Employee engagement serves as the bedrock for sustainable and sporadic business growth. A Gallup report also shows that companies that engage their employees have 21% higher profitability and 17% higher productivity than those with disengaged employees. Despite this, the State of the Global Workplace, in their recent report, shows that only 85% of employees are disengaged. Not only does the disengagement of employees breed dysfunctionality in the workplace, but it also reduces the profitability of an enterprise and increases employee turnover.
While many companies have tried to influence the emotional and physical investment of their employees in the organization, many have failed at it, while others have no strategy for sustaining it. The world is now a digital space where most business activities are controlled technologically. Therefore, creating a digital culture in the workplace is a proven means for sustaining employee engagement and driving growth.
In this article, you’ll be enlightened on what it means to build a digital culture beyond the use of digital tools and how it helps sustain employee engagement.
In the workplace, digital culture transcends the use of technology or digital tools to achieve business goals; it is the culture that guides an organization’s approach to technology, innovation, and collaboration. It encourages the embrace of digital transformation by having all the employees prioritize a forward-thinking mindset that sustains consistent growth.
The thriving of digital culture in an organization is based on the engraftment of organizational values into the culture. Organizations with a great digital culture adjust their standards and align their values with digital transformation.
An organization with a robust digital culture greatly influences employee engagement by creating a workplace system that encourages and values employees. Companies that add value to their employees by training them in high-demand digital skills and creating a culture that nurtures those skills are creating systems for sustaining their engagements.
In this system, it is easier for employees to thrive. It fosters creativity, innovation, and collaboration amongst employees, enabling them to birth great solutions that grow the organization. It also educates the minds of the employees, communicating their values to them and helping them to see the importance of their contribution to the organization.
When employees understand their place in an organization and their worth is visibly communicated, it increases their engagement, which is how emotionally and physically invested they are in the organization. This, in turn, boosts their productivity and increases their efficiency. This is how organizations boost their revenue by investing in employee engagement.
There are so many ways of creating a digital culture; some of them include the following:
Before establishing a digital culture, employees must be made to understand the importance of digital literacy in the business world and how it influences their growth individually. This inclines their hearts to learning, as nobody wants to be left out in this digital world. Therefore, creating this awareness amongst employees is a way to open their hearts towards learning and embrace every step taken to help them become digitally literate.
Having fed their minds with the importance of digital literacy, it’s imperative that you empower them with the necessary tools and skills that will help them become digitally literate. After their hearts must have been open to learning due to their awareness, enroll them in digital training programs and equip them with the required tools needed to groom their digital skills.
In creating a digital culture, it does not end with empowering employees with digital skills and tools; it also requires creating a platform for them to interact and nurture the skills they have acquired. When every person in the workplace is empowered, it improves communication, fosters collaboration and innovation, and also increases productivity. On this platform, everyone can communicate on the same level, think progressively, and birth new innovations that create new growth standards for the company. Therefore, creating an atmosphere where employees can put their skills to use is a sustainable way to drive employee engagement.
Though there are many strategies that have been used to keep employees engaged, they only have a temporary effect and achieve very little result. Creating a digital culture that empowers employees and makes them valuable to themselves and the organization is key to enhancing employee engagement. Employees are likely to physically and emotionally invest themselves in work environments that understand their value and communicate it by empowering them with digital skills and tools to increase their productivity. Also, it increases employee retention as employees find fulfillment in their workplace and desire to remain there longer than they might have intended.
