Is Digital Transformation Delivering value to your employees?

I am repeating it over and over, many transformations fail simply because they are failing to deliver value to their employees, because they are not getting everybody on board. A successful digital transformation will change the culture of a company, it will change its DNA. For that to happen employees need to first understand why the change is needed, and why they should change.

Companies often fail to clearly communicate the objectives of the transformation, at least they fail to communicate them in a language that is relevant to the employee. It is more than just top line and bottom line financial figure, KPI and metrics. It has to be relevant and meaningful for each and every employee.

In order to achieve this I believe companies and leaders need to develop new mindsets to start with. Mindsets that will help employees get a better understanding for each and everyone of them needs to be on-board.

I believe that there are at 4 mindsets needed to successfully drive a digital transformation

• A Human Centered Thinking or Design-Thinking mindset
• An Entrepreneurial mindset
• A Growth Mindset or A Learning Mindset
• A Digital First Mindset

A Design Thinking Mindset

The design thinking mindset or human centered thinking is essential to be able to understand customers and employees alike. It is about having the right attitude and skill sets to develop empathy. The design thinking mindsets helps to focus on customer's or employees issues during various journeys.

This mindset helps to design solutions that are not only relevant and valuable for the business but that are also relevant for the employees.

Just has a sanity check, how often have you seen changes in an organization that simply lead to more for the employees without creating any value? Excessive reporting is exactly that. An exec has a need for more information, and the work simply gets simply dumped to the next level. This is typically happening in organizations where there is very little leadership empathy.

Develop a human centered approach can also help employees get in the shoes of their customers and give more meaning to the work they are doing. This will become increasingly important with millenials, which tend to be more purpose driven.

An Entrepreneurial mindset

An entrepreneurial mindset, is about willingness to take risks. This goes beyond the ability to develop empathy, this is really about willingness to experiment.

An entrepreneurial mindset will constantly look for solutions to problems, will be driven to try improvements. Failure is not an issue. Failure is what will help us to learn, it is what will help improve.

The entrepreneurial leader will never rest after an inital victory, he will try to grow and scale. The entrepreneurial employee will constantly seek for new challenges, offer solutions, is ready to prototype and validate his assumptions.

The entrepreneurial leader does not seek reward other getting traction for his solutions. An important result of this mindset is that employees are encouraged to think differently to contribute to change through new ideas and proposals.

A Growth mindset

The growth mindset is maybe on the most difficult mindsets to adopt. It is about developing a mindset for constant learning, but it is also about constantly growing the employees skills and the organizations capabilities.

A growth mindset allows to better deal with the speed of change as employees are constantly encouraged to learn in order to develop new skills, shift skills and increase agility.

The fear companies have, and this is why this is difficult to adopt this mindset of a wide scale is that employees might leave. This is though counter productive as statistics from Cap Gemini study on Digital skills gap show that close to 48% of employees would leave for a another company offering better learning and development opportunities.

A Digital First mindset

This similar to what we in the past called a "Mobile First" mindset. What this means is that we need to stop thinking in terms of legacy technology and legacy solutions when trying to innovate.

A digital first mindset embraces new technologies to come up with relevant solutions for employees and customers. It helps us avoid or are less reduce situations where employees complain that their tools in private life are more advanced than what they use at work.

A digital first mindsets value to employees and customers alike as it seeks a faster adoption of digital technologies

4 Key Mindsets to drive culture change

I believe that if a company is able to groom leaders with these 4 types of mindsets it will set part of the foundation for a successful digital transformation. Each of these mindsets helps to develop value both for employees and customers and I believe that is the key to achieve a sustainanable culture.

Do you agree? Have you seen these type of mindsets as part of digital transformation projects? Is anything missing?