How consumer tech is inspiring cultural remixes across organizations

Nurturing and maintaining workplace culture is a major priority for business leaders as hybrid workspaces become the new norm. With many employees returning to in-person offices again or adopting permanent hybrid work policies, it’s important to invest in a company culture that suits today’s new ways of working.

In a bid to improve workplace culture in hybrid work settings, business leaders often reach for common, tried-and-tested incentives, such as championing individualism and appointing people to spearhead culture-focused initiatives.

But this copy-and-paste method doesn’t always have the desired impact in today’s modern workplaces, which come with their own set of unique challenges and needs.

As adaptability reigns supreme, businesses must adopt an experimental approach toward company culture. They must provide employees with new space and tools to drive cultural remixes organically.

These shared ‘cultural moments’ are just as important in hybrid work settings. They bring people together in ways that more accurately reflect their values, humor, and behaviors than top-down incentives.

Employees — especially younger generations — want these moments of authentic connection from their workplaces. But as nurturing and maintaining work culture climbs up the hybrid priority list, how can leaders encourage it without forcing interaction?

One answer: look to the consumer tech market. There’s an opportunity for businesses to learn from consumer tech to inspire connection on their teams. The growing popularity of consumer platforms like TikTok (which surpassed Google’s traffic in 2021) has prompted enterprise technology companies to follow suit.

This is a macro trend, and communication platforms are borrowing elements of consumer tech to facilitate workplace connections. In doing so, employees are empowered to communicate in the modern workplace in a way that feels familiar and natural, feeding and shaping company culture as they go.

Consumer behavior in action at work

There are many ways consumer tech behavior is influencing the hybrid workplace. This crossover has been encouraged by the ‘always on’ culture, as well as the younger generation of tech-savvy workers.

In the consumer world where social media never sleeps, there’s an expectation for tech to be frictionless and available at any hour, anywhere in the world. There’s also an expectation for it to be collaborative, fun, and sociable. You only need to look at recent updates from Instagram and TikTok to notice how user collaboration has become a core part of their growth plans.

In today’s business world, these same expectations apply. Businesses need their tech stack to be seamless and uncomplicated, with research saying that overly complex technology negatively impacts workers’ productivity and engagement levels. They also need to service their employees around-the-clock across various time zones.

With business hours now less rigid, 24/7 availability has become an employee expectation and a key deciding factor when seeking reliable new tools for hybrid workforces.

Readily available tech encourages a continuous loop of serendipitous interactions and connection-building in the workplace. This can help build a sense of purpose and community among employees, similar to what we see in the consumer world on messaging platforms and social media.

As research says, maintaining informal awareness of what is going on in the office and a sense of community are important features of work. And according to McKinsey, 70% of professionals said that their sense of purpose is defined by their work.

With access to the right set of communication tools, employees can share knowledge, break down silos, and forge human connections.

This helps establish the desired level of purpose and community, in addition to boosting camaraderie, communication, and collaboration – three essential ingredients in facilitating modern company culture.

With a stronger sense of community, businesses can encourage a culture that champions people to be themselves. Authenticity is not only deeply valued in modern work but also needed.

A 2021 survey from Simmons University reported that 90% of people believe authenticity is extremely important at work.

Coupling this with the younger workforce changing the rules of ‘business speak’, businesses must empower their employees with the freedom and flexibility to communicate and work in a way that’s effective for the individual.

The desire to be super polished and ‘corporate’ has gone out of style, as modern work and the flexibility and freedom it brings has now proven itself effective. This is why creating the space for more nuanced, expressive interactions is essential – something that consumer tech behavior has partly influenced.

Consumer tech players believe that experience is at the heart of technology.

Salesforce found that 84% of today’s customers agree that the experience a company provides is just as essential as its products or services. Workplace tech platforms are starting to take note, from curating personalized content recommendations based on user history to integrating creative elements like GIFs, photo editing capabilities, and video.

Unlocking culture with video

Consumer video platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube have fast-tracked demand for video in the workspace. Video itself has become a more familiar communication format of choice for consumers in the last two years – and this is beginning to translate in the enterprise world.

Video is one of the most powerful, unifying ways of building connection, communication, and collaboration within organizations. From a human perspective, video can bring people closer together by capturing body language and real emotion that you can’t achieve through the written word.

In the consumer world, the ability to post live videos, edit video content, and send it easily and quickly has broken down barriers traditionally associated with video such as user confidence, usability, and accessibility.

With people starting to become accustomed to video, the benefits it brings to organizations – particularly from a cultural perspective – are impossible to ignore.

Asynchronous (or async) video is a prime example of how video is being used to cultivate connection and collaboration across teams. 

Time to record

The reality is that video is still radically underutilized at work. The adoption of video in the workplace – as with most technology – is similar to its adoption in the consumer world. It happens in two steps: the ‘magic moment’ and the ‘habit moment.’

The first ‘magic moment’ is when a user realizes how quickly and easily they can create a video. With so many different communication tools out there, it can be difficult for people to understand the value of video if they don’t use the tech at least once.

The ‘habit moment’ is more complex. This is when a user starts to understand that creating a video is something they should be doing every day for many different reasons – from fighting back on entrenched meeting fatigue to accelerating understanding across their hybrid team.

Being able to see when and how video is reducing meetings, scaling information, documenting ‘gold dust’ knowledge, as well as driving connectedness and productivity for both individuals and teams is when the ‘habit moment’ becomes solidified.

In the consumer world, the ‘habit moment’ tends to be when they become a regular user of the app or platform. But to make this moment happen in the hybrid workplace, it’s not only essential that the tech is available across every platform, but that it encourages teams to start creating videos together.

Once they send a video, it builds a ‘viral’ chain of reaction, similar to the one that exists in the consumer world where users share native content hosted on the platform.

As consumer tech proves, designing light-lift ways for more nuanced, expressive interaction is essential in building connection and affinity.

Encouraging employees across time zones and teams to share a bit about themselves via video – work related or not – can go a long way in this new aspirational era of modern work.

Company culture needs to become the real winner when reimagining the hybrid workplace – and video can make that possible.