Champions of Collaboration Lead the Digital Transformation
The Digital Economy has revolutionized companies’ business models through IT and is also impacting the workplace as much as other organizational structures. Employees have evolved into a mobile workforce that increasingly use multiple apps and devices that do not always belong to their organizations, but still handle internal operating systems and legacy applications.
Modern workers are bringing their consumer experience to business reality. They want to work from anywhere and expect that the digital workplace will allow them to have all the apps and work data they deal with connected and accessible from any device 24/7.
What does creating a digital workforce mean for a company?
Empowering employees by enabling a digital and collaborative workspace has quickly become a fundamental factor that determines the digital transformation pace of a business.
However, creating a digital workspace may seem a fairly complex adaptive change to pull off from a business perspective. In addition to integrating new technologies into business processes, enterprise leaders need to set the right strategies to answer the evolution of their employees’ new digital habits, and additionally, workers must have the right skill-set and knowledge in order to be able to properly use advanced IT platforms that respond to the company’s actual needs.
In order to maximise the synergies that new IT technologies can bring to the office, organisations need to integrate digital services into their day-to-day operations and ensure the workforce is aligned with the company’s digital roadmap.
Workplace innovation is born from collaboration
Innovation is more necessary than ever in the current highly competitive and global environment. In this regard, well-handled digitalization of the workforce has a remarkable impact on business productivity, collaboration and innovation. A collaborative workspace is more capable of adapting to new market dynamics and driving innovation.
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‘Innovation is the only option’
It is true that people cannot be forced to collaborate or to become more innovative, even if they have the right tools. However, workers are already living in hyper connected environments, which extend across the breadth of mobile devices they use at home and work, and they have access to an extraordinary amount of data anywhere and anytime. Which means they are already collaborating in many ways.
In that setting, leaders in organizations have an unparalleled opportunity to sow the seeds of innovation by laying down the right elements that promote better digital collaboration at work, employee mobility and work productivity. It is about cultivating, promoting and leading a culture of collaboration, whilst also providing smart workplace technologies that will make them participants in the business transformation. As a Microsoft e-book about workspace collaboration and Office 365 says, Innovation is a team sport.
Competent and skilled employees for the new digital workplace
Since software tools are getting more sophisticated, growing digital literacy among employees is key in creating a digital workforce that has the ability to make the most of technology. Any investment a company makes in technology will be unused unless employees become more competent and skilled in the new digital tools.
According to the Accenture Strategy Executive Research 2015, 44% of business leaders say a lack of digital skills is a key barrier to transformation. The talent factor and how best to support employees’ transition to the new digital conditions are paramount questions that need to be addressed to create a digital workforce.
In its report, Accenture describes five steps developing a digital workforce:
- Align your workforce and HR strategy with the business
- Start experimenting with more flexible and agile ways of working using proven digital technologies and tools
- Define the digital skill gap within the workforce
- Develop required digital competencies
- Foster leadership behaviours that fuel a digital culture
One more point can be added to the above list. To create a digital workspace, customers should invest in the best tools and choosing the right partners to manage the transition. This is where partners and Cloud productivity sellers like you come in, to help companies be more competitive in the marketplace and bring insights and technology that can transform organizations.
Would you like to learn how the DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AND THE CLOUD OPPORTUNITY is changing the IT business world? Or are you interested in learning how you can best LAND OFFICE 365 SALES AND EXPAND YOUR CLOUD BUSINESS?
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