We live in the digital age, and for this, today, corporate culture has a fundamental role to play for an enterprise’s success and sustainability.
Rapid technological and sociological changes make being adaptive and creating a corporate environment that encourages innovation, collaboration and employees’ wellbeing ever more important.
Corporate culture in the digital age
What is Corporate culture? It is the set of values that characterize a company and which are lived at an implicit and explicit level. In the Digital Age, Corporate culture should be based on values such as transparency, flexibility, innovation and focus on employee experience. This kind of culture does not reject the challenge of continuous change, but rather embraces it, and promote an environment in which employees can feel valued, supported and motivated to contribute to the company’s success.
Best Practices for Creating the Right Corporate Culture
For a strong and authentic corporate culture in the digital age, it is fundamental to adopt some best practices:
- Inclusive Leadership: leaders should be positive, engaging and inclusive models, promoting diversity, equity and personal enhancement;
- Effective Communication: a company’s internal communication should be open and transparent. This is essential not only to keep employees informed, but also to make them feel engaged in the decision-making processes;
- Diversity and inclusion promotion: there should be a proactive commitment to create an inclusive work environment: each employee should feel respected and valued;
- Collaborative technologies adoption: generally speaking, these kind of technologies help employees to work in a more effective and collaborative way, even if they work remotely.
Employees’ engagement strategies
it is important that employees feel involved, not only for their well-being and personal and professional development, but also because, in this way, they will always work with the common good of the company in mind. To engage employees in the digital age one can adopt various strategies:
- Training and development programs: by offering training and development opportunities to employees one will make them feel satisfied and valued, and will also improve the internal company expertise;
- Internal communication platforms: by using them, employees can be informed and connected to each other, they can feel they are part of a team and, because of that, work better;
- Wellbeing initiatives: investing in wellbeing improves employees’ satisfaction and productivity, and it’s a great investment for the company;
- Company’s social media: through a company’s social media channels one can create a sense of community and belonging among employees and collaborators and promote the sharing of ideas and knowledge
Measuring and evaluating digital corporate culture
One should always use Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to measure corporate culture. This way, one can have an objective look on the company environment and monitor improvements (and worsening) following the corporate culture’s promotion’s initiatives.
Furthermore, there are plenty of analysis instruments that can help enterprises to figure out their improvement areas and, consequently, to adapt their strategies.
Corporate culture is not optional
Even if we don’t care about it, corporate culture exists independently from the attention we give it: if it is out of our control, we risk having a corporate culture that doesn’t encourage communication and collaboration but, instead, promote discomfort and dissatisfaction.
For this, it’s important to monitor, evaluate and improve corporate culture, by focusing on innovation, collaboration, wellbeing and enhancement of the individual: this way, companies will be able to adapt even to rapid changes both in the technological and social spheres, and to prosper more and more.