Are your employees supportive of your workplace culture? When employees feel positive about their company’s culture, they are more engaged with their work. And culture can be one of your top team productivity tools when you roll out new sales technology and initiatives.

Why Culture Is One Of The Top Team Productivity Tools

In a poll published by Gallup and Workforce, engaged employees described their workplace culture as “caring,” “innovative” and “professional.” Disengaged employees used terms such as “toxic,” “horrible” and disorganized.  Further, the research showed that employees who feel connected are “3 times as likely to be engaged at work.”

The topic of engagement is critical for businesses seeking to optimize team output on a daily basis. But it’s even more important for employers that are scrambling to keep up with a rapidly changing economy. In particular, businesses must leverage technology properly to keep up with the competition.

The Challenge of New Initiatives

Over time, some employees become complacent in their roles. They may support the culture. But they may also not actively seek to change their role or the processes they use. 

Resisting new tech tools can be a common issue with these employees.

Unfortunately, business leaders cannot afford to back away from change.

We are now operating in a business environment where the pace of work is increasing. To thrive, businesses must rely on employees to adapt and work more efficiently. In the typical sales organization, for example, the technology stack must be adopted successfully.

And your team must be ready to use, instead of run from, AI. With proper deployment, AI can be among the top team productivity tools.

According to McKinsey, as reported by vendorneutral, “70% of change programs fail to achieve their goals.” Why? The failure has much to do with employees who resist change.

As a manager, it’s your job to guide your team through transitions that are designed to maximize productivity. To do that, you may need to adjust the company culture.

Understanding Employee Mindset

In any organization, some employees will naturally hesitate to learn anything new. Others will lead the charge to learn everything they can about the latest offering in the tech stack. You’ll find information about these personal tendencies in their psychometric assessments.

Those assessments will also indicate which employees embrace change. These team members may have already experienced sweeping initiatives that were supposed to improve the bottom line. But after a few weeks, they may have abandoned the new system and returned to the “same-​old” work process.

If this happened in your organization, trace the process to find the point of failure. An employee may not have understood their role in learning and using a new tool. Additional training may prevent future failures.

Tweaking the culture to minimize these problems may also help. The responsibility falls on the managers’ shoulders. When you follow through on how a new process is going with each employee, you demonstrate its importance. 

You can increase the chance of success by expanding the role of employees who easily accept change. Ask them to lead lunch-​and-​learn sessions to explain how the new process is benefiting their outcomes. You can also assign the change leaders to mentoring positions. 

Some team members may find it less intimidating to learn from co-​workers. These employees are closer to the work. Actively involved employees will understand the nuances of where the snags may be in the new workflow.

Formally recognizing these mentor employees will improve their visibility and send a message to the rest of the team. For maximum success, you may want to do this in a kickoff meeting.

Your message should be clear and stated in positive terms: Cultural commitment to improvement is the new normal.

Commitment to Change

In a Forbes leadership post, Carsten Tams emphasizes the connection between culture and successful change. “The role of change managers is less to push through discrete change projects, but rather to design the organization in a way that enables continuous adaptation to an ever evolving environment.”

Managers who succeed will reap the benefits of using culture as one of the top team productivity tools.

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