DIGITAL CULTURE

saturates professional and private lives,

drives Corporate Culture and

shapes the dominant mindset of employees.

This comes with one significant downside –

more workplace conflict and poorer dispute resolution

The new digital culture workforce

• Tech-savvy

• Curious

• Idealistic

• Adventurous

• Confident

• Connected

But lacking the capability or willingness to resolve disputes cooperatively and effectively

The new digital culture workforce

• Tech-savvy

• Curious

• Idealistic

• Adventurous

• Confident

• Connected

But lacking the capability or willingness to resolve disputes cooperatively and effectively

Every point of CONTACT in an organization is a potential point of CONFLICT

While workplace conflict has amplified, the “collaborative” soft skills necessary to resolve this are in short supply and fast disappearing within organizations

A non-collaborative and adversarial mindset undermines any workplace situation involving alternative and competing viewpoints

Cross-functional
teams

Performance
Reviews

Outsourcing

Task allocations

Intra/inter dept
decision-making

Employee
grievances

Dealing with vendors/clients

Resulting in poorer decision-making and less effective outcomes

Damage from poor Collaboration and Dispute Handling

Employee
disengagement

Loss of better
performers

Reputational
damage

Erosion of
corporate culture

Barriers to
innovation

Lower team
efficiency

Time wastage –
senior managers
& HR

Where to act first ?

Team Effectiveness

Highly productive employees see a vast difference between being assigned to a team and identifying with that team. Employees want to know that everyone on their team is pitching in.

Gallup State of the Workplace Survey 2017

Recruitment / Selection

92% of talent professionals agree that candidates with strong soft skills are increasingly important …and 89% feel that “bad hires” typically have poor soft skills.

LinkedIn Global Talent Trends 2019

When employees collaborate, they work 15% faster on average; 73% to do better work; 60% are innovative; and 56% are more satisfied. Businesses with a collaborative strategy are twice as likely to outgrow their competitors.

Deloitte Access Economics 2014

Businesses have never done as much hiring as they do today. They’ve never spent as much money doing it. And they’ve never done a worse job of it.

Harvard Business Review 2019

PRINCIPALS

Brian Mitchell PhD and Evan Mitchell are founders of HOW&Y.

Both have strong backgrounds in Negotiation, having consulted to major corporations in the US and Australia across widely diverse categories and brand portfolios.

For the last six years they’ve researched and published widely on the Millennial mindset and the impact of Digital Culture on workplace attitudes and decision-making. Focusing on the decline in Soft Skills – in particular COLLABORATION – and the resultant increased levels of unresolved disputation within organizations.