One of the biggest challenges that companies face in today’s competitive market is building a strong—and attractive—company culture. As more and more millennials enter the workforce, an organization’s culture is becoming a key factor in how candidates determine where they want to work. From attracting and retaining top talent to boosting innovation and growth, companies can reap several profound benefits by creating a great company culture.
So how can companies build and sustain an appealing culture that reflects a core set of values and keeps employees engaged? The key is to embrace and leverage the power of technology. Here are five ways technology can help you improve your company culture.
1. Reward and Recognize Employees
Modern workers—more than the generations before them—seek purpose and value in what they do for a living. Performance recognition software can be a powerful tool for driving productivity by measuring and showing employees the impact of their work.
By rewarding and acknowledging employees for their efforts, recognition programs quickly and effectively demonstrate your commitment to creating a positive company culture.
Our Recommendations: 15Five, Kudos, Tap my Back, and Globoforce each offers unique ways to show your employees how much you appreciate their work.
2. Create Clear Career Paths
Studies have shown that clear and flexible career paths motivate high performers. Many companies have integrated internal recruiting tools that give employees a first look at internal positions that may be a strong fit for them. Some software can even scan the movement of other employees at the company and provide a view of potential career paths.
Offering transparency into new positions and empowering employees to pursue them can establish a culture of opportunity at your company.
Our Recommendations: TalentGuard, C2 Technologies, PathSavvy, and the Seven Stories Exercise offer high-tech and low-tech ways to create career paths.
3. Embrace and Encourage Flexibility
Flexibility in the workplace has been linked to many benefits for both employers and employees. While the most surprising benefit of flexible work hours may be increased employee engagement, there are several other cultural benefits as well:
· Stronger loyalty
· Higher productivity
· Lower absenteeism
· Reduced turnover
Fortunately, cloud-based technologies make it easy for employees to log in and access projects from anywhere. Whether employees choose to work from home or have flexible in-office hours, this mobility provides workers with more control over where and when they do their jobs—resulting in a healthier work-life balance.
Our Recommendations: Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and ShareFile offer cloud-based collaboration options—often providing a lot of space for a relatively low cost.
4. Provide Access to Training
A well-trained workforce is the cornerstone to a company’s success. In fact, access to training has been linked to higher morale and profit, in addition to these employee benefits:
· Increased productivity and impact
· Increased job satisfaction
· More opportunities for promotion
Many companies are investing in virtual training programs to provide employees with an ecosystem of tools, knowledge, and support to demonstrate their commitment to a positive work culture. Technological advances have made training and skill development programs significantly more compelling and economical. Companies can utilize rich video, video streaming, audio, and shareable content experiences to quickly and effectively train employees and create a rewarding and positive company culture.
Our Recommendations: Depending on your needs and your resources, Jigsaw, Lynda.com, and Skillshare can provide formal or informal employee training options.
5. Communicate Frequently and Effectively
Communication and collaboration are crucial for team performance and productivity—but the days of long email threads and hours of in-office meetings are in the past.
The development of online chat programs and project management tools has reinvented the way teams communicate and collaborate. These digital productivity tools can help teams foster a stronger sense of community by keeping teams connected, communicative, and collaborative.
Our Recommendations: Slack, Hipchat, and Jabber are popular chat programs, while Trello, Asana, and Airtable are popular project management tools. All offer free and paid versions to suit your needs.
When used effectively and strategically, technology can help create an environment in which employees feel challenged, motivated, and engaged. To stay competitive with today’s workforce, look for innovative and creative ways to use technology to build and improve your company culture.