If you’re working at a big company or organisation, “digital transformation” is probably high on your priority list for 2019. But it’s also a vague concept that has to be tackled in several steps and in different areas of your organisation. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at digital transformation of your workplace. Why do you want to digitally transform your workforce? And what are the main challenges and pain points you have to take into account in your transformation plan?
Why transform your workforce?
Let’s start at the start: why would you want to transform your workforce? All big corporates are focused on creating new innovative technologies to stay on top of the market these days. Next to that, they are looking to digitally transform their workplace, to change the way they and their workforce work.
Why is that?
Attract young talent
Young talent is the future of an organisation and the war for talent is very fierce. It’s becoming very hard to recruit young talent for big organisations. One of the reasons is the tooling. Young talents expect to work with tools that behave like consumer tools, and can’t stand tools that slow them down.
Work-life balance
Your workforce expects to be able to work from home, from time to time. If people have to go through VPNs that only work half of the time and collaboration with colleagues becomes much harder when working from home, this just becomes a complex topic. As an organisation, you need to make sure that working from home is just as smooth as working from the office.
Increase productivity
To compete in the current market, you need to be able to get to results fast. Otherwise someone else will be ahead of you. That’s why big corporates are looking to become as agile as start-ups. It’s also why they need to use the same technology which allows them to get to results faster. That doesn’t only mean introducing real-time collaboration and taking advantage of artificial intelligence, but also getting rid of old working habits and company processes.
The top 3 challenges to workforce transformation
As a Google Cloud partner, our Workplace team at Fourcast is digitally transforming the workforce and workplace of big companies all the time. We’ve found that there are a few common challenges to overcome in all digital transformation projects. These challenges are focused around 3 areas: collaboration, productivity and security.
Collaboration
Legacy tools are obstacles that get in the way of real-time collaboration both between individual employees and between teams. Despite Microsoft’s investment in Office 365, 78% of employees report that they continue to use the desktop applications instead of the Cloud services.
In large organisations; ideas, content and teams are often siloed from each other. Multiple teams may be working on similar efforts, unaware of each other. This brings along lots of redundancy and double work. It can also be difficult for your employees to discover or find content, or to locate the right expert within your organisation to work with.
Other collaboration pain points are:
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- IT Tools are slowing the work of employees down
- It’s challenging to maintain a productive remote workforce
- It’s tough to facilitate home working
Productivity
The amount of time that workers have to focus on their primary job duties is decreasing. People are spending 8 hours per week consolidating info and 6.5 hours per week responding to emails. Files act as a middleman, conveying broken information through multiple versions and making you wait for feedback.
60% of all occupations have at least 30% of activities that are technically automatable, according to McKinsey.
Other productivity pain points to consider:
- Not using the full potential of employees
- Lack of data-informed business decisions
- Significant time wasted on menial tasks
- Inability to get the right information at the right time
- Slow boot-up times and devices becoming slow as they age
Security
IT leaders prioritise protecting intellectual assets, but with the pace that technology is changing, that task is increasingly difficult to attain. Most CIO’s also don’t realise that employees use unapproved apps at work – the majority of which are consumer file sharing & collaboration tools. This obviously brings along a huge security risk for the company.
Research indicates that one in four companies will experience a data breach next year, with Forbes predicting global cybercrime costs to total $2 trillion by 2019.
Other security & manageability pain points:
- Compliance
- Transparency
- Data breaches and Shadow IT
- Viruses/attacks on devices
- Security worries for lost/stolen devices
Finding a solution to the challenges
Technology and digital tools are penetrating more and more aspects of our (work) lives. As a company, you can’t stay behind on this evolution if you want to keep your workforce happy and – maybe even more important from a business perspective – productive and efficient.
As you plan the digital transformation of your workplace, keep in mind the main challenges and pain points of this article. It’s important that the technology and tools you choose to help you transform your workplace are able to answer these challenges.
Google G Suite for example is a collaboration suite that can help your organisation to transform to a digital, future-proof workplace. Interested? Find out more about G Suite here.
Or talk to us, we can help you map your digital transformation and make the change step by step happen at your company.