Employees Are The Key To Digital Transformation

As defined by Salesforce, digital transformation is the process of using digital technologies to create or modify existing business processes, culture, and customer experience. Digital transformation transcends traditional roles such as sales, marketing and customer service. In fact, digital transformation is permeating across all business functions, even HR.

For organisations to succeed in digital transformation, HR needs to embrace new ways of working by championing an employee experience, adopting technological trends, and capitalising on digital tools to accelerate digital transformation. With a mindset shift in how HR can spearhead a digital transformation revolution within the organisation, paired with the right application of technology tools, this helps to create a high performing and productive workforce.

Drive employee experiencer
Employee experience is a combination of all the experiences that an employee is exposed to, from the time they apply for a role within the organisation through to their last day with the organisation. Employee experience is more than just compensating employees with a paycheck, it includes everything that an employee feels, learns and goes through at work. Essentially, it is about making employees feel as if they want to contribute to the success of the organisation, while getting something meaningful in return. By creating a personalised employee experience, this equips HR with a strong foothold in setting the stage for driving digital and enterprise transformations.

Transform organisation structure and talent managementr
To accelerate the adoption of digital transformation, organisation structure needs to change. Traditionally, organisation structure was at best hierarchical. The relationship between employers and employees was that of a manager and subordinate. However, as organisations start to globalise and the workforce becomes increasingly diverse and remote, digital tools become even more important. Freelancers and contractors, making up the gig workforce, is extremely common today. In order for organisations to be able to ensure that this gig workforce continues to be highly productive and contribute to the success of the organisation, they need to be well-equipped with tools to enable them to execute their tasks effectively and efficiently.

As organisations transform to one that is digitally-savvy and agile, their existing workforce needs to upgrade. Given that technology is increasingly embedded in our daily lives, employees have to be able to keep up with the rapidly-changing business dynamics or risk lagging behind. This means upskilling workers to be proficient in capitalising on digital tools in their daily work. Aside from ensuring that employees are digitally-literate, senior leaders also need to be equally digitally-literate to spearhead and champion a culture of digital literacy. This allows both employers and managers to be comfortable in using new technology tools to work efficiently and productively.

Create an employee-centered smart workplacer
With the integration of digital tools and the accumulation of key employee and payroll data, there is a whole avenue of data analytics that can be used to optimise business processes. A digitally-optimised human resource management system should ideally be able to collect key employee information and use it for critical human capital insights and decision-making such as prediction of turnover rates and performance management. In short, focusing on creating an employee-centered smart workplace forms the very cornerstone in driving a successful digital transformation with the organisation.

In the face of a turbulent and highly-dynamic business market, the workplace is a constantly changing environment. Employee experience, talent management and human capital strategies have to evolve in order to keep employees engaged and productive, while hiring and retaining key talents. Building a holistic human resource model, one that focuses on defining the future digital workforce and taking incremental steps towards this long-term goal will help to ensure the success of digital enterprise transformation.