Digital Culture: 6 Tips to enhance workplace conversations

Article by Alexa Lemzy, Marketing and Communications Manager at TextMagic

Your culture plays a vital role in driving the growth of your company. Digital culture relates to the way digital technologies shape communication within the workplace. The way your workers converse gives an insight into your company culture.

Given the recent acceleration in digital transformation, understanding how to improve your digital culture is more important now than ever. Let’s look at some effective steps you can take to enhance workplace communication in the new high-tech environment.

Why is digital culture so important?

If you want to stay competitive, you have to revolutionize communication in your organization using cutting-edge technologies. You need to embrace digital culture for the following reasons:

• It improves work speed by breaking the hierarchy and empowering employees to make decisions based on their judgments.
• Digital culture enhances innovation by creating a workplace that promotes learning and utilizing the latest solutions.
• It promotes a healthy workplace culture by improving collaboration and offering career growth and challenging opportunities.
• Digital culture creates a breeding ground for new talent that prioritizes an autonomous and flexible workplace.
• It is essential for engaging and retaining the current workforce by enabling them to see the impact of their opinions.

Developing a strong digital culture will enable your company to leverage all top-notch technologies to streamline your team communication and enhance collaboration. And this is a key factor in staying ahead of your competition.

Rethinking workplace conversations

How your employees interact says a lot about your company’s culture. Fostering human communication in your office will create an atmosphere of trust and a sense of belonging. Rethinking workplace conversation can help build a people-centered digital culture enhancing an open, collaborative, and productive workplace.

How can you have the best of both worlds? Here are some tips for effective workplace communication:

1. Create a receptive atmosphere

At the foundation of every workplace, communication structure is the atmosphere within which conversations are conducted. If you want to build a people-centric culture, there is a need for a receptive atmosphere where employees are not afraid of being in the conversation. Netflix, for example, is famous for valuing ‘people over processes’ and is devoted to building inclusivity from the moment of hiring.

It is challenging to innovate workplace conversation in a place that is not friendly and receptive. The first step towards enhancing workplace conversations is to create a safe space for effective communication. This can be done by strategically enacting policies that make the leadership friendly and eager to listen to everyone. This results in a company where everyone feels valued and is willing to collaborate towards common goals.

2. Identify potential conflicts and sort them out using diplomacy

Disagreements are bound to occur. What makes the difference is how you choose to solve them. To avoid escalation, wise leaders take proactive measures to identify potential conflicts.

The goal is to prevent conflicts even before they become apparent. Once again, you have to make this happen by leveraging policy-making. Create a system responsible for identifying potential conflicts and sorting them out strategically.

3. Institute a robust feedback system

An active feedback system is one of the heartbeats of workplace conversations. Communication is far from being effective if there is no strategic feedback loop that ensures every idea is exhaustively discussed. Virgin Group has long recognized the benefits of incorporating employees’ feedback in company policies and processes. They practice listening to the recommendations from employees and acting upon them as a way to build a people-first culture fostering workplace communication and collaboration.

Instituting a robust feedback system enables effective communication and enhances collaboration within and across teams. To do so, develop a schedule for collecting employee feedback using customized questionnaires.

4. Use a messaging tool to promote effortless communication

You can adopt messaging tools to streamline the communication processes and make things easier and faster. A good messaging solution comes with great features like automation, mass messaging, and other necessary features for collaboration and effective communication.

There is a great variety of instant messaging platforms that can enable your team to exchange quick pieces of information and updates. You can use Mattermost for self-hosted team chat, Slack for a chat-powered workplace, or Discord for always-on voice chat. Google Chat is specially designed for Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) users, and Microsoft Teams is intended for large organizations broken down into teams. Another option best suited for small and medium-sized teams is Chanty. Whatever instant messaging tool you choose, you will empower your team with a common communication platform and help improve collaboration.

Another excellent way to make sure that nobody’s left behind is implementing a text messaging platform, such as the TextMagic online SMS chat offers. You can use it to keep your employees and teams updated through automated messages and reminders irrespective of the availability and strength of the internet connection.

Select and implement a uniform platform to facilitate communication in and across your teams.

5. Leverage video-conferencing technologies and schedule regular meetings

Video conferencing solutions are an ideal substitute for one-on-one and team meetings. Video-based conversations breach the gap generated by not being in the same place. Many companies across various industries report using such technologies to enhance internal communication and collaboration. Forbes’s teams have been carrying out their video meetings since pre-pandemic times, and O2 has also embraced the culture change by implementing video conferencing. You can choose from a wide range of full-fledged platforms.

Zoom offers clear audio and high-quality video along with instant sharing capabilities. The Zoom Basic option perfectly fits the needs of small businesses, whereas if you’re running a larger organization, you should opt for a paid plan. Microsoft Teams hosts up to 300 users at a time and is designed to ensure seamless team communication and collaboration.

Google Meet is another option you might want to consider, especially if you’re using other Google products. Cisco Webex may be a perfect choice if you’re focusing on remote support and webinars. One nice hack to consider if you want to save some money, use one of the platforms listed here for your marketing efforts (like webinars), but also to host internal conference calls. These platforms are dual purpose in most cases.

In addition, scheduling regular meetings is a strategy used by leaders to keep everyone informed and committed. It is also useful for instituting an active feedback system.

6. Assess your digital culture policy and optimize when necessary

Assess the results of your strategies to make sure they align with your goals. If things are not working as they should, review your policies and optimize accordingly.

Enhancing your workplace conversation is not a one-time set-and-forget effort. Keep reviewing your principles until you create a robust digital culture.

Conclusion

Adopting digital culture strategically can significantly improve your company’s internal processes and spur massive growth. There are leading technologies to help you improve workplace communication. You are bound to see great results if you meticulously adhere to the tips above.