Four people & planet focused strategies to inspire organisations beyond the digital transformation moon shot.
paul houston
Chief Clinical Researcher @ TrialsofLife | Health Interventions, Community Engagement
Faint battle cries from consultants can already be heard exclaiming “digital transformation is dead long live ContinuousNext” [15] or “Beyond Digital” , etc etc. But that’s rubbbish and we know it! Digital transformation is a continual state of preparation to ready an organisation for what is next. Most research highlights that organisational culture is where the focus is needed to get digital transformation right. As any H.R. director will point out organisational culture isn’t a trend or a state but a foundation on which a organisation must rest its most lofty ambitions be they digital or otherwise.
(Below, in Part 2, I outline four strategies that work towards creating an organisational culture that is balanced, responsive and effective; a culture ready to embrace change that has a symbiotic focus on people and planet. Part 1, gives some background on organisational culture and modern challenges such as digital transformation.
PART 1 — Insights into organisational culture
“The companies reporting breakthrough or strong financial performance was five times greater (90%) among those that focused on culture than it was among those who neglected culture (17%)” Boston Consulting Group. [1]
Giving culture time and respect. Psychologist Edgar H. Schien noted that “ Culture is deep, broad and stable….if you expect to manipulate it at will, you are sure to fail”.
Morgan cars case study. When business mogul Sir John Harvey Jones advised Morgan cars back in the 1990s it was the deeply rooted culture of Morgan cars that Sir John hadn’t factored in when giving the advice that the company make radical changes such as automate their processes. But, Morgans raison d’être is to make quality products while preserving a 100+ year tradition of father to son apprenticeships. Automation would have killed their culture and reduced the demand for their products which is greatly influenced by that very culture. It is a lesson that the first question should be when embarking on major projects or change is how does this fit with, or affect, our culture?
The need to change organisational culture. With 70–80 per cent digital transformation project failures being commonly quoted [18] it appears thirty years on from Morgan’s lessons that radical change programmes still heed the same warning, and it is company culture, 63% of management according to one study, that is commonly being cited as one of the largest hurdles [3].
Digital Culture. The first step towards a successful digital transformation, as identified by McKinsey [3] has to be preparedness of the culture to accept digital transformation, a culture that has essentially moved towards a ‘digital culture’. Digital culture is typically identified as a culture that is agile, innovative, digitally minded, risk-taking, collaborative, data-driven, and customer-centric; some of the strategies discussed below contribute towards successfully obtaining these key cultural aspects.
‘Effective’ organisational culture. One could argue that defining culture as ‘digital’ is in-fact an oxymoron, or indeed it’s insensitive to fears of cultural digitalisation with A.I., or just plain obtuse when considering culture equates to the melting pot of all employee and customer human interactions, histories, working and meeting/drinking places, etc. I prefer not to get blind-sighted or even distracted with ‘digital’ as a reference to organisational culture for those reasons. I have just dubbed the below strategies as ‘effective’ organisational cultural strategies, though we could just as well use the tag ‘dynamic’, ‘responsive’, or ‘digital’ if you prefer but that has very little to do with purpose which is a big topic of this article.
Part 1 Summary
Rather than cultural overhauls, it’s far more practical and achievable to look towards inspiring an organisations culture, directing it, empowering it and finding a shared purpose to motivate it. In doing that we create very solid foundations, ideas and structures to erect a veritable cultural coliseum, one solid enough to withstand and embrace changes for a long time to come. Sounds easy hey?
Part 2 —
The four synergistic strategies for an effective culture
Strategy 1: Defining a purpose. Purpose relates to the purpose of employees and of the organisation; it is the added environmental or societal value that drives the organisation's activities or missions and the values that often connect employees with their employers. It is the ‘why’ the company exists? John Ezzon warns “purpose is more than a strategy and it’s not a marketing program” [18]. Ezzo notes that employees can detect the difference between purpose that is about doing good and purpose that is pure marketing and if your staff don’t believe your purpose then eventually your customers will see through it too.
Purpose has to be deeply embedded into an organisations DNA, it drives strategy, treatment of staff and customers, it should be present everywhere from board meetings to every day meeting agendas to what is being served in the cantine. In the USA ‘benefit corporations’ are given limited legal liability for directors to pursue purpose-driven missions besides maximising shareholder value. Danone last year lead the way in France by setting out missions under their B-Corp equivalent status ‘enterprise à mission’ in France. With newly defined targets under the mission “One planet. One health.” their new purpose ‘to bring health through food to as many people as possible’ sets the agenda for a framework of environmental and societal targets which received a 99% agreement from the shareholders [14]. We are now seeing investors backing companies that put people and planet alongside profits as having a stronger outlook in the future and in a post Covid crisis [16,17].
Defining a Purpose. If your business does not have a defined purpose as grand as benefitting people or the planet then look again at your strategy and consider deeper care of your staff and your customers as your purpose. A purpose gives staff a common mission to unite them and to rally them towards, which is synergistic with strategy 3 below to ‘break existing silos’. Linking company culture with a purpose will give employees meaning; the energy project found that meaning has deeper rooted positive effects than happiness, meaning keeps employees engaged, it can treble their retention rate and increases productivity [6].
Strategy 2: Customer-centric approach — Being customer-centric is central to all of the other three strategies outlined in this article; a companies purpose will be a big influence on customers especially when there is an environmental or ethical focus that affects them, focusing on customers can bring an organisation together and remove departmental myopia and empowering staff to engage with customers and be responsible for improving the customer experience will create positive staff engagement and positive interactions with the customer.
66% of a 4000+ survey of B2C and B2B customers stated that CX factors explained the loyalty of their customers. Gartner
Match customer experience (CX) to employee experience priorities. The way employees are treated immediately reflects on customers so in trying to maximise the CX most business experts are agreed that getting the employee experience (EX) right is the essential place to start, indeed in many businesses the customers can directly be employees from other parts of the business, demonstrating how strategies of excellent CX and EX are interdependent.
Strategy 3: Collaboration and breaking the silo culture. Both Capgemini [3] and McKinsey[4] studies found that silo mentality and poor interdepartmental collaboration is one of the highest blocking issues to successful digital transformation. An Accenture survey [5] found that 75% of respondents said that departments are competing rather than collaborating.
Increase collaboration through cross-disciplinary training. Training that gives insights into how other job functions or departments work is a great way of increasing collaboration and empathy. By sharing broader knowledge of the way organisations work, or want to work in the future, we move towards creating ‘full stack’ professionals that can move a business forward due to an increaseed global view of the business and it’s customers.
Uniting the four strategies with cross-disciplinary teams. Bringing all of the strategies together in this paper is a great way of achieving greater collaboration. Giving the company a strong purpose-based culture will motivate and unite staff, creating a strong customer-centric culture will move staff away from any sense of departmental myopia, getting staff to work in cross-disciplinary teams creates empathy and synergies and below we look at how to empower staff to create motivated and focused teams.
Strategy 4- Empowerment of staff and leadership. Kotter and Heskett [9] studied ten successful major change programs and identified in each one that the appointment of a strong leader with a track record was central to each success. Leadership style is the precursor to effective organisational structure to support staff and to guide and motivate them. A certain psychologists motivational pyramid [10] reminds us that, before self-actualisation, individuals need to feel engaged, valued and to have self-esteem, to achieve this the organisation must create the right support and team structures, this takes great skills and experienced leadership.
The Intuit case study inspired by Eric Ries ‘Lean startup’ methods monitored small teams empowered with ‘entrepreneurial style freedom to create products. The bottom-up decentralised decision making quickly realised new products with revenues of up to 50 million within a year, which would normally have taken five years plus. Such autonomous leadership style can incentivise innovation and introduce controlled risk embracing fail fast strategies which are central to advancing an organisation.
Empowerment through training is a key approach to keep staff feeling valued, knowledgeable and empowered to do their job better. To use the Opquast training as an example; the Opquast certification utilises the synergies between all four of the strategies outlined in this article. The training has a purpose to ‘make the web better, for everyone’ it also is about the empowerment of staff through a human-based quality assurance system [7] and by giving the individual the foundational skills and knowledge to ensure a better CX throughout the customer's digital journey. In effect, the cross-disciplinary nature of the training and its strong purpose and empowerment unites teams and motivates them towards that purpose.
Empowerment through digital solutions. Last and by no means least is technology. Though not the main focus of this article technology is one of the greatest enablers of change. Technology, however, must be used to empower and enhance the ability for people to do their jobs better, not to take away their skills and responsibility. The use of A.I. should be used to remove the most mundane or routine tasks, freeing up time for more meaningful work such as more customer engagement, innovation, or towards tasks that contribute towards the company’s purpose and missions such as big data and information analytics; particularly retraining in A.I.and Machine Learning programming.
Conclusion:
If we mark Schiens’ words again, it is the small steps that may be the most useful and easy to achieve and maybe when it is possible we should be looking to inspire and evolve rather than all-out transform our organisations' culture.
The human factors of an organisation are its lifeblood and they must always be in sight when considering any large scale change or project; moreover, with the right strategies, structure and people in place the greater the chance of success will be when embarking on transformational projects and programs, both in the short term and in the long term.
We look at digital transformation as that organisational moon shot but really it is the organisations' moon base. From that base, with the right culture, we should have the energy and agility to launch effective initiatives to deal with whatever challenge and destination presents itself next.
[1] It’s not a digital transformation without a digital culture. Hemmerling, Kilman, et al. Boston Consulting Group
[2] The Corporate Culture Survival Guide — Edgar H. Schien , Wiley imprint 2009
[4] https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/culture-for-a-digital-age
[6] https://www.fastcompany.com/3032126/how-to-find-meaning-during-your-pursuit-of-happiness-at-work
[9] Corporate culture and Performance, Kotter and Heskett, The Free Press 1992
[10] https://digital.com/how-to-become-an-entrepreneur/maslows-hierarchy/
[11] The Lead Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses. Eric Ries . Penguin 2011.
[12] https://futureworkplace.com/ebooks/the-2020-hr-sentiment-survey/
[13] The Purpose Revolution — — John Ezzo and Jeff Vanderweilen
[14] https://www.ft.com/content/1eff9241-ef11-4a38-8b5c-bb825fa108ca
[17] https://www.unpri.org/pri-blog/covid-19-accelerates-esg-trends-global-investors-confirm/6372.article