Digital transformation has the potential to greatly improve the employee experience by streamlining processes, increasing communication and collaboration, while providing access to relevant information and tools in real-time. These digital advantages can result in more efficient workflows, reduced workloads, and increased job satisfaction. Additionally, digital transformation facilitates remote work options and flexible work arrangements, leading to improved work-life balance and increased employee engagement.
With the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, manual tasks have been automated, freeing up employees to focus on more strategic and creative tasks. Furthermore, the use of digital tools and platforms has facilitated continuous learning and skill development opportunities, leading to employee growth and career advancement. Overall, digital transformation has positively impacted the employee experience by providing more autonomy, meaningful work, and a supportive work environment.
A digital transformation journey lives or dies by employee adoption, the greatest transformation is meaningless unless the most important stakeholders adopt it, and those are the employee if new ways of working are not adopted, then they may as well not exist. There are three main elements to employee digital transformation:
Augmentation: While it's true that certain traditional jobs may become automated or obsolete, however digital transformation also creates new opportunities.
These new jobs often require a different set of skills and knowledge, which may require employees to upskill in order to adapt. Ultimately, digital transformation shifts the focus of work from manual tasks to higher-value activities such as analysis, decision making, and innovation. In this sense, digital transformation doesn't eliminate jobs, but rather transforms them to meet the demands of the digital age. Employee will generally find more satisfaction with these new digitally augmented roles than the manual repetitive ones of the past.
Future readying: The speed of digital transformation greatly outpaces both academic institutions ability to adapt as well as the number of available candidates on the job market, this is why future readying your workforce is essential for success. It is far more effective to upskill an existing workforce than lose years of experience and bespoke knowledge to hiring new staff.
This is why it is essential to develop learning programs that are agile, flexible and strategic; ideally in a medium to large transformation, it is essential to have a chief learning officer, someone with a team to ensure that each employee who's role is impacted by the digital transformation has the support they need to embrace the digital change rather than fear it.
Flex forcing: is a combination of providing a work environment along with the training support to broaden the breadth of expertise within a workforce, no longer have T shaped employees with expertise in only one avenue, but rather creating working environments in which employees can work in cross functional teams augmenting their expertise with other related skills. The second factor in flex forcing is to leverage external resources, for non-core, non-operational tasks, leveraging private contractors, the gig economy
