How software improves company culture?

Systems underpin culture

In all areas of business, we rely on systems to operate efficiently. The same goes for people and relationships, only those systems are often much more complex than a flowchart or piece of computer code can ever explain. What does help, however, is having clear routines and operations that can guide the way we interact and work with each other.

This is where smart software systems can improve and strengthen successful human relationships in the business world.

Collaboration

At the core of any healthy culture, you will always find that sense of collaboration. The ability to work together towards common objectives and helping each other is central to making everyone feel valued and significant. By utilizing software that makes communication and collaboration easy you can avoid the stress that often comes with isolated or siloed teams.

A modern business library of collaboration tools includes at least one project management system. This is where each team member is able to access visual overviews of projects and share files and information.

 Most modern collaboration systems enable conversation threads to grow within the system – keeping all relevant information in one place.

Another flavour of collaboration is of course instant communication. While this is particularly useful for distributed teams or working across long distances, it can also be a quick and easy way to send a short request across a building.

Fun and games

Few things help build morale as much as having fun together. Organising friendly competitions, draws and social gatherings can be made easy using online tournament systems and planning tools.

It’s becoming popular to apply a form of ‘gamification’ to both work and learning. It can be easy to create an interactive scoreboard for sales numbers, phone calls, bug fixes or other measurable areas of the business to encourage some friendly competition. For others, the gaming element could come in the form of learning achievements and knowledge badges.

Transparency

In businesses where a negative culture is brewing, transparency is often one of the first things to get overlooked. A lack of openness means that things get discussed in small cliques of people, where others feel left out. The best thing the business can do to counteract this behaviour is to instil a sense of transparency across the organisation.

Many businesses also use the reporting functionality in their CRM or business management systems to create visual representations of performance.

Training

Ongoing training is a huge part of nurturing a good company culture. This goes beyond basic skills and operations training, to also entail training on values and behaviour. This can be particularly important when a merge between two businesses occurs, or when the company is global and relies on people from different parts of the world being able to work comfortably together.

There are plenty of learning management systems (LMS) available, some which are specifically tailored to different industries.

Software as part of the business environment

As we see recurring examples of in the business world, culture is far from straight-forward. The complexity of human behaviour is hard to predict and sometimes impossible to understand. But although we can never eliminate the element of human carelessness, we can do our very best to create a business environment where the good qualities flourish and bad behaviour is quickly shut down – and software can help us do this in more ways today than ever before.

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