There is no such thing as a “good” or “bad” organisational culture. You can only make your culture
distinct. Your organisational culture says a lot about how work gets done. It is time for you to learn
how digital transformation can improve your organisational culture and leave a positive reputation in
the resource sector.
Organisational culture has been a business “hot topic” for decades that carries a lot of importance. A 2022 Deloitte
survey found that 94 percent of executives and 88 percent of employees believe a distinct workplace culture is
important to business success. This is especially true of mining suppliers and producers operating in this current
skills shortage, because a distinct culture that delivers a positive reputation can be the deciding factor for people to
be attracted, engaged, and remain with your business.
A formal definition of organisational culture can be that it is the set of values, beliefs, attitudes, systems, and rules
that outline and influence employee behaviour within an organisation. The organisation’s culture reflects how
employees, customers, vendors, and stakeholders experience the organisation and its brand.
What is it like to work within your organisation or with your organisation? Perhaps your organisation is slow to
move, difficult to find information, over complicated, has non-transparent processes, communication needs
improvement, high turnover of people, unskilled labour, or perhaps struggling to grow?
Organisational culture is difficult to understand because you cannot “wrap your arms around it,” but one way to
think about it is that it is your promise to people about what is the normal way to interact with your business. Just
like organisation culture, you can’t wrap your arms around digital solutions. However, digital solutions can help
position your business to be unique, and help improve your organisational culture in the following 6 ways:
- If you value a structured, process orientated organisational culture, then electronic tools can assist your people
to behave in this manner. Digital solutions can be built to provide a workflow that determines how employees
need to interact. These workflows can be built to represent how your employees currently interact, or if your
organisation is wishing to deliver change these workflows can be implemented to suit the organisation’s new
strategic direction. Electronic tools can drive change.
The workflows can provide control because they can escalate for expert review, financial authorisations, and
management approvals. Electronic systems can have securities and accessibility to information set to allow
information to permeate to all levels of the workforce depending on what position in the organisation they fulfil.
Most of all, electronic systems remove the manual handling of paperwork, downtime due to a loss of paperwork
and the probability of human error, therefore increasing people’s productivity. - Perhaps you strive for a result driven organisational culture, and you need metrics to manage it. An electronic
tool can provide accurate and current information to everyone’s fingertips – from the detail for the practitioner
to the dashboard summary for the executive. A digital solution provides information in a timely manner to
facilitate informed decision making to occur as quick as possible, while still being a stable and dependable
operation. Through visibility over all information and responsibility assigned, your organisation can improve
their financial management and profitability because the focus is clear. - Most modern workplaces encourage a collaborative culture of teamwork. This can be achieved through digital
solutions because communication is instant and fast. Also, through an electronic tool it can be both
collaborative and deliberate by allowing access to information needed to perform a job, and review and
approval processes where necessary. - Contemporary organisations set a human resource strategy to encourage and develop cultural diversity in its
workforce. An essential way of delivering this multiculturalism can be via technology, because the cultural and
language barriers can be eroded through use of a digital tool. Electronic products can be configured so field
names are more easily understood by non-English speaking users, online monitoring, online help, even
translation tools can be used to interpret text to other languages. In the case of the Rsured compliance
management system the inbuilt intuition of the software helps “fill in the gaps or the blanks” for every user, no
matter their communication capability. - If you want to tell your people that you trust them, and you want to reinforce you have a culture of “we have
nothing to hide, we hold people accountable by reporting and managing our business,” then there is no better
way to visibly entrust your people than with a technology solution that is the single source of truth across the
entire business that everyone has access to in real time. You can give people the symbol of the corner office, the
designated carpark, or a company car, but if you want to ensure your people understand that your executive
“trusts them to do their jobs well” and “your management has nothing to hide”, then give them timely, accurate
information to their fingertips on handheld devices. It’s truly valued for everyone to be informed, because it
sends the message of “we trust you with this digital tool.” - Finally, the last organisational culture that people usually think about when it comes to digital solutions is those
fast paced, and creative Silicon Valley style businesses. So, if you want an organisational culture that supports
digital change, is innovate and generates further improvements more naturally, then you need to make
electronic solutions the core of your business.
It is important upon implementation of a digital product that through change management you are seeing the
organisational culture is changing alongside it. You can see this change demonstrated via visible behavioural support offered between employees to learn the new digital product, and the positive, supportive communication relating to it by the employees that use it.
If you are operating a medium to large scale resource sector business, by embracing digital technology you will be
allowing your people resources to be even better at the people related parts of their jobs, for example leadership,
communication, consultation, management by walking around, behavioural safety interactions etc. If you are a
smaller sized business in the resource sector, by embracing digital technology you can replicate and grow your family style culture to still be in control and capable consistently in a larger scale operation.
There’s no surprise, that according to a 2022 LinkedIn study, companies with winning organisational cultures have 72 percent higher employee engagement ratings than companies with poor cultures. When people are engaged in their work, they have passion and purpose because the goals they focus on are clear. So, a distinct organisational culture can increase motivation and engagement and hence enhance the productivity of employees.
Rsured Executive Manager David Grenfell OAM is engaged by businesses nation-wide to take a “cultural pulse” of
industry. He then implements tactics to help industry executives improve their culture. Dave says, “Organisational
culture is like electricity. You may not be able to see it but the impact it makes can be monumental”. So, if your
business is looking to take your Workplace Health, Safety, Environment, Quality and Risk processes out of your
archaic paper-based approach, then Rsured is the digital solution to help make you DISTINCT. You might want to
improve in all 6 of the organisational cultural aspects highlighted above, or perhaps only a few of them; and so
Rsured is highly adaptable to suit your business requirements and changing organisational culture needs. Just like
your organisational culture is not a generic off-the-shelf product, neither is Rsured.
Jennifer McGuire
Customer Experience Manager
Rsured