When corporate culture and digital transformation are misaligned due to low IT maturity, it can slow down innovation and degrade corporate culture. And although digital transformation is now a core business strategy, corporate culture is equally important. After all, your employees will be the ones implementing your digital transformation strategies, so everybody needs to be on board.
Digital transformation involves a top-down approach to digitizing the processes, products, and operations of an organization. Corporate culture, on the other hand, refers to your employees’ habits, processes, attitudes, and beliefs.
Communicating a clear vision and making sure you have the right team and partnerships to realize digital transformation goals can safeguard your corporate culture and foster positive change.
Read to learn more about preserving corporate culture in the midst of digital transformation and how managed services can help keep everything afloat.
Corporate Culture Challenges During Digital Transformation
Despite the importance of aligning corporate culture with digital transformation, many organizations struggle to achieve a digital-first corporate culture due to low IT maturity. When your IT team is overworked, and more focused on putting out fires than advancing business goals, it can be difficult to align that corporate culture with a proactive and innovative approach like digital transformation.
Low IT maturity affects the corporate culture throughout your organization. When employees are working with legacy systems that hinder productivity and efficiency, they can view IT or any new technology as just another inefficiency. Some of the top corporate culture challenges that organizations can face with digital transformation include:
- Resistance to change. When your team is in crisis mode and focused on maintaining systems instead of growing, it can be hard to believe that change is possible or positive.
- Lack of training. Leaving employees to “figure it out” is an easy way to see digital transformation collapse before it ever really begins. Employees need comprehensive training in new tools and processes.
- Fear of innovation. Without educating employees on how their jobs will transform, employees can fear that digital transformation strategies like automation will take over their jobs.
- Lack of digital skills. This is one of the leading problems that get in the way of digital transformation.
Without addressing these digital transformation blind spots, your efforts may come to a grinding halt. Even worse — lack of vision and fear of innovation can harm your corporate culture, and you can lose the trust of your employees.
How to Strengthen Corporate Culture for Digital Transformation
Digital transformation must include transforming and strengthening corporate culture at the same time. Here are some ways you can preserve corporate culture before and during your digital transformation.
Start With Vision
Digital transformation means something different for every organization. It’s up to you to decide what the larger vision of your digital transformation efforts will be. Are you focused on efficiency and automation? Is the vision to provide digital experiences for your customers?
Sharing your vision on every level of your organization can boost your corporate culture and get your employees as invested as you are in digital transformation.
Provide Opportunities for Collaboration
Digital transformation is simply not possible without collaboration and communication. Instead of frustrating and inefficient silos, create as many opportunities as possible for your IT team to collaborate towards digital transformation goals.
Collaboration boosts corporate culture because it fosters an environment where everybody is working together to achieve common goals.
Rehire Your Employees
Digital transformation is meant to simplify processes, but it does add complexity to your IT team. In the early stages of digital transformation, “rehire” your employees and take stock of who has the skills to facilitate changes.
Topgrading, a 12-step interview and hiring process, can help weed out the team members that will improve your IT maturity. When you have only the best people on your team, it can improve corporate culture by keeping your digital transformation efforts moving forward.
Managed Services: The Life Preserver for Your Corporate Culture
Most organizations don’t have enough in-house IT maturity or a big enough IT team to handle complex digital transformation projects. Trying to power through digital transformation with a small, overworked, and undertrained team can harm your corporate culture. Instead, you need to focus on simplifying your employees’ lives, not adding friction points.
Partnering with a managed service provider (MSP) is a great way to buff your in-house IT capabilities, so you can realize your digital transformation goals without eroding corporate culture. MSPs are more than just technology vendors — they’re technology partners that fit in with your corporate culture and help create a consistent digital transformation strategy, as well as plug in any skill gaps your IT team needs.
MSPs get to know your business from the ground up and tailor strategies that work for you. Working with an MSP can help foster a corporate culture of innovation and make your core processes more efficient. As a result, your IT team has the breathing room to grow and work on core business goals.
Your corporate culture doesn’t have to sink because of digital transformation. Dyopath can help clear the murky waters of digital transformation so you can continue to innovate and realize your core business goals. We provide simple solutions to complex IT challenges so you can stay ahead of the game in digital transformation.
Schedule a meeting to learn more about DYOPATH’S solutions.