4 steps to building a successful digital culture for your people

Is your business digital-ready?

If you’re in any way involved with deploying new tech in your organisation, it’s likely that you will have been asked this question many times before.

But what does it really mean to set up your business in a way that makes it ready and open to adopting everything digital?

It’s called a ‘digital culture’ and it goes beyond just the tools that you and your people use. It’s about the training, processes and mindset that you embed into your business to ensure you’re getting the most out of your digital tools and priming yourself for what the future holds.

Investing in new tools can come with plenty of advantages, but it also comes with the risk of leaving your employees behind. Part of the problem can be a lack of rigorous and regular upskilling, but another aspect is failing to make your employees a part of crucial investment discussions and decisions.

Success comes from ensuring your employees are the foundation of your digital culture. So how can you build a culture of empowered and motivated people who have the tech they need at their fingertips?

Answering these questions means having insight from your employees. So consider the value of diversity and inclusion networks that connect and support the varied demographics of your business and help unlock sponsors or advocates for your culture.

These networks are invaluable to ensuring your planning is going to meet the specific needs of the people at the heart of your business.

Digital culture is all about holistic change, embedding digital across your business, not just implementing a new system. But planning these phases of investment can be tricky, especially with such a rapidly advancing tech landscape.

The key here is to not neglect the planning stage. Lean on your digital partners to understand what the implementation process looks like and get all the advice and expertise you can before pressing go.

With the right onboarding, training and troubleshooting processes in place before you implement, you’ll be in the right place to make rapid improvements.

Let’s look at a specific example from Virgin Media O₂. Say you want to introduce a new digital platform such as Workplace, which is like Facebook for your company. Introducing this quickly may open up comms and collaboration, but if your people don’t fully understand how to use the tool they can get lost in disorganised feeds and miss the important content like company updates.

The crucial step in building a digital culture for your people is giving them the skills to use their tech.

82% of jobs in the UK now require digital skills according to Digital Poverty Alliance, so training can’t be seen as a one-off.

It’s crucial to ingrain basic digital practises into employees as a foundational step so they can maximise the potential of the technologies they are using before taking on any enhanced training.

Upskilling should be offered when employees are comfortable and ready to top up their skills and address any specific concerns they have.

A common mistake is that we try and upskill people on everything all at once and then wonder why knowledge and adoption is low. Training your team to exploit the benefits starting with the basics and then, when they are comfortable, going back with enhanced training will help them realise the tech’s full value.

It’s also beneficial to champion superusers and empower them to help their peers.  By spotlighting a few users who haven’t previously used a new tool, you can build a network of advocates who can help with onboarding new employees.

Peer-to-peer learning is effective for exposing people to knowledge that they might not have found themselves, according to Deloitte. So help your employees help themselves, even if that means taking a tactical step back.