Digital Transformation: The Forgotten Employees

Technology ‘empowers’ or ‘overpowers’ employees? The answer lies in the organizations’ plan of using technology.

No doubt technology is a great facilitator and technologists do claim that it has made life & work simpler but on other hand there is an intense discussion going around in industry circles on digital detox - how a person voluntarily refrains from using technology to de-stress himself.

Which perspective to trust? There is no straight answer to this question but if the “internal stakeholder-employee” component is made central to tech-led transformation, it can help keep employees happy leading to higher productivity and organization growth.?

Technology is disrupting almost anything coming in its way and in this light businesses need to evolve and make use of technology to sustain themselves & grow. The need to re-engineer the workplace processes has never been greater as businesses in this digital era are trying to navigate the technology onslaught. Digital transformation has now become an obsession with businesses, but in name of digital transformation or simply in name of using technology, I see a big disconnect between those designing digital processes/service and those that will use them. In this case user is employee who will use the tech-based processes for achieving the goals of the organizations they are working for.?

When internal customers 'The employees' are forgotten or are not made part of this digital transformation, the transformation is bound to become a roadblock rather than catalyst for growth. One of the major reasons to embark upon?digital transformation journey is to boost employee productivity but if not implemented with right intent, the technology slows down business processes as opposed to speeding them up and it can end up being extremely costly for the organization and extremely stressful for employees leading to their burnout an in-turn reduction in their productivity.

Even today, in many organizations, technology led initiatives are planned and even executed in silos, without inputs from the users. When users are ignored, the few so-called transformational leaders or even the coders make decisions with an incomplete understanding of the user requirements. This leads to a tug of war between the designers of the digital process and the users - that no one truly wins but organization for sure is at loss.

A digital transformation for transformation’s sake only won’t be effective. It must be tightly tied to vision laid down for digitization and the strategy laid down to achieve the vision. Advanced technology, combined with comprehensive vision, can truly transform a workplace. Some measure that organization can undertake to ensure success of technology-led initiatives:

• Infrastructure: One might have planned well for a picnic at a beautiful place around 100 km away but if bus is not available forget about picnic one would not be able to reach the place even. Tech-based initiatives or process for sure will fail or would fall short of desired results and even create anxiety among the users if basic infrastructure like internet is not at place or is made available to people responsible for the ensuring success of the processes.
• Integrate processes: Different departments in an organization like Administration, R&D would like to have processes that suits their requirements, but this can create inconvenience to the end user as he need to tackle multiple processes. Organization must have plan to integrate all the processes user needs and they must be aligned to the central pool of data.
• Focus on empowerment rather than control: Any tech-based process must facilitate the user and decrease his efforts. The intent of tech supported processes must be to help in decision making and support analysis but if the intent is control than even the smartest of the system will yield no results.
• Focus on quality rather than volume: The companies are simply too large to transform all at once so the focus must be on quality, not quantity. Process changes can be implemented in phased manner starting with one department at a time and later depending upon the learnings, it can be rolled out to rest of the departments.
• Involve all users: The feedback of the users is of utmost importance and must be continually used to improve the processes. Rather than looking at the tech solutions from perspective of engineering, it must be looked at from the user ?

Organization will fail if they try digitalization or use of technology without a true vision of what they are trying to achieve. Successful digital transformation strategy starts with humans - technology comes later.?