By Speaker Digital May 8, 2020

Digitale Culture - Abstract

We live in a fully digitalized world that is constantly evolving and improving faster and smarter than ever before. As a good leader, it is our job to be always highly informed and willing to take action when technology improves – once again. We have to be willing to change, adapt, and evolve with technology and never work against it. Those who will fight the digital culture will end up losing what they worked so hard for because others will be better, more profitable, and advanced.

Those who grow and bloom with the growth in Digital Culture will seek great success in our near future. In this blog, I will give you the top seven steps you must follow as a manager/leader/entrepreneur to build, maintain, and grow a Digital Culture within your company.

What is Digital Culture?

Most people prefer calling it a Digital Culture over just simply calling it the Digital Transformation as implementing technology is actually more about people than anything else. Therefore, Company Culture is a top priority when it comes to building a Digital Culture. This concept only works when all employers work together as a group rather than individuals or as I prefer to call it – as a culture.

The perfect employee for building a great Digital Culture is autonomous, flexible, and agile.

With all this in mind, the goal of Digital Culturist is to explore this area. We want to dive deeper into what a great manager guide, to “building” a Digital Culture, would look like. Are you willing to participate?

THE HOW-TO-MANAGER-GUIDE

Make sure to prepare your leaders

With leaders such as other managers, managers on duty, or assistant managers, it is important to assure that they have the necessary skills in leadership, management, and digital knowledge to lead effectively towards building Digital Cultures. Many people are thrown into management positions without having the right skills or training. If the Digital Culture is meant to grow strong the leaders need to be ready to lead correctly.

The leaders need to create an example for all employees and if that means it is necessary to provide them with extra classes, training, and skills then this is the only right thing to do.

You have to strengthen the internal communication from human resources

As already mentioned, if you want to achieve a successful digital transformation the internal communication with all employees is key. This includes informing all employees not only on how building a Digital Culture will help the company to grow but also how it will benefit every individual employee and their own working environment.

This can give the employee a feeling of being involved in the process of growth and therefore motivates them to be more committed, motivated, and disciplined, which will help to improve the business as well as the general working atmosphere. When employees feel like they actually matter, they automatically feel more dedicated to work harder.

Assure you know exactly which skills your employees need to develop

Once your employees feel willing to learn and grow within the Digital Age rather than resisting it, it is important to raise awareness on specific skills that they need to develop.

Certain technical skills are vital to have in literally any profession, to save time and money. Instead of sending technical issues to the IT department straight away, it would be faster and more profitable if all employees have at least a basic technical knowledge if not more than that.

Every employee needs to be able to understand the major tech trends, the company’s tech ecosystem, and the disruptive technology in their profession. Apart from that, each individual has to have the skill to master their own tools and how to use them correctly, efficiently, and to understand their purpose.

Understanding the purpose is vital when it comes to running a business successfully. Therefore, I wrote another article about why being purpose-driven is so important.

For more information click here

Very great skills to develop in growing a digital culture are meeting on the middle ground between work methodologies and certain soft skills such as:

Being able to work independently
Being able to handle failure management
Being highly responsive and able to adapt to the ever-changing technology
Being willing to take necessary risks
Having advanced customer service knowledge
Seeking constant innovation in your ecosystem
Seeking awareness of your evolving profession and market and keeping up with competitors.

When you have a specific vision which skills your staff need to develop you can head to step number four.

Give your staff a boost with further training & enabling

By the time you identify the skills your staff needs to develop your Digital Culture is already getting to a step of consciousness that many companies often don’t even reach. Then, do not fear to train your staff in certain fields or even invite an outer professional to teach your staff important skills and knowledge about the constantly growing and evolving technology and its working culture.

When creating a successful digital transformation it is very beneficial to invest in staff enabling and training. Firstly, with improved skills, training, and education your employees get a chance to grow with the company and therefore become more willing to grow with the digital culture rather than resisting it. However, another great reason for advanced staff training is that you are creating long-lasting positive results in your Digital Culture as your employees will be able to work harder, better, faster, stronger – digitally.

But trainings is only one part, take role-oriented enabling as a whole into your focus. Concepts such as Learning Journeys are great approaches, supported by digital products, to set up an efficient and motivation enabling environment.

Why Learning Journeys are efficient und effective?

The aspects of informal and formal learning content of role-based Learning Journeys, customized to the employee needs and development, mixed with aspects of gamification lead to a high efficiency in employees enabling.

High level of automation in combination with re-usable content make Learning Journeys a good approach also from cost point of view.

The role-based Approach of the Learning Journeys makes each Journey individual. The employees focusing on the right content, the right time.

…more?

Make sure you encourage agility among the whole organization

I highly believe in the philosophy of agility and innovation, having a conscious approach motivated by those two aspects can be very effective in building a Digital Culture. Adapting to changes and overcoming any obstacles as they occur, quickly and dynamically is crucial when it comes to a successful digital transformation, especially when working with software onboarding.

Furthermore, employees must maintain this mindset to help to create a Digital Culture that works hand in hand with experimentation, innovation, and fast decision making.
Great leadership is crucial when it comes to building an agile and innovative philosophy for every individual of the business. Teach that it is okay to fail. However, if employees fail they need to fail fast and adapt even faster. – That’s the right attitude.

Let your staff test out new things or skill them in work fields that go beyond their current profession and you might get surprised by the great outcome for building your Digital Culture, your relationship with your staff members, and the company.

Make sure you are providing the necessary technological support

If you really want your business to grow toward a Digital Culture you won’t be able to avoid investing in necessary technological equipment such as software support. For your employees to perform on a superb level you need to give them the right tools to do so.

Any software can be kitted up with in-line navigation, real-time support, and on-screen guidance 24 hours a day seven times a week, which can make working hours way more efficient.

If you provide helpful tools like digital adoption solution programs your employees will have it a lot easier to learn how to use their software correctly and most efficiently. Apart from that, you save time having to help them yourself and they feel more independent and less frustrated which leads to – happier employees.

And if your employees are happy, the results get phenomenal.

Help your employees to perform better and everybody wins.

Try to encourage new habits and daily practices

A Digital Culture grows well just like everything else in life with having daily practices and creating new beneficial habits as the Digital Transformation requires new work methods and habits it is best to implement these with daily exercises.

A very great tool to support your employees to continuously learn new things and feel less frustrated when learning new habits is so called continuous retrospective. …more about this topic?

Digital Culture in 7 easy - World of digitalization

Conclusion - What makes a Digital Culture successful?

Research has shown that companies that promote building a Digital Culture are five times more likely to be successful and usually sustain very strong performance.

The most important thing is to invest into a long-lasting Digital Transformation Culture rather than a short term based Digital Transformation to create the best results possible.

If leaders create a good example by building the necessary digital infrastructure their employees will happily follow. Therefore the right leadership is decisive when it comes to building successful Digital Cultures. Simply having a good digital strategy won’t ever be enough.

Remember this is more about people than anything else.

In this case your staff. This is your paramount to success.

If you follow the steps above you will easily thrive into the age of digital evolution.

If you need more help in becoming a successful digital gamechanger feel free to get in touch with me here. I am happy to help!

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