Putting people at the heart of digital transformation

Dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion has shot up the cor­po­rate board­room agen­da, with organ­i­sa­tions rac­ing to keep up with rapid­ly evolv­ing cus­tomer expec­ta­tions in the dig­i­tal age. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly vis­i­ble in the retail sec­tor where, before the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, 87 per cent of cus­tomer expe­ri­ence jour­neys were already start­ing online, accord­ing to Sales­force research.

But the need to trans­form tran­scends all sec­tor, as agile “born-tech” star­tups dis­rupt tra­di­tion­al indus­try incum­bents weighed down by bloat and lega­cy.

If the pace of change wasn’t fast enough already, coro­n­avirus has dialled it up fur­ther. By forc­ing even the most vehe­ment­ly ana­logue con­sumers, and indeed busi­ness­es, to inter­act and car­ry out tasks online, it has left organ­i­sa­tions with no choice but to meet their cus­tomers where they are on dig­i­tal chan­nels. The pan­dem­ic has sub­se­quent­ly accel­er­at­ed dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tions by six years, accord­ing to research from Twilio.

How­ev­er, sim­ply tak­ing the step to embark on a dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion by no means guar­an­tees suc­cess. The cold hard truth is 73 per cent of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tions fail, an Ever­est Group study shows. And one of the most com­mon rea­sons for this is com­pa­nies pri­ori­tis­ing tech­nol­o­gy over the impor­tance of peo­ple.

“Dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tions fail when peo­ple are not brought along with it and they don’t under­stand the ‘why’,” says Daniel Gold­stein, group chief exec­u­tive of Ele­ments, which pro­vides strate­gic con­sul­tan­cy and in-house tal­ent acqui­si­tion to some of the biggest born-tech and “going-tech” busi­ness­es in the world.

“If peo­ple don’t under­stand the ‘why’ of trans­for­ma­tion, they’re not going to get on board with the ‘how’ and actu­al­ly deliv­er­ing it. You can buy the best tech­nol­o­gy, but unless your peo­ple are absolute­ly brought into it, and are real­ly dri­ving it, it’s just not going to do what you want it to.

“Trans­for­ma­tions also fail when they’re forced onto peo­ple. A fixed approach to solv­ing prob­lems doesn’t work. If the peo­ple at the end of process­es, who are actu­al­ly doing the work, don’t feel it’s work­ing from them, they’re not going to adapt the way they work.

“What might work for your peo­ple in dig­i­tal might not work for your peo­ple in finance or sales. Approach­ing it as a one size fits all is a mis­take. There are so many nuances and it’s impor­tant to have the agili­ty to get them right because if peo­ple don’t under­stand that agili­ty is local, rather than macro, a dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion is unlike­ly to suc­ceed.”

For born-tech, dig­i­tal­ly native com­pa­nies, agili­ty is often intrin­sic. For lega­cy com­pa­nies in tra­di­tion­al indus­tries, how­ev­er, it’s very dif­fi­cult to achieve. Agile is more than a method­ol­o­gy, it’s a mind­set that focus­es on fail­ing fast and learn­ing fast. Allow­ing fail­ure to be part of a company’s psy­che requires a major cul­tur­al shift in the way busi­ness­es have worked pre­vi­ous­ly.

Born-tech organ­i­sa­tions have brought this to the mar­ket and their reward is the flex­i­bil­i­ty and adapt­abil­i­ty that allows them to thrive.

To keep up, going-tech com­pa­nies need to first under­stand how many peo­ple in their cur­rent work­force can be rede­ployed or retrained to work in a new dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment and how much tal­ent needs to be acquired. This requires effec­tive work­force plan­ning and sup­port in the thought process.

Once they’ve done that, organ­i­sa­tions then need to decide how to sup­ple­ment exist­ing tal­ent with new tal­ent, bring­ing in the nec­es­sary skills to sup­port trans­for­ma­tion. This might mean recruit­ing hun­dreds of new peo­ple because there is no rel­e­vant tal­ent in house or cher­ry-pick­ing tal­ent in cer­tain areas.

“You need to learn as a com­pa­ny where you are, in terms of the tech you have and what you’re look­ing to do, and make sure you hire peo­ple who have under­tak­en those types of projects before,” says Mike Scul­lion, man­ag­ing part­ner at Ele­ments. “If you’re a going-tech com­pa­ny going through a dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, you prob­a­bly don’t want to bring peo­ple in who have only worked at born-tech com­pa­nies because they haven’t seen the trans­for­ma­tion from a tra­di­tion­al busi­ness to a more dig­i­tal­ly focused one.”

Ele­ments’ embed­ded part­ner­ship mod­el is designed to build and accel­er­ate the suc­cess of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion agen­das through peo­ple, con­nect­ing big strate­gic vision to the tal­ent capa­ble of bring­ing it to life. For each part­ner Ele­ments works with, it builds a bespoke team of embed­ded con­sul­tants and, by advis­ing from the inside, its peo­ple can go deep­er and inspire more mean­ing­ful change. They tru­ly under­stand each company’s mis­sion, val­ues and cul­ture, and then con­vey all of that to the wider tal­ent mar­ket­place.

Hav­ing pio­neered and built this unique mod­el around its first embed­ded part­ners, them­selves among the biggest glob­al brands, Ele­ments has since rolled it out across both born-tech and going-tech organ­i­sa­tions around the world.

Its expe­ri­ence with lead­ing born-tech busi­ness­es, in par­tic­u­lar, is huge­ly appeal­ing to large cor­po­ra­tions embark­ing on dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tions. Being involved from an ear­ly stage in the growth of these dig­i­tal natives, and build­ing the sys­tems and process­es that allowed them to attract, hire and deliv­er tal­ent in huge­ly com­pet­i­tive areas, pro­vides a blue­print. How­ev­er, adapt­ing to the bespoke needs of a going-tech com­pa­ny is the key to suc­cess.

“If peo­ple didn’t under­stand dig­i­tal was the future before, they cer­tain­ly will now,” says Gold­stein. “Com­pa­nies that hadn’t already start­ed dig­i­tal­is­ing have suf­fered the most dur­ing the pan­dem­ic and will con­tin­ue to. We part­ner with organ­i­sa­tions to under­stand their mis­sion and enable them to suc­cess­ful­ly exe­cute them. We’re there to sup­ple­ment and sup­port them inter­nal­ly, work­ing with tal­ent acqui­si­tion and human resources teams to pro­vide the fire­pow­er and knowl­edge to dri­ve pow­er-cen­tric dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion.

“Our pas­sion for out­stand­ing can­di­date expe­ri­ence and our unri­valled stake­hold­er man­age­ment, treat­ing our clients as part­ners and being treat­ed as equals by them, is what dri­ves our suc­cess. The oppor­tu­ni­ty to dig­i­tal­ly trans­form is now and peo­ple should be embrac­ing this moment to adapt their envi­ron­ments and cul­tures for the future.”

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it weareelements.io

Pro­mot­ed by Ele­ments