Increase productivity with technology-employee partnerships

Although digital technology is a must if you want to stay competitive in today's business world, it's pointless if it doesn't deliver the business outcomes you need to reach your goals. That's why a digital transformation journey shouldn't involve rushing out to buy the latest technology. In fact, if your goal is to increase productivity, improve the customer experience, and gain the insights you need to innovate and grow your business, at some point you need to shift your focus away from the technology itself, and turn your attention to digitalization.

In “Digitization, digitalization and digital transformation: the differences," i-SCOOP notes, “digitalization is about systems of engagement and systems of insight, leveraging digitized data and processes."[1]

To leverage data and processes as effectively as possible, you need to first digitize your information and make it easily accessible to your team. You can learn more about how to do this in, “3 ways to drive business outcomes with a digital transformation."

In this post, we'll focus more on digitalization as systems of engagement and systems of insight, and how viewing your employees and the technologies they use as partnerships can optimize these systems for a more successful digital transformation. We'll look at the following three areas to help you build effective technology-employee partnerships across your organization:

1. Alignment

2. Assignment

3. Technique

1. Create a more collaborative work environment by aligning technology with people and business strategies

A successful digital transformation should lead to higher employee engagement by empowering employees to make informed decisions quickly, which allows them to experience a collaborative work environment that enables them to share innovative ideas that lead to healthy business growth. When looking for technologies that can help to deliver these outcomes, it's important to focus on employee needs. You can get started by asking the following questions:

• How do your employees currently work toward your business goals?

• What busy work could be eliminated to help your employees spend more time on your strategic business initiatives?

• How do they partner with each other?

• How do they partner with your customers?

2. Assign technology dedicated tasks that can help employees increase productivity

Once you've created a strategic partnership between your employees and the technologies they use, it's important to become a steward of this technology. This involves appropriating tasks to specific solutions. Just as you'd assign an employee certain tasks, you also want to dial into what your technology can and needs to perform while pairing that technology with the right people in your organization.

A good approach is to start in a specific department and look at a specific workflow to help you determine what processes make the most sense with particular solutions. Let's say you have an IT department that needs to focus on a strategic project but just doesn't have the manpower because they're too busy managing print servers and fielding help-desk calls. In this example, you have a mismatched technology-employee partnership: the on-premises print infrastructure is actually interfering with IT's ability to focus on other, more important business initiatives. In this case, you need technology that will work with — rather than against — IT. This may involve looking for technologies that let you remove the burden on IT by moving your print infrastructure offsite.

According to a Gartner CIO Agenda Report, 39% of CIOs surveyed noted that their IT departments could benefit from a major talent overhaul.[3] This is a conclusion that any CIO can come to if their IT staff is so busy maintaining servers that they don't have time to innovate. In fact, when any department is overtaxed with busy work, talent and creativity suffer. By digging into departmental workflows and how technology can be tasked to make processes more efficient, you'll also be able to truly discover the potential of your employees and how to optimize this potential.

3. Consider how your employees engage with technology to get the most out of your digital transformation

A digital transformation is not about deploying technology, it's about embracing it to get the results you need. You want to be able to walk into a room with a turnkey solution that's quick to get going and easy to use. When you've done your due diligence by aligning people with your technology and assigning tasks to your solutions, you've already made it easier for employees to learn how to use technology more strategically. From there, you and your team can continuously adapt techniques that strengthen the technology-employee partnership.

Let's look at information management solutions as an example. These types of solutions offer a variety of benefits, such as:

• Allowing employees to access and share data quickly and easily

• Optimizing processes and speeding up workflows with automation

• Helping employees deliver more accurate information by centralizing content and reducing data redundancies

These benefits alone can help to drive business strategies, but employees can accomplish even more with such easy access to precise data — such as adapting more innovative ways to use these tools to gain actionable insights. The business insights that can result from easier access to data can help you break into new markets, build stronger relationships with customers and further increase productivity.

Whether you're evaluating how your employees use data management tools, collaboration solutions, mobile technologies or other digital solutions, there's often a possibility that your team can find more ways to use the technology — adding more value to your business. Keep in mind that a digital transformation is a circular process. Technology is always changing, so continuously revisiting the alignment-assignment-technique process is vital if you want to stay competitive.

[1] “Digitization, digitalization and digital transformation: the differences." I-SCOOP. 2016. https://www.i-scoop.eu/digitization-digitalization-digital-transformation-disruption/

[2] Ibid.

[3] “Taming the Digital Dragon: The 2014 CIO Agenda." Gartner, Inc., 2014. https://www.gartner.com/imagesrv/cio/pdf/cio\_agenda\_insights2014.pdf