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What if your company culture wasn’t just an HR buzzword but the secret weapon to scaling your business?
Welcome to Kan Talk Kulture, the podcast that dives deep into how remarkable company cultures are intentionally built and how they can transform your team, your business, and your bottom line.
Hosted by Kylie Anne Neal, founder of Kan Kulture and a passionate expert in people, culture, and leadership, this show is designed for business owners, CEOs, HR professionals, and anyone who believes that empowered people are the key to long-term success.
Each episode features real conversations with inspiring CEOs, business leaders, and culture champions who share how they’ve shaped their team environments alongside case studies, practical tips, and bold questions that challenge the status quo.
Whether you're looking to boost employee engagement, create a high-performance team, or align your people with your vision, this podcast will help you connect the dots between culture and growth.
At Kan Kulture, we believe in Kindness, Understanding, Learning, Trust, Uniqueness, Respect, and Evolving, and this podcast brings those values to life.
If you're ready to turn your team into your biggest brand ambassadors and create a workplace people love, this is the podcast for you.
Find out more at www.kankulture.com
Hi, I'm Kylie Anne Neal, founder of Kan Kulture and welcome to Kan Talk Kulture. In this podcast, I sit down with some of Australia's most progressive founders and CEOs to explore the heart of their company cultures. What drives them, what they value, and what it's really like to work for the companies they lead.
You'll also find occasional episodes packed with practical HR insights to help you build safer, stronger, and more trusted workplaces. So whether you're a new team maba, getting to know your workplace, curious about creating remarkable company cultures. Or just wanting to know more about implementing HR best practice.
You are in the right place. Let's dive in.
Hello and welcome to Cantor Culture. I'm Kylie Neal, your host, and joining me today is Georgina Walker, who is a people and culture consultant for Kan Kulture. Welcome again. Georgina.
Welcome. Thank you, Kylie.
Thank you for coming in today. It's
my pleasure.
Today we wanna talk about something that we're constantly seeing in growing businesses, and it's not technology.
Technology isn't the problem. It's speed. Digital tools have made everything faster, the way that we make decisions, the way that we communicate, the way that we give feedback, the way that we react to certain bits of information. And on the surface, that looks like progress. It looks like efficiency, it looks like leadership.
But what we are seeing. That speed has quietly broken something that's really important. It's broken. Our thinking leaders have suddenly become less capable. What's happened is that the pauses that good judgment needs has removed, and that's why we think that digital fluency isn't about being good with tools.
It's about. Knowing how to think, how to decide and how and when to lead. When everything around you is moving so fast.
So when work speeds up digitally, human behavior will change and does change whether. We realize it or, or not. Messages gets shorter, the context disappears, tone gets lost, especially on, you know, instant messaging.
Um, and people fill in gaps emotionally. Mm-hmm. So a message that, you know, maybe was meant to be efficient can land as cold or dismissive, and I certainly know. Sometimes if someone's replied to me in a rush, I might be like, oh, have, are they being blunt with me? And it's just a, a to overthink, but a quick decision can also feel like someone's wasn't considered, um, or silence can be interpreted as disapproval.
And I'm sure you have felt some of these things pre before as well.
Mm-hmm.
Um, and we certainly see it all the time. Where a, a slack message might turn into a performance issue or a teams chat becomes, you know, the start of a grievance. Um, no one ever intends harm in these situations, but speed removed nuance, uh, humans are wired to read meaning into communication.
So when digital speed strips that away. Empathy certainly drops. And when empathy drops, this is where misunderstandings arise, and this is why digital fluency is actually a human capability. It's about understanding how people experience work through screens and not just how efficiently information moves.
It's a very, very interesting. Lens on digital fluency. I think because one of the biggest myths in leadership right now is that being fast equals being effective.
Mm.
What speed really does is amplifies whatever judgment already exists.
Mm.
And sometimes that initial, that initial judgment, that knee jerk reaction.
It can be quite emotive.
Mm-hmm.
So, you know, again, like over those, um, channels that you mentioned, you know, slack teams, like that initial response, if it's too fast, it can be more emotional, um, rather than considered.
Mm-hmm.
If a leader has strong self-awareness and emotional regulation, speed can work for them.
But if they don't, speed makes. Everything visible.
Mm.
Digital environments really reward reaction. They don't reward reflection. And when leaders react publicly in fast channels, those reactions become culture very, very quickly. And we often say that to leaders, you know, digital fluency is sometimes knowing when not to response.
You know, pausing isn't avoidance, it's leadership saying, I need to think about this, or let's talk about this. Tomorrow is the most powerful trust building behaviors that we see.
I just wanna touch on where, you know, speed breaks down the most, because for me there are some very specific moments where speed can cause the most damage.
Um, and one of them is performance conversations when handled digitally.
Oh dear. Mm.
So, you know, conflict managed in. Messages, decisions made in group chats. Emotional issues responded too, too quickly. Um, as you touched on before, you know, leaders often say to us, I just, I sent a really quick message, or I didn't think it would land like that with that particular person.
Um, but when they, you know, under pressure, they don't hear intent, they hear impact. And digital speed certainly magnifies impact.
Hmm.
What could have been a constructive conversation becomes something that sits with someone all weekend. So, you know, you might get a message from your leader on a Friday afternoon and that person is literally thinking about that one short message all weekend.
Um, and that also may escalate down the track. Mm-hmm. So it's not about leaders being careless, it's just about leaders being humans in systems. Mm. Um, that don't slow them down. Mm
mm. And I think it's also good to raise that in the context of psychosocial safety. Our last episode was talking about psychosocial risks.
Um, but fast digital workplaces can create cognitive overload. They create this mindset of always on expectations and what. The consequence of that is, is that it reduces that recovery time. Um, so in our last episode with the psychosocial risk, we spoke about sprints and then recovery time and the, the real importance of that to reduce psycho psychosocial risks within a workplace.
I think this is kind of hitting that same point that. Fast digital workplaces do create that cognitive overload and psychosocial risk isn't always about workload, sometimes it's about pace. Um, when leaders respond instantly, work never really stops. And when decisions are made. And change rapidly. People stay in that constant state of alert.
It's kind of that fight or flight type, uh, stress response. And for. Team members or even leaders, they're in that constant state of alertness. That's when stress and burnout happens. I feel that leaders have a real responsibility to notice this because psychosocial harm doesn't come from one big incident.
It comes from sustained pressure, speed, and emotional whiplash, and. It is leaders that set the pace. It is leaders that need to role model the right behaviors and what expectations they're putting on their team members. So this is where support really matters, not because leaders are doing the wrong thing.
Again, it's not about poor leadership, but because it's incredibly hard to see the impact of speed when you're inside it.
Mm. I think I see speed a lot as well. When we've all got our phones on us, we've got. Our outlook on our phones. We've got our teams, our slack on our phones. So we're always, we feel like if we get a message and we're out of the office or at an appointment or whatever, we feel like we have to reply instantly.
Mm-hmm.
And that's where leaders need to make that impression. And if they've taken time out of the office, don't reply on your phone. Mm. Just take, take the time that you need, because that sets the precedence for your employees.
Mm.
So, you know, a good digitally fluent leader doesn't slow everything down.
They just slow down the, the right.
The right things.
Yeah, the right things. Mm-hmm. So, you know, they choose the right channel for the moment. Um, they move sensitive conversations out of public spaces.
Yes.
They delay responses with what or when motions are high. They delay those responses taking time out.
Take time out to narrate their thinking. They say things like, you know, let's pause on this. I just wanna give it a bit of thought. There's, there's no harm in. Just pausing and reflecting and coming back later, or coming back the next day. This creates that psychologically safe environment and it tells people that they actually matter enough to be considered.
So these leaders don't confuse urgency with importance. And that distinction really changes everything, I think.
Mm. Looking at how to. Rebuild that thinking space in fast businesses, and I don't know of any businesses these days that actually. Aren't fast businesses,
no.
That don't have that pace of working where it just escalates, the overwhelm escalates and they're just the expectations to just keep going.
Mm-hmm.
It is going to be something that businesses need to pay attention to and to bring it back to digital fluency, I think that, uh, businesses tech stack, so they get one tech. Channel, then they get another tech system, and then they get another tech system. And they, they think that building on the systems that they have available to them will actually create more efficiencies because it will give people more tools to use.
Um, whereas what we're saying here is they really, some businesses really need to slow down and they need to understand that. Digital fluency isn't just about how do we move faster and quicker? Mm. It's also about how do we purposefully stop and pause? How do we bring the right sense of meaning to the way that we're communicating?
How do we, um, educate our staff on how we communicate through Slack as opposed to how we communicate through email? What's worthy of saving to a one-on-one conversation to create that meaning and purpose to what's spoken about in a virtual team meeting. And that is, it's not about losing momentum.
No.
It is about setting clear expectations around things like response times.
And again, leader led, um, giving permission to pause. Um. You know, I've, I've had it a lot of times where you are working on your computer and you've, you've got teams up and someone will ask a question and you don't get back to them within five minutes. So they ask it again and it's just like, you know, the keyboard warriors or are you
directing that at me?
Some, sometimes, no, but we have had examples where someone will message me on Slack. And then five minutes later message you the same question? Yes, because I haven't responded to them in that five minutes. And there is a really powerful I I think it's not necessarily the intent behind it, it's the emotional reaction of people that.
Get that. Mm. It's, you know, creating sense of urgency to work on someone else's agenda
Yes.
Rather than your own.
Yes.
And when we move at that fast pace, if you're not on top of it, you don't get the opportunity to centralize how you are feeling and prioritize how you're responding.
Mm.
You, you don't enable yourself to prioritize how you're responding.
Mm.
So I think I. Reducing noise, I think. So conversations can actually happen. I think that's a really important thing as well, because sometimes, you know, if you look apart from our gifts back and forth, of course, on our team's channel
mm-hmm.
Some conversations on Slack, and I think particularly on the more informal channels like Slack or Teams where the conversations just keeps going and you're not quite sure what they're.
Initial question was, 'cause everyone's just kind of like
jumping in,
inputting.
Mm-hmm.
But there's also no actions that come from it. So it's really difficult sometimes to understand through that noise. Sometimes when to jump in and contribute and when to not because it's just noise. Um, the most effective leaders, I think.
Work with a model of restraint. They don't feel every silence. They don't immediately respond to everything that's thrown at them, and they definitely do not respond emotionally in public channels. Leaders that are coming say up through the ranks, for one of a better word, nowadays. Because we are so conditioned to scroll for that fast pace of social media.
It is just, you know, snip, snappy communication, like abbreviations of words. Like, it's just kind of constant, you know? Yeah. You know, some of the, you younger people in the workplace don't actually have full conversations because they're accustomed to the way that they communicate. Um, maybe that's okay.
Mm-hmm.
Um. Maybe they need to be educated on how to actually communicate effectively. They need to understand that speed is a tool and fluency is knowing when to put it down,
which I think a lot of struggle, a lot of people struggle with both in the workplace and at home. I have friends that. Gosh, if I don't reply straight away, they think something's up.
Yes. And I'm like, well, no, I'm just, I don't have my phone on me.
Yeah.
Because I need, I need some, some downtime. Yeah. Um, so, you know, it's very easy to bring that into the workplace when our world is, is so digital.
Yeah.
We've got everything in our hand.
It's digital and emotional.
Yeah.
Um, and I think for businesses, that's where.
Support really makes the difference. You know, we've, we've said a couple of times in the last couple of episodes that having someone outside the business that can see the patterns, not just the problems and the pace, not just the problems, to slow down the thinking and to help leaders respond, not just react.
Yeah. So if everything at the moment feels. Fast. It's not your imagination, it's happening. The question is whether you know where speed might be costing you more than it's actually giving you. Uh, and where could one pause change the outcome? Where has speed replaced conversation? Digital fluency isn't about keeping up, even though we're always downloading the, the newest version or getting the newest app, it's actually about thinking clearly even when everything else is moving extremely fast.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So it, it is definitely a very interesting, it is a very interesting topic.
Mm.
Uh, and, uh. I think it's a very different way of look at looking at digital fluency, because I think a lot of organizations would take that term of digital fluency and they'll be attaching it to how do we use ai, how do we automate these process through ai, and it's that tech building and stacking which.
Has the perception of digital fluency, but if we look at it from a more humane and people side, it is the fluency and the understanding of when to lean in and when to
Yeah.
Quieten it down
and Absolutely. Get all the new gadgets and all the tech. That's, that's fine. And that's the way that the world is going.
But having, you know, processes and systems in place for how to use those technologies.
Yes, yes.
Yeah.
Yeah. Great. Thank you so much for joining me today, Georgina. It's really pleasure. This is a really interesting topic to talk about, and you know, for our listeners, I would ask you to really reflect on what the pace of digital fluency looks like in your organization.
And if you're a leader, reflect a bit on when digital fluency has worked well for you. When you've paused and it's worked well, when you've responded immediately and it's worked well, but also maybe there's been some times when you've reacted too quickly and it's actually lost the impact that you were hoping to have.
So if anyone would like to talk about this topic or any others further, please send us an email at hello@canculture.com. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next time.
Thanks for joining me on Kan Talk Kulture. I'm Kylie
Anne Neal. I hope today's episode gave you a clear review into the values driving your workplace.
All sparked new ideas about building a remarkable company culture. If you're a founder or CEO interested in sharing your culture story, or if you are looking to build a safer, stronger, and more trusted workplace, let's connect. Visit Kan Kulture.com. That's K-A-N-K-U-L. TUR e.com to learn more. Please hit that subscribe button to hear more real conversations with founders and CEOs and hands-on episodes full of people.
First culture advice. I look forward to connecting with you on our next episode.