7 Essential Strategies to Accelerate Digital Maturity

Is digital transformation knocking at your door, or have you stepped through it?

Accelerating digital maturity is top of mind for leaders today. To get to this stage, organizations need to answer an important question: How do we move to the right combination of goals, resources, people and technology to realize digital benefits while achieving customer, employee and business success?

Automation alone isn’t the answer. Success comes at the intersection of people and technology. In fact, more employers than ever – nearly 9 of 10 – plan to increase or maintain headcount as a result of automation, according to the 2019 ManpowerGroup report, Humans Wanted: Robots Need You.

What we’re seeing is Digital Workforce Transformation. This means that digital transformation is occurring at an unprecedented pace, creating a more connected world, and providing new opportunities for businesses to grow and create value.

In the 7 Essential Strategies You Need To Accelerate Digital Maturity webinar, a top talent management consultants discuss the digital landscape, stages of maturity, and provide these 7 strategies organizations can use to speed up their digital transformation transition:

Invest In Continuous Group Learning & Sharing 

Investing in ongoing leadership and workforce learning is a key strategy to digital transformation. The costs associated with transformation are not just financial, but also includes the impact on your organization as well as the ability of individuals to adapt, adjust, and to demonstrate competent agility during transformative stages.

Connect & Align Leaders On A Trackable Roadmap

Each organization needs to know precisely where they are in terms of digital maturity, and to make sure that leadership is informed and fully committed. Where you are in your enterprise focuses on your function, process, products, market, etc., but ultimately, is based on the demand your customers/clients expect of you and your ability to navigate the data involved that’s usable for you and your clients.

Increase ‘Systems Thinking’ By All

Instead of thinking about events in isolation, organizations can improve proactivity and better connect the dots between data points. Your organization needs to be looking for root causes, rather than simply responding to symptoms. This type of thinking improves synergies, interdependence and interconnectedness, and helps to shift thinking towards viewing the organization as a living organism.

Target Teams For New Value Customer Experience

Assembling teams is a critical cross-discipline, inter-functional strategy. Enhancing the customer experience demands that teams are diverse and carefully structured to better focus on process, product, internal or working directly with your customers. A wide variety of expertise and experience should make up a team that can leverage data driven insights from digital, while constantly meeting and exceeding the ever-changing needs of your clients.

Adapt Roles And Capabilities As ‘Pre-Needed’

Workforce planning and proactive strategies are not a new concept, but they must be updated to enable digital transformation. This includes reimagining both your workforce and leadership roles, as well as the acquisition of new digital roles. Understanding what those roles are, what your organization needs will help you determine what areas to focus on for your leadership development strategies. This is how to best meet your client/customer expectations, and it goes a long way in workforce planning.

Upcycle The Team Creating Organization Structures, Or ‘Flex-tures’ 

New organizational structures are trending at increasing rates because of their importance to understanding digital business needs. Adjusting how your organization is structured will help shed new light on what needs to be rearranged or reformatted to better operate in a digital environment. These structures are often more decentralized, yet remain inter-connected across networks, ecosystems, platforms, communities and leadership networks. The inclusion of flexible roles that are less defined, but more cross-functional in capabilities is another key piece of this strategy. Many different attributes of flexible roles and broader structures are what’s going to create an upcycled organizational design toolkit organization leadership will be responsible for.

Make Meaning And Connect Purpose At All Levels 

Over the last several years, people’s views on work and connecting purpose with work have been changing. With all the changes to work, roles and capabilities, there’s no substitute to making sure your people understand what’s important to the organization’s mission, the client/customer values towards your products, and connecting that purpose at all levels of the organization. Your leaders are responsible for continuously maintaining that connection through talent management and development strategies.

How prepared is your organization for digital transformation? Take our DigiPathway assessment to find out.