Getting company culture right is crucial to long term business success. And it’s widely recognised that getting culture change right is at the heart of making business transformation initiatives work. Building an open, transparent feedback-driven culture is central to organisational effectiveness, retention of key talent and overall high performance.
But even today, some people are cynical about whether technology can play a role in successfully changing company culture. Surely it is more about ‘soft’ people skills, rather than ‘hard’ systems?
What they don’t realise of course is that technology is already changing our culture and behaviour in dramatic ways; look at the way the internet and social media are driving cultural shifts in the way we respond to businesses for example, and how our expectations continue to rise. How we communicated and interact is being changed by technology on an ongoing basis.
Feedback technology facilitates a two-way dialogue between management and employees, as well as allowing employees to interact, collaborate and share ideas and concerns with each other. This means it can play an important role in supporting and realising cultural change within organisations, underpinning high performance cultures. And here are three important ways it can help.
1. Gives staff a voice
Online employee communities provide a vital channel that allows you to create a dialogue with your people and to listen to your employees. They give staff a vehicle to express their views, providing you with insights into what they are thinking. They help you gain a handle on where your culture is at right now and how change initiatives are working (or not).
Communities such as this are particularly relevant for large, geographically dispersed organisations or those with a more flexible workforce, such as mobile or shift-based employees. By letting staff log on and participate via their device and channel of choice – wherever, whenever is convenient – you can maximise involvement.
It’s important to remember that if you don’t give staff a voice in this way, they’ll just continue the conversation elsewhere, on social media and other forums where you won’t always be listening.
2. Let you track cultural alignment
At the start of any culture change initiative, it’s vital to develop a vision of the cultural model and values you’re targeting for your organisation – and put in place a plan of action to get there. By instigating a continuous programme of employee surveys and quick polls using feedback technology, you can build an up-to-date picture of how aligned your employees are too your cultural model. This can be displayed in real-time through dashboards to drive evidence-based decision making, allowing managers to pinpoint areas that need adjusting or extra resource.
3. Enables best practice sharing
A significant part of any culture change is about establishing a new set of behaviours or ways of doing things within the organisation. This needs to permeate through the entire business and with the help of feedback technologies you can spread new ways of doing things throughout people’s working lives.
As well as tracking employee adoption of new cultural norms, you can support managers during the culture change process. This can be as simple as embedding training materials within the action planning part of your real-time dashboards, giving them immediate access to information that will help them spread the word.
Managers can also share their experience and best practice examples through closed communities in order to support each other through the change process as they begin to adopt new behaviours. They can and tell others what has worked well, and where they need additional help.
Culture change is a constant, long-term process which is probably never complete. You need to keep it top and front of mind for everyone. Above all be clear, open and transparent about what is expected of people and what they should be aiming for in their specific role or function. Feedback technology gives employees a platform to voice any concerns and for managers to support each other with advice and learnings throughout the change process. It is also an invaluable tool for monitoring and measurement, giving you a steer on areas that need more attention. Technology is central to culture change in our personal lives – it is time to recognise it can do the same for your business.
