Your IT Culture and Your Bottom Line: What You Need to Know

Generally speaking, employees want to be actively invested in their jobs — it’s just that many of them don’t have the ability to do so. People want to see value in what they’re spending so much time doing each day. It’s part of what gives them a purpose. Out of all the ways in which the average business can achieve this, placing a high priority on positive IT culture is certainly one of the most effective. 

Modern-day positions require communication, collaboration, data collection, and feedback. All of these things can be supported and driven by technology, provided that you’re coming at the situation from the right angle. Understanding just how your IT culture affects your employees and, ultimately, your bottom line is one of the keys to guaranteeing that your own business is headed in the right direction.

To get a better understanding of what IT culture actually is and why it’s important, it’s necessary to find out more about how it relates to your larger corporate culture in the first place. 

Corporate culture is a term that simply refers to the beliefs and behaviors that determine how your company functions on a basic human level. The values that you hold dear, the ideals that you believe in, the goals that you’re trying to accomplish and how — these are all things that feed directly into your corporate culture. 

IT culture is a natural extension of that. When executed properly, a healthy IT culture can actually be a great way to reinforce that larger corporate culture in a way that can’t help but improve business performance. It’s about more than just making sure that your employees have functional computers to work with each day. 

It’s about giving them the tools, the resources, and the support they need to succeed on both their terms and yours whenever they’re given the opportunity to do so.

To get a better understanding of why IT culture (and, by association, corporate culture) is so essential, consider the following statistics: 

• One study estimated that companies who have high numbers of engaged employees tend to outperform those that do not by as much as 202%
• More than one in four employees who responded to another survey said that they don’t feel like they have the tools necessary to be successful in their jobs
• Because of this, as many as 71% of employees say that they are not fully engaged
• Likewise, only about 21% of employees say that they feel like they’re strongly valued at work. That leaves 79% who sadly cannot say the same thing

Consider those statistics through the funnel of a strong IT culture, which you can only achieve by making an informed, strategic investment in modern technology. When you go out of your way to give employees access to the tools they say they need to successfully do their jobs, their work becomes easier as a result. 

They start to feel more engaged in not only their role but in your company, increasing their satisfaction across the board. It also helps increase the feeling that they’re strongly valued, as if you didn’t believe in their potential you wouldn’t be making such a significant investment in IT resources in the first place. 

At a basic level, the right technological resources can help generate a massive boost in terms of productivity and organisation. People don’t have to sort through stacks of paper documents and spreadsheets to be productive — the data they need is always at their fingertips. People don’t have to go out of their way to communicate or collaborate with their coworkers — they can create spaces online to do that with anyone, anywhere in the world. 

This creates a clear and dramatic ripple effect — one that ultimately feeds into improved business outcomes and increased productivity and quality. Remember that the University of Warwick discovered that happy workers tend to be 12% more productive than the average worker — a number that most businesses cannot afford to ignore.

In many ways, the major quality that IT and corporate culture share can all be boiled down to a single word: empowerment. An investment IT is more than just an investment in technology — it’s about putting the right tools in the hands of the right employees at the right times. It’s about making sure that they have what they need to work smarter, not harder. It’s about doing what you can to support the way they like to work so that, in turn, they can support you and your organisation. 

But even an investment in the “latest and greatest” that IT has to offer ultimately won’t mean much without a strong IT culture at your side. Technology is an incredibly valuable business asset when done right, but failing to also emphasise IT culture could potentially limit your business outcomes before you’ve really had a chance to get started working towards them in the first place. 

If you still have any additional questions about how your IT culture affects your business’s bottom line that you’d like to see answered, or if you’d like to sit down with someone and talk about your needs with true experts in the field, please don’t delay. Contact Lanrex today.