Transformation Without Technology
While digital disruption may be the latest craze, the path to transformation is not always rooted in technological advancement.
When you hear a buzzword like “transformation,” what comes to mind?
Whether large-scale, business-related, or organizational, many people automatically assume that transformations are driven by a technology implementation. However, while technology can be a huge disruptor and driver of big changes for organizations, this isn’t always the case.
New technology can create efficiencies, drive automation, and streamline ways of working, but it can also be costly and time consuming to select, configure, and implement. In cases with limited budgets and resources, there are impactful ways that businesses can transform without technology.
At Slalom, we follow a unique growth formula: We believe that the keys to growth are authentic customer obsession, a relentless focus on teams, a solid operating foundation, an insurgent mindset, and highly aligned leadership. Below, we’ll look at the first three components of the growth formula to show how transformational change can happen without technology, highlighting our recent collaboration with a large-scale non-profit to exemplify the impact.
Drive customer obsession with a strong content strategy
From blogs to overall messaging, one of the first places to look for transformation opportunities is within a company’s content strategy. To its customers, a website is a company’s digital front door, and by focusing on content strategy, transformation can still take place online without a large technology investment. Websites become cumbersome to navigate when the content is not aligned with changing audience needs, and an effective content strategy is critical to deliver the right content to the right audiences at the right time.
When building a content strategy, companies need to identify the key personas of site visitors, ensuring messaging is crafted to speak to each audience. During this stage, it’s also useful to dig into website analytics and create journey maps that outline how different users move throughout the site and interact with content. By understanding the end-user’s journey, companies will be better enabled to create impactful messaging that resonates with customers.
When partnering with our non-profit client, we deeply examined the organization’s website analytics and found over 25,000 website pages. Yet, 56% of these pages received no traffic in a 12-month timespan, while 91% had an average of one or fewer page views per day. In addition, only 20% of the organization’s pages had been updated within the last 18 months. Using these learnings, our client was able to strip away the pages that were hindering domain authority and revitalize its content strategy to drive more traffic and engagement.
Since 81% of people think less of a brand if its website content is outdated, maintaining a fresh and relevant content strategy is crucial for our client, as it would be for any company looking to amplify its online reach and accelerate customer obsession.
Ensure a relentless focus on teams by investing in company culture
Company culture is another area prime for transformation. The mission, goals, values, leadership style, and overall working environment of a company are critical to employee satisfaction and team productivity. In fact, employees who work in organizations with a positive culture are 3.8 times more likely to be engaged in their work, directly affecting a company’s bottom line. To cultivate this kind of culture, 76 percent of employees believe companies need to have a well-defined business strategy in place. If there’s no clear strategic directive, then it’s harder for teams to understand and work toward their goals.
For a company to determine if cultural transformation is needed, interviews should be held with internal and external stakeholders to understand potential gaps and opportunities. From there, a cultural roadmap can be developed that addresses the future state of a company’s mission and vision, micro-behaviors, equitable staff development, diversity and inclusion, sustainability measures, and operational effectiveness.
To illustrate the importance of cultural transformation, let’s examine our non-profit scenario. In addition to enhancing content strategy, our client also wanted to take proactive steps to create a more inclusive, collaborative culture. We helped this organization launch an employee experience survey and data dashboard to understand employee outlook and identify areas of improvement. From there, we were able to help its executive leadership team determine a new cultural vision, create updated values, launch more inclusive recruiting strategies, and develop a tactical roadmap to address changes. By intentionally prioritizing its culture, our client was able to strengthen its community and increase team communication across a hybrid work model, establishing a foundation for the organization to grow and scale impact.
Lay a solid foundation with strong operating models and governance
When teams are working in silos or organizational communication is lacking, it ultimately creates a lack of cohesion for end-users. For that reason, operating models and governance go hand-in-hand with a company’s culture.
For example, when working with our non-profit client, our team performed an in-depth discovery to find that the organization’s operations were department-centric rather than constituent-centric. Instead of all departments working together toward a common goal, each department was competing to achieve its own goals, which led to inconsistent experiences for the organization’s stakeholders. To solve this problem, we created an operating model toolkit and MVP playbook to better unite departments and eliminate silos.
While this is a singular use case, these types of problems affect businesses across all industries. Examining how a business operates opens the door to new transformation opportunities.
Conclusion
Although digital transformation is the latest craze, it’s not always the right solution. Without the budget or capacity to make significant technology investments, companies can still make measurable improvements and better outcomes by focusing on changes to their people and processes. By applying the tactics listed above, organizations of all sizes and industries can transform to become more agile, customer-focused, and efficient.
Slalom is a global consulting firm that helps people and organizations dream bigger, move faster, and build better tomorrows for all. Learn more and reach out today.
