Easy Step By Step Guide To Implement Data Culture In Your Company

Our increasingly connected world presents organizations with a variety of difficulties, opportunities, and customers to please. It's no secret that corporations are using data culture to stay competitive, from the ever-changing consumer habits to the COVID-19 epidemic, which disrupted enterprises' ability to operate.

Data-driven decision-making is still a challenge for even the most well-established companies, despite the efforts of teams of data analysts and massive investments in data infrastructure and analytical tools. In this article, we will explain how you can incorporate data culture into your business and run a data-driven business. So let us get started.

Data culture in current businesses

Despite the fact that more businesses are implementing data-driven approaches like business intelligence, the vast majority of people in these firms aren't benefiting from these initiatives. Only 6 to 17 percent of businesses have implemented business intelligence tools, according to a recent survey.

As a result, businesses will be unable to take advantage of the full potential of their data analytics systems. Disparate decision-making within an organization – where one conclusion is informed by evidence while another is based on an authority figure's opinion – can also occur. Businesses can impose data and analytics solutions on their workforces, but a more long-term approach is to change people's thinking and provide incentives across the entire organization.

What is data culture?

Data culture is a decision-making culture based on data. The goal of establishing a data culture within an organization is to aid in decision-making. Faster-moving consensus cultures and myopic hierarchical cultures lose out to organizations with a data culture. With a data-driven culture, you can recruit and retain the greatest people.

Importance of having an efficient data culture

Many firms face the issue of creating a data-driven culture. Data-driven companies, on the other hand, get the benefits of enhanced business competition, improved organizational efficiency, and commercial innovation to stay on top of the market.

Firms with data culture knowledge are three times more likely than non-data-driven ones to report major gains in their decision-making, according to a PWC research of over 1000 senior management leaders. As a company that completely embraces a data-driven culture, Google is embracing 'people analytics' in order to improve its employees.

Google was able to reduce new mother turnover rates by 50 percent by extending maternity leave, which allowed the company to care for both its employees and its financial line. You may use this 6-step plan to help you construct a data culture for everyone and reap the rewards of better decision-making in your company.

Steps to efficiently build a data culture business

There are several benefits to adopting a data culture, including fostering a culture of innovation and fostering meaningful cross-department discussions. Let's take a closer look at how each organization can make meaningful efforts to cultivate an environment where the power of data may be efficiently utilized by everyone.

Obtain the backing of the company's senior management

If you want to develop a data culture in your firm, you'll need the support and participation of your company's business executives. A smart place to begin is with a meeting between your CDO and your most important stakeholders.

Data-driven culture can be communicated to each department's business value, and how to present decision-making methods will be altered when data is brought in. It's important for leaders to recognize that a data-driven culture goes beyond using data to defend a decision but rather to use it as the primary driver of a decision-making process. As a result, leaders will be able to better arrange their business units so that they may better collaborate with other departments.

Conduct sessions on data literacy

Understanding and utilizing data may be a foreign concept to business teams, even when they excel at their jobs. Departments can begin to undertake data literacy training and workshops with the help of executive sponsorship and department leaders who support a data-driven culture.

Data scientists can be given the authority to organize discussions and seminars to teach employees how to read, comprehend, and process the data they will encounter on a daily basis in their jobs. As a matter of fact, organizations might circulate their data specialists amongst other departments in order to break down the walls between IT and the business. This creates a trusting and collaborative environment. In addition, departments might design their own curriculum to meet their own specific needs.

In one case, a sales staff can be taken through the company's many key data points and framed in a way that directly affects metrics that matter to them, such as leads produced or client retention, as a case study. Business leaders can also take the help of a data culture podcast to give detailed knowledge to their employees. 

Democratize data across the organization

All leaders, from the boardroom to the front lines of a data-driven organization, have access to the information they need to make better decisions. In addition to discouraging end-users from actively searching out the data they desire, having data segregated slows down the productivity of data analysts. Thanks to a conversational analytics-powered business intelligence platform, data democratization may be readily addressed.

As a result, teams will be able to access heterogeneous data from throughout the enterprise and acquire insights (or simply extract the data) in a matter of seconds by simply asking queries to the data. Search-based or self-service BI dashboards will no longer suffice, and organizations will need to empower each employee with a tool that simplifies the difficulty while being extremely convenient.

Utilize data to effect positive change in the workplace and community

Employees are the lifeblood of every firm, and gaining their support is essential for long-term success through a data culture. Data may be used to improve employee morale, working conditions, and perks in a smart firm. To do this, a committee can analyze data in order to promote employee engagement, or individuals can be empowered to obtain insight into their daily duties on their own.

In order for employees to identify more productive or alternative ways of doing things, the democratization of data can be used to motivate them to do so. For example, this enables teams to connect the usage of data with the improvement of their personal working life, which fosters a better relationship with data.

Facebook used their data to construct disaster maps, which helped rescuers solve major information gaps they experienced while responding to natural disasters, such as earthquakes and tornadoes. Workers will understand that their use of data can have a positive impact on the world that goes beyond their organization and their own personal interests.

Aim for a set of organizational objectives

One of the most typical roadblocks to implementing a data culture is figuring out where to begin and how to use data successfully. To solve this, corporate leaders might create a set of unified organizational goals that are broken down into important indicators for employees to focus on. Teams can focus their data analysis and decision-making by breaking down large goals into smaller indicators. Boosting productivity and directing staff in the right direction by accelerating results.

Employees benefit from this because it fosters a sense of progress and achievement throughout the company and helps to unite diverse departments into a cohesive tribe. Every employee feels that they have made a tangible contribution to the larger picture, which helps them equate adopting a data-driven culture with doing their bit in the larger context.

Encouragement of analytical decision-making by teams and leaders

A data-driven culture necessitates regular discussions on data as part of any decision-making. As a way to facilitate this, corporate executives may spearhead the initiative to begin explaining major decisions made analytically – backed up by facts that everyone can see. When it comes to big decisions, it is important to show that the top levels of the firm are accountable for the decisions they make and that they are taking a data-driven approach to make them.

Employees and stakeholders will learn and embrace an effective methodology for using data more effectively when they see how challenges are tackled analytically and how the ultimate choice is reached using data-driven insights from their work. It's also possible for companies to go one step further by including teams in the decision-making process, with data being at the forefront, to further establish the organization's data culture and enhance employee engagement.

Final words

Despite the fact that every firm aims to use data to make better decisions more regularly, many fall short due to old habits or a lack of a clear plan to shake up old decision-making procedures. It's imperative that business leaders take a step-by-step strategy to win over the hearts and minds of their employees in order to successfully implement a data culture. So follow the tips mentioned above and build a data culture for everyone.