📜 ⬆️ ⬇️

Software use culture in the company

The students of the beginning of the XXI century had a favorite excuse: “I had a hard disk flew, but it just left a written coursework”. Perhaps it was one of the few reasons that passed. But behind this lies lies a very important syndrome of modern society - to throw the blame on technology. The electrician crashed, the report was not handed over - the computer was frozen, the project was not completed - something was slowing down, the email was forgotten to be sent - something with mail, it rang on duplicates - CRM was dumb, etc. No culture using technology. And what kind of culture should it be, and how does it relate to corporate culture in business? Let's argue - this is a huge scope for discussion.


When working software does not leave indifferent

Corporate culture that we do not understand


What elements of corporate culture do you know? Corporate events, conference trips, purchase of books and magazine subscriptions, office meals, convenient transportation, etc. As a rule, the case in theory and in practice is limited to this list. Let us try to find a definition in specialized textbooks, for example, in the textbook "Organizational Culture" by IP Belikova. We read: Organizational (corporate) culture is a system of values ​​shared by the workforce of values, beliefs, beliefs, norms, traditions that define the corresponding stereotype of the behavior of people in the field of labor activity. Organizational culture expresses the level of social integration and professional maturity of the workforce in the process of achieving the goals of the organization . " Let's not discuss this definition, ok? To read it is already work. Let's discard all these thoughts about beliefs and traditions, and let's talk in human terms.

Company culture is determined by how employees interact with each other and how they fit into business processes, how much they accept and fulfill business goals, how they perceive the reward system. And now let's look at the points:
')

It turns out that more and more interactions and processes are accompanied by the use of software, and software in turn facilitates communications and workflows. It means that the management of the companies should pay maximum attention to the software installed by the employees. We consider several issues of managing the culture of using software in a company on the example of a CRM system for two reasons:

  1. Today, CRM-systems have become common universal software, which covers and automates most of the processes in the company (not only sales and marketing);
  2. we are developing a CRM system for RegionSoft CRM , we are introducing it to clients and, of course, we use it ourselves, therefore, as no one knows, how to work with everyone in one system, from programmers to sales people, and at the same time work productively.

Culture and lack of culture using software


There is a hypothesis, and it was not we who invented it that in the modern world organizations can be formed by the software they use. This hypothesis came from Mel Convey's famous theory (Mel Convey) about the influence of the company's organizational model on the product it develops.

In 1967, Canadian scientist Mel Convey proposed the theory that products developed by software companies absorb and reflect the organizational structure of a corporation. His theory was later confirmed by other researchers. Indeed, if you pay attention to the products of companies and read management practices in them, you can see that the software is different. For example, compare the powerful, functional, but confused and often ambiguous in the development of Android and strict, verified, adjusted iOs. So in the picture below there is only a joke share.

And how are you?

Thus, it can be assumed that the software used and the organizational culture of the company may also be related. Indeed, even by choice of a CRM system, one can understand how a company accepts itself within the market: simple startups and small creative agencies choose cloud solutions and do not really care about the customer base and data, but mature small, medium and large companies prefer either a combination of clouds and the desktop, or a pure on-prem solution - this way the data is protected more reliably, and the automation costs are predictable and often much less.

Automation by itself can not increase productivity, but together with employees, it can easily cope with this task. So, employees in the company should receive such software that will help them feel better in the corporate environment, give additional strength to work, and not take them away.

Primary activity


If your business can count costs and knows about the benefits of automation, then the workplace of each employee is automated and equipped with advanced and most importantly, necessary software. And if programmers and engineers are a priori ready to work with the necessary tools, delve into them and use all the possibilities, then other employees are quite hard on any automation. The culture of working with software should be formed from the moment the requirements are collected and not ceased throughout the program’s life cycle.


Reporting


Reports are an important corporate communication tool between employees and managers, especially in a large company. On the one hand, the reports are needed by the employees themselves in order to see the volume of solved tasks on a daily / weekly / monthly basis, and on the other, on the manager, in order to receive adequate and honest data on the state of affairs in the company. How are reports made in some companies (even IT shnyh)? At the end of the period, employees sit and fill in the plates that they lay on the ball, and the manager looks at them (or not). The most depressing thing is when they are asked to indicate the exact time of the execution of tasks. One would like to write: “From 8 am to 10 - a feat. 16:00 - war with England. ” There is no sense in such reports.

Another thing is when a report is formed according to given principles, and the information in them is valuable and practically applicable:


In the case of a developed culture of working with software in the company, reports are generated on the basis of completed tasks during the day and are either automatically sent to the manager, or the employee reviews the report, corrects and presses “Send”. Such reports make the work transparent and the relationships within the team open.

KPI


KPI (key performance indicators) is one of the most controversial management tools and an important element of corporate culture. Some companies prefer to consider key indicators as a means of stimulating (not motivating!) Employees, but in the end they get violent resistance and negative. We have already written about KPI more than once, there was even a separate article, so now we will look at the coefficients as an integral part of organizational culture.

Uh, maybe we need new software to motivate ...

How not to do.


How to do it.


Security


Security is an important part of the culture of using software in a company. Moreover, the level of security is determined by this culture. Alas, to build relationships with employees on the same trust is almost impossible. It is necessary to protect the most vulnerable sides of the business and, above all, the client base. The same program code is protected by a patent and is the intellectual property of the company, while client data is protected except with a piece of paper about a trade secret that an employee signs when he enters a job. Sometimes it is not possible to sue anything or punish an unscrupulous employee.

Therefore, it is important to establish protection, but at the same time not to impose total control like keylogger or surveillance cameras on each workplace. The rule is simple: "Feel at home, but do not climb in the refrigerator." For example, to protect the client base, it is enough to use a CRM system with specified access rights, server-level protection and logging of user actions. At the very least, you will have an established and proven fact of data compromise.


Security is also in preventive measures - if employees know that any malicious action will be immediately detected, they will think three times before starting a dark case.

Choose software as an employee


When a company hires an employee, it spends several rounds of selection and interviews, checks applicants, examines several people at the same time. But the software for work is sometimes chosen by some completely unknown ways: for example, on the advice of a business coach (a humanist who was paid by one of the vendors), based on recommendations (generated by bots), on the advice of another businessman (director of an auto parts store chooses CRM, which beauty salon uses). Meanwhile, business programs need to be selected in the same way as employees.

When it comes to choice, all processes occur between three subjects: the vendor, the client and the employees of the client. Four attributes of a business culture (according to Gartner) are superimposed on these relationships: work, make decisions, collaborate, measure. Based on this, the obvious requirements for corporate software are formed.

It should be convenient to work in it - from the point of view of practical tasks. The convenience of corporate software is quite different than the convenience of a social network or instant messenger. For usability in work programs, the relevance of the processes is primarily responsible. For example, CRM is an ideal tool for working with clients in full cycle. This means that in the first place there should not be pretty dashboards, but a desktop, a client card and end-to-end connectedness of entities (so that from any place you can create any object). Dashboards are also wonderful, of course, but when they clog up an employee’s workplace, they are worthless.

Software must meet the requirements of employees for their main activity. This fact seems obvious, but, for example, in the publishing house of one of the newspapers, the layouts were not even composed in Corel Draw or even in MS Publisher, but in Word and Power Point, then pinned into PDF and went to print. The XXI century samizdat :-) Therefore, it is more attentive to the tasks that the software must solve. By the way, this also applies to development: the bugtracker, IDE, ticket system must meet the work tasks, selected programming languages ​​and development management models. For example, in one fairly large and well-known company, replacing Jira with Bugzilla cut the time for bug fixing three times, and for the “time” gained, testers redistributed test plans among themselves, started writing scripts for automatic tests and won more time for new tests. Although somewhere the opposite effect may occur.

The software should fit into the overall processes of the company and conform to the style of leadership. Imagine hypothetically: a small advertising agency wins the prize of an advertising festival, orders are falling on it, there is a lot of customers and money, we need CRM. And here it decides that the winner of the festival to face only SAP and nothing else. As a result, a small, talented, creative and intelligent team gets on the PC a concentrate of bureaucracy, complexity and congestion in this situation. An investment in expensive software simply does not pay off - no one uses it. Accordingly, prior to implementation it is worth conducting an audit of the processes, inspecting the organizational structure, desired reporting, etc. and after that select and implement software.

All software within the company should be just the worker, and not involve employees in continuous communication. Although digital empathy (virtual communication of employees with the transfer of offline practices) definitely should be. If the system (CRM, messenger, corporate portal, email client, video conferencing, etc.) is turned into a tool for fun spending time in the office, this is fraught with procrastination and deadlines. That is why we always urge to be wary of the so-called corporate social networks and any gamification. In the end, let it be better to spend the extra 15 minutes on chatter over tea, than hours to discuss discounts in the online store in chat.

I'm not a procrastinator, I'm just unusually productive in not the most important tasks.

Software can not solve all the problems. Companies put software in and expect a miracle from him (independent work): BI should analyze itself, CRM sell itself, project management system look into the Gantt chart and poke employees in the backs half an hour before the deadline. And sometimes no one is waiting for miracles, but simply misunderstand what the software is about. Here is a recent example of how the manager of a consulting company talks about software:

Do not cite the publication, although you can easily google

What can be expected from such an understanding of software? Absolutely nothing. With this approach, any implementation will suffer fiasco. Unfortunately, it is the lack of understanding of the software that leads to false thoughts about its omnipotence. But this is just a tool, and effectively it can work only in the hands of a specialist. Therefore, the primary task is to “make friends” of employees and software, and then demand efficiency.

Software should not be imposed solely on top and for material reasons. The opinion of employees should be taken into account, they should participate in the selection and implementation of corporate software. In the end, it is for them to work in the programs, so cooperation is strictly necessary. Alas, in some Russian companies, it is very difficult to overcome the plantation from above precisely because top managers are almost vitally interested in the material aspects of implementation. In simple terms, either have a rollback, or receive bonuses the higher, the more difficult and longer the project lasts. Since this tendency cannot be overcome from below, the care of the efficient management of automation should lie with the general director. He is vitally interested in quick start, effective work and revenue growth. And he must initiate the creation of working groups. Of course, this situation is not in all companies, and it is very encouraging.

Software should not fundamentally change business processes , unless otherwise intended at the very beginning of implementation. Do not choose software that forces everyone to change their workflows, unless changing these workflows is a priority in itself. Negative reviews are often associated with this: a person chooses software not for purposes, wants, for example, to break the law, and the system has no functions to cut, rollback and black bookkeeping. Vendor is to blame for who else. A company should think about how ready it is to adapt to new software and is it ready at all. It will be much more competent to review existing business processes and implement software in accordance with them.

Changes to the software should not affect the driving processes. Any vendor of any automation system knows that a business cannot stand idle while it is being deployed or updates are rolling. All changes must occur within a separate managed process - so that employees can safely go to work in a new interface and not lose either time or accumulated results.

CRM-systems vividly illustrate this thesis. Initially, systems were conceived as a door for a client to enter a company, and nothing should interfere with the performance of this door. Therefore, the policy of plug-ins and add-ons that can be “hooked” modularly to the system seemed to everyone to be simply cloudless. But it was not there. Plug-ins quickly turned into a way of pulling money out of a client: a simple CRM is put, and then it starts ... Mail client, telephony, reports, notes, tasks - all separately and for money. Well, among other things, this zoo is often not seamlessly integrated. Therefore, serious vendors have come to CRM universalization. For example, we have so far preferred to divide our RegionSoft CRM into several editions for different business scales.

Software should bring improvements: reduce the time spent on the task, minimize disruption of time, get rid of the routine, etc. If the software is already half a year and continues to bring continuous problems and inconveniences, you need to reconsider the implementation and find out what went wrong. Corporate culture - including attitude to the time and nerves of employees. Therefore, it is important to ensure that the software “flows into the team” and is not torture or does not stand idle.

Corporate culture is primarily in the respect of employees for business and business for employees. Now, software is necessarily present in this relationship, simply because it is difficult to imagine a company without automation. It means that it is necessary to move away from traditional definitions and form a new one: corporate culture is a combination of measures, actions and tools that give a synergistic effect to achieve the goals of the participants in the workflow.



By the way, we are looking for partners in the regions of the Russian Federation and the CIS - write, call, especially if you are able and willing to work and earn. Companies and entrepreneurs are welcome to write reports, scripts, train users and take all the income from this for themselves, and only share the cost of licenses with us.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/346694/


All Articles