A New Way to Make the Workplace Work: Digital Transformation
Make no mistake, digital transformation has not only come to stay but is sure to expand and evolve as organisations digitalize their businesses to provide more value to their customers, increase revenue streams and reduce costs. The question is, what is your strategy to ride this wave with success or, at least, without getting left behind?
If you happen not to be sure about the answer, let me suggest you this one: embrace change and do it fast. Why you may wonder.
Well, as any experience goes digital, magic happens: they become 0 and 1. In other words, they become the language machines understand, process and are able to transform at an unprecedented speed. This has profound implications in a context where digital is the new paradigm as it reveals the true value of digital transformation which, by the way, it doesn’t rely on the capacity to provide an omnichannel coherent and cohesive customer experience. Nope. It’s beyond that.
What digital transformation truly brings to any organization is the capacity to learn and change… really fast.
The reason why relies on the fact that the digitalization of transactions allows capturing a lot of data that, appropriately processed, becomes knowledge that organizations can use to rethink and develop their business. But the opportunity to change fast comes at a cost: being able to change. Is that your case?
Is your organization flexible enough to leverage what digital transformation has to offer? Is your organization able to change its go-to-market strategy, customer experience and supporting operations at Moore’s speed, or close enough? If the answer to all these questions is no, then my suggestion to start developing two core competencies: agility and people-centricity.
Agility
In this context, agility does not mean that companies need to use the software development methodology called Agile. Nope.
Agility means the capacity of any company to foresee market trends and profit from them or prevent their impact on business before is too late. Consequently, it requires companies to be flexible to adjust their market strategy to a new course of action without too much hassle for the entire organisation.
As you may imagine, in a context of extreme digitalization, IT Departments have a key role to play. But what role exactly?
IT departments are a key agent in bringing that flexibility businesses need to reorient their strategy, customer experience and supporting operations at Moore’s speed. As such, IT departments are progressively exploring new approaches to ensure that agility a business needs. In this, two trends bubble-up across industries: rapid application development and enterprise low code development platforms.
Rapid application development relates to the use of agile methodologies, while enterprise low code development platforms relates to the use of visual development environments to create applications very quickly. If the latter is new to you, take a look to this report from G2Crowd where IT enterprise users rate which vendors are leaders in this field.
Now, we all know that new IT paradigms play a core role in digital transformation, but we also know that there are other factors. This brings me to the second core competence I mentioned at the beginning: people-centricity.
People-centricity
You probably have heard about customer experience, or making organizations become more customer-centric, and all that is right… well, partially right. Why only partially? Simple, this approach misses a crucial element of any customer experience: your employees.
Let me ask you a straightforward question: are you applying to your employees similar approaches to those used with customers, to make them feel satisfied and happy? In other words, are you intentionally building an environment that enables employees to perform really well, to tweak the way they work, and more importantly to feel good and cared for?
If you wonder why you should care about your employee experience, let me share with you these three facts:
- Your employees play a crucial role in the customer experience because they either develop the products and/or digital experiences that your customers consume, or they are a big part of the services and/or products your customers buy or use. More importantly, it has been proven that satisfied employees are positively related to positive performance in terms of profitability (ROA) and value (Tobin’s Q). For further details check here.
- Attracting and retaining talent is still a battle for many industries but the hardest battle of all is to make sure that your employees don’t become zombies. Here is an article from the World Economic Forum to explore in more detail this concept that is related to disengagement, stress and huge backlogs.
- Salaries are at the top of the list of almost any company’s operating costs. Hence, making sure your employees are satisfied and having the necessary resources to perform well should be one of your key priorities.
Now that is clear that your employees play a huge role in the customer experience and, consequently in your ability to make or break your revenue targets for this and the following quarters. Moreover, now that you know that being proactive on the employee experience has a huge impact on your ability to become a flexible organization capable of changing and growing without suffering from it.
Then, the question becomes, how do you do intentionally build the employee experience that makes sense for your business, your employees and the culture you are trying to foster and nurture despite the exponential growth you may be experiencing as you read these lines?
Well, the answer to this question is not as straightforward as it was with IT departments. So, in my next blog post on “A New Way to Make the Workplace Work” I will dive deep into the employee experience and the changing role of human resource departments from a non-revenue generation function, to a key business unit towards delivering value both to customers and employees.
Stay tuned.
Note: Any views or opinions presented here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of past or current employers.
