.
Additionally, the employees get an opportunity to stay connected with their peers and others and stay current with their updates. Organizations can leverage Social to gauge the pulse of the people through small and quick survey without waiting for the annual surveys to happen.
Traditionally, idea generation was confined to Boardrooms and Suggestion Programs that required a degree of structure. However, truly innovative organizations have taken a detour from this approach to follow a collaborative model. As they say, no question is stupid and no idea is futile. But how can an organization create a constant repository of ideas without disrupting the workflow? A virtual innovation hub is an ideal solution for employees to share inspiration whenever it strikes. It can be used to drive innovation-oriented thinking among employees, maintain an automatically updating internal knowledge base, and promote free dialogue. Including an element of gamification further encourages team members to share their ideas and thoughts.
Leaders can use such a platform to seek feedback on new policies and ideas. It is a fact that nobody is 100% correct all the time and seeking feedback on certain elements of strategy can bring in some great insights. It helps in building trust and transparency and promoting employee satisfaction by making them a part of the company’s mission and vision.
Most enterprises are facing unique circumstances currently in terms of employee management. Traditional strategies for socialization and building cohesiveness between teams no longer cut owing to forced distancing and increased adoption of remote working. Fortunately, collaborative technology can be used to combat common sources of frustration and employee isolation. For instance, remote workers often feel frustrated owing to a lack of access to resources for performing their role. A simple solution lies in creating an enterprise-wide knowledge hub that makes it easy to discover relevant information. By using predictive modeling, you can also create a Netflix-type recommendation system suggesting relevant content to employees based on their interests and past activity.
Sharing regular health-related information and updates on an enterprise-wide platform to help employees maintain their health and create a culture where they truly feel valued and cared for is something that is increasingly being examined bu CHRO’s.
Happy employees create happy customers. Therefore, it's imperative to invest in technology to improve organizational culture to create happier employees that contribute positively to the company’s bottom line.
For instance, customizable employee engagement software like HCM-NEXT can help you build employee-centric processes that boost productivity and satisfaction. Such software is not limited to automating time-consuming processes in employee management using AI/ML. Rather, it’s focused on genuine productivity, driven through engaged and happy employees. Of course, it is entirely possible to begin the process of improving company culture manually, but technology will ultimately help to implement the changes on a larger scale and rapidly.
The Employees can share their ideas openly, praise each other, collaborate, and receive curated news about organizational activities, filtered by their interests and past activity. Such tools also leverage the power of interpersonal communications to relieve anxiety and loneliness by encouraging conversations between employees even if they cannot physically meet.
HCMNEXT brings your entire workforce onto a single platform covering the entire employee lifecycle in a holistic manner. The Blue Ocean strategy of HCMNEXT ensures that a range of hitherto unaddressed areas go digital and speeden the process of driving culture in the organization. Creating a ‘Gold Standard’ should be the mantra. No more point solutions and no more integrations of various platforms.