Building and Sustaining the Digital culture during COVID-19 & Beyond

COVID-19 outbreak is a world-changing phenomenon that will have long-lasting implications for our global economy. It’s a once in a generation global impact event. This is the opportunity for each SERVICE PROVIDER to conduct an organizational re-framing of their pre-COVID business model, behaviors & practices. Flexibility and adaptability in operational control whilst continuing to operate as close to the prescribed core organizational culture, are the traits that will secure their futures.

We are witnessing that:

·       Pandemic has severely disrupted production processes.

·       Digital has helped through the rapid scale-up of platforms resulting in changes to the traditional boundaries of firms.

·       With the advent of new business models, digital platform first firms have been able to evolve rapidly. The year 2020 can be described as the year that “a forced test of many things we had thought about but not tried.”

Building and sustaining a digital culture during COVID-19 & Beyond would require:

·       Introducing flexible and adaptable operational controls to secure SERVICE PROVIDER’s future.

·       Skill & hire for technologies such WFH, digitally secure online presence, blockchain, and IoT.

·       And most importantly, enhanced Investments in automation space as the next big thing.

COVID-19 induced pandemic and disruption is being seen as the catalyst for a global reset and the acceleration of digital transformation. Across the organization, everyone must recognize that, for a business to achieve sustained innovation excellence, it is very important that an innovative mindset must be integral to every employee’s job profile. Also, Leaderships teams need to measure and reward innovation so that it becomes a core competency that drives priority-setting, resource allocation, talent acquisition, and the development of influential leaders.

New age leadership teams know that many old ways of working are basically incompatible with a successful digital transformation culture and a tremendous, yet subtle cultural change is required. Given that every company is different, according to Protiviti (https://www.protiviti.com/IN-en/insights/bpro102) the leadership teams should consider whether the organization is a digital follower, expert, or leader:

• Digital follower — under this category, a given company has developed a digital strategy and has a proven track record delivering on digital initiatives, which are typically focused on discrete aspects of the customer journey as well as internal process automation.
• Digital expert — under this category, a given company has a proven track record of adopting emerging technologies has achieved high levels of process automation and quantitatively manages digital aspects of its strategy enterprise-wide.
• Digital leader — under this category, a given company has a proven track record of disrupting traditional business models; digital aspects of strategic plans are continually improved based on lessons learned and predictive indicators.

Other experts tend to agree. According to the Danish business leader and leadership author Torben Rick (https://www.torbenrick.eu/blog/culture/culture-change-is-key-in-digital-transformation/) , digital transformation isn’t really about technology, it’s about organizational agility - and culture plays a vital role in the digital transformation of any business.

Building and sustaining a culture of digitalization is also the new core for each organization making an attempt to grapple with the onslaught of economic process fuelled by digital disruption from its competition. digitalization is regarding permitting technology to drive your organization – your product, services, client interactions, and core operations – so as to maneuver quicker. However, digitalization conjointly needs an organizational culture where folks are both ready and willing to adapt. Thus, digital culture and transformation go hand in hand. Ignore culture and risk transformation failure. Rick identifies digital culture transformation as leading the adoption of recent technology; it's the shift from ancient, analog culture, wherever choices area unit supported marketing research, careful business cases, and careful in-house reportage, to a digitally-driven surrounding, wherever choices area unit created by cross-functional groups supported live customer-centric information. It’s being ready to fail quickly instead of being averse to risk.

Organizations don’t transform, people do.

Digital culture is a company-wide change in mindset and behavior that has a good chance of succeeding only if it is instilled from those at the top. Leaders need to demonstrate their enthusiasm for new technologies and be prepared to develop new skills themselves in order to empower people to transform within the organization.

But then one might question, why all this fuss around digital and digital culture? Well, as it turns out, with empirical evidence, it does appear that digital organizations move faster, favoring continuous iteration over refining a product or service to perfection before launching it. Another fundamental tenet of digital culture that is highlighted in multiple articles is the great benefit of flattening organizational charts. When collaboration across teams is encouraged and valued over individual effort, and employees are trusted to make judgment calls – no matter what their role – empowerment follows, and this empowerment fuels motivation, which can lead to faster decision making and, ultimately, more wins.

As the teams learn to collaborate, the organization will become more transparent, and finally, as digital culture embeds in the business, the organization’s focus will inherently shift outward. Outside expertise and customer feedback will be sought-after rather than feared as the organizational culture changes into an agile and resilient digital powerhouse.

To summarize, digital transformation depends on having a digital culture supporting it because digital culture:

·      Enables focus on customer needs rather than internal processes

·      promotes agile thinking

·      places high emphasis on collaboration

·      drives transformation

·      empowers workers across the company