Digital Culture and Organizational change
by Murugavenkatesh Karunanithi
Digital is not a buzzword anymore. From ordering food, daily supplies, reading magazines, to watching movies, consulting with doctors or banking, everything is on your fingertips within the comfort of your home. Almost all industries have gone through massive digitization in one way or other and haven’t spared anyone. From being one of the channels as part of an omnichannel strategy, digital has become a must-have channel for any business.
But how do you create a digital culture and manage the organizational change associated with it? Going by the conventional definition, they say digital culture is a concept that describes how technology and internet are shaping the way we interact, behave, think and communicate in a societal setting. But it’s beyond that. Like for an organization, it should be THE defacto way of increasing organizational agility, decision making, reporting and all that which simplifies work makes us innovate more and increases our productivity.
Achieving success in creating a digital culture for any organization is always a 3Iprocess (Identity, Instill and Improve)
Step 1:Identify all the tools/technologies that are needed to collect or automate manual work
Step 2:Instill a digital-first mindset across the organization with a strong commitment from every employee
Step 3:Improve both individual (employee) as well as organizational performance through the collected metrics and use it to the benefit of employee/organization
Let’s dive deeper.
Identify: The foundation of true digital culture
Any organization, irrespective of any industry/sector, encompasses the below pillars/business processes, and the tools required for digitization should be identified correctly.
Opportunity to Invoice: Ways to identify and follow up on all of the opportunities till we convert them as a client and invoice for our services/products. Mostly sales, pre-sales, finance and marketing departments would be using these tools.
Demand to Fulfillment: Tools that are required to capture the entire demand to fulfilment process of a product or service. It can be both internal and external. For example, in IT servicing industry, it could be people who need to be hired from outside/inside and talent acquisition teams would be using these tools.
Hire to Retire: Technology required to hire people/machines to service/manufacture till we retire or release them. For instance, once an employee is hired we need to do a lot of things like their onboarding/induction/work assignments-reassignments/providing feedbacks/employee support/upskilling and a whole lot of things till we release them out. This is the core of any organization and mostly all of the corporate groups like Human resources, L&D, admin, IT would be using these tools.
Support to Control and Policy to Audit: Support to control helps employees in supporting all of their operational needs and also in a way control/manage the organizational assets. Typically, this is managed by the operations team while policy to audit is a group responsible for making sure all types of compliances are being adhered to at an organization level.
All the tools required to facilitate and control the above pillars should be digitally integrated for gaining better insights.
Instil: The key to bringing forth organizational change
Having digital tools alone for each and everything is not going to solve our problems. The key to success lies in how our employees embrace this digital culture and collaborate with each other across the organization. We need to instil a digital-first mindset across the organization which might be a new change for them but this is imperative for its success.
Just the way marketing delivers hyper-personalization to increase customer conversions, organizations should understand and satisfy the specific needs of each of their employees while they go through the process of embracing digital culture. Once you create this awareness and show how this is going to help each one of them, an acknowledgement will follow suit.
Improve: The measures that are directed by data and insights
What is the use of digital culture if you don’t work on the data/insights gathered through the tools? This is extremely important as this data gives us the opportunity to acquire more information in real-time and catalyze impactful changes in a timely way.
Digital culture needs digital campaigns for mass adoption
Digital culture needs digital campaigns if we need to change the overall organizational culture. We can do as many presentations, training manuals/sessions but at the end what motivates anyone to embrace digital culture would be through digital campaigns only with a specific relevance of how it could benefit them.
Have your ever thought how this internet memes of photos/videos go viral in a short time?
Even though we come across millions of such memes only some become viral and it’s been parodied across in the ‘’Gangnam style”.The underlying factor across all these viral memes is some common thread that connects everyone across their cultures/countries.
We can also try with using digital brand mascots (like Gecko in Geico insurance) for organizations who are very traditional and don’t want to go through meme route for digital culture adoption. You can define digital mascots with personality traits campaigns that link to your organizational culture.
Companies must become more flexible and agile in structuring their workforce to prepare for a digital culture that is undergoing rapid and continuous changes. Only a workforce that is willing to adapt to these changes and a company that embraces a transformative digital culture is a company that wins.
