The Role of Company Culture In Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is increasingly important for companies to be successful — merger and acquisition datashows that companies that have digital skills or capabilities built-in, or that are in later stages of digital transformation, generally have higher valuations than those that don’t. And this kind of transformation has always gone hand in hand with — it’s less about specific technologies and more about how people work so that they can learn faster and adapt to ever-changing consumer habits and technologies.
As the number of people who work digitally increases, there’s a new question about whether it’s easier or harder to create or change your culture in a remote environment where everyone works from anywhere. To answer that question, you have to break down several key aspects of digital transformation.
Cohesive teams with strong emotional conviction are important to digital transformation and achieving general agility because they allow people to connect, learn, improve and perform better over time. In the traditional office, connection between people was relatively easy to achieve because people naturally would bump into each other and communicate. But now, with the typical water cooler chatter going quiet, connections are weaker. With some of the uniqueness of each work environment gone, it might be harder to distinguish from one employer to another. As a result, workers might have a more difficult time forming a sense of loyalty, not just to their employers, but to the rest of their team. And unless they truly feel they belong in the tribe, people may also be willing to switch jobs more easily.
A sense of tribal belonging comes from:
Making a conscious effort to build these four points within your company can ensure stronger connections that contribute to better stability.
When connections happen only within a specific functional area of a business, employees can become closed down to anything from the “outside.” They can treat others as if they are almost invisible, or even worse, become enemies with people from other departments. Most leaders agree that successful digital transformation requires that you break down these boundaries, but in remote settings where workers aren’t physically interacting, companies have to work harder to dissolve existing silos and make sure that people really understand and have empathy for each other. It’s just too easy to get consumed by intra-department meetings all day, with no interaction with anybody else.
In these circumstances, companies are trying to mimic daily office interactions and align workers with activities like virtual happy hours, mindfulness sessions, classes or designated times to share experiences. This is all good and important, but it is not enough. It’s tough to maintain the excitement with these initiatives over video conferences all day. It’s fundamental to bring these interactions to the day-to-day work activities in an engaging, empathetic way that also generates productive results. Design thinking techniques are especially good for this purpose — and yes, they do work in the remote, virtual environment!
Customer centricity simply means understanding customers and building a sense of empathy for their experiences, desires and needs. You can use both quantitative and qualitative information to get an idea of who your customers are and how they behave.
Typically, companies use surveys, focus groups, in-loco observation and of course, digital analytics to learn about their customers. It has become more difficult to observe customers in-loco, however, and leaders have to understand a range of new digital behaviors.
