Technology is changing and influencing industries, companies and lives. Every aspect is embedded within this expanding phenomenon and to ensure a better business future this needs to be embraced by leaders and resources.
Digitally centric
Building resilience in your business cannot be achieved without ensuring your employees are digitally prepared. As digital transformation continues to sweep the globe and across sectors, CEOs, stakeholders and leaders are stepping up to ensure their businesses are not left behind. To be most effective transformation calls for a holistic approach and should be adopted by the entire team.
One of the main capabilities of any business are the resources they hire and in today’s market retaining digital talent is more important than ever. As the world continues to drive down the digital road employees with these skill sets are a valuable commodity and will more likely to be poached if not given good reasons to stay.
There are many ways to keep staff on side and not all relates to offering more money. If you have a company with a sustainable business model leading to a clearly defined strategy pertaining to goals that employees can understand this is a great start. Other factors include culture, relationships with colleagues, treatment by management and the ability to weigh in on decision making.
Digital transformation creates opportunities for both staff and leadership to perform duties in a digitally centric business with competitive advantages for customers. If this approach is implemented properly top-level talent will be attracted to your door. It is then up to the management team to ensure those with the right skills remain apart of the team.
Leadership
Management has three important roles:
- Scan for technology opportunities and bring digital transformation into the company
- Responsible for making good decisions
- Motivating and retaining staff
The treatment of staff members by the management team has an immense effect on individuals and on teams, thus creating the right culture where everyone can thrive is hugely beneficial. Employees are more likely to be productive and effective if they have good working relationships including clear lines of communication with their boss. This is often nurtured over time which is why a long-term resource development plan is crucial.
Although staff are impacted by the outcomes of the strategy, they are unlikely to be involved in the decision-making process. This is step one to resource failure. To enable digital transformational technologies to become all-encompassing employees, need to help shape strategies.
Isolating this process with executives hidden away in board rooms adopting an eyes only mentality is actually more disruptive. This behaviour stops the organic flow of intelligence and knowledge stored amongst the staff. The adoption of a show don’t tell attitude means employees are being shown what to do rather than being asked for their input. Of course, the board team will be the ultimate decision makers but they should also involve those who will actually be using the technologies.
Competence enhancing
Digital transformation enables leaders to shape the future of their business by ensuring they have the right competencies and skills to effectively implement new strategies. This is called competence enhancing a method which if used effectively examines the current level of skills and knowledge within the business before executing any radical changes to strategy.
To ensure technology can be implemented as planned questions need to be answered:
- Do they have the necessary skills to operate the technology and obtain competitive advancement?
- Are their staff digitally competent?
- Can they implement resource strategies such as replacing existing board members or staff with the right people?
Failure to answer the above questions will lead the business into competence destroying and with it the ability to execute strategy thus rendering the innovation pointless.
Resources are an accumulation of organisational processes, knowledge and skills which companies have control over. Ensuring they have the right assets is just the beginning, executives also need to know they have employees who can demonstrate value, efficiencies, effectiveness, loyalty and sustainability. Investing in individual resources can only go so far, the next step is to provide the infrastructure, culture and team collaboration.
Embracing new ideas
Many of the big brand companies who sadly are not around today disappeared because they were blind sighted by competition and failed to recruit the right set of skills. They were bureaucratic with heavy layers of management creating a dissolvable level of perspective the higher ideas went up the chain.
Instead apply a floor level approach by creating sub teams managed by individuals from the leadership team to thrash out ideas in an open and creative environment. Ultimately as the leader you will want your team to lead the enabled transformation. Therefore, the sooner information is disseminated across functions the quicker staff will be ready for the change.
Internal customers
Digital transformation can enhance more than just end user customer satisfaction, it can also affect how employees and core functions interact as internal customers. The technology should increase efficiencies in-house, connecting teams together digitally. Enabling sharing of process outputs, data and analysis to provide an all-encompassing digital knowledge bank to better serve the customer and obtain competitor advantage.
If core functions are failing to operate successfully, they will become disintermediated. This will see groups enforcing work arounds to solve procedural problems. Whilst this is not always a negative if applied on a whim it could radically disrupt in-house project work streams causing a break in internal communication. Information needs to flow through process and procedures ensuring every function is receiving their necessary input and output to support the business model and benefit the external customer.
Working and breathing digital capabilities
If staff are expected to embrace digital processing in their jobs, then this also needs to be carried through into where they work. COVID has dramatically changed how resources want to work. In the years preceding the pandemic the premise of employees working from home was overshadowed by other priorities. Staff were expected to arrive at a physical location, work their hours, do their jobs and leave with a pay check.
Today this has changed and those businesses who extend their staff capabilities by allowing them to work remotely will certainly reap the benefits. A trending topic is one of hybrid working where employees are equipped to work between an office and home. To enable this new way to work efficiently businesses need to provide the infrastructure and the technology means to do so.
Conclusion
Digital transformation creates opportunities for both companies and staff. Leaders need to be aware of how growth and the ever-changing aspects of technology will affect their business model and how to manage resources required to do the work. Failure to incorporate both means companies will not be able to execute their plans.
Arming your teams with the right environment and the tools to carry out their duties wherever they choose to work has become a game changer. Employees whilst they are paid to do their jobs, are also employed because of the knowledge they hold so don’t ignore the wealth of information at your fingertips. Digitally transformed companies require a combination of technology and resource capabilities bundled together as assets to develop new products and perform business process. Competitive advantage cannot be acquired without them.