Digital Transformation should be at the core of an organisation and embedded in the culture in order to innovate and motivate employees to experience something new.
Organisations typically fall under three categories:
- Digital Reluctant
- Digital Savvy
- Using Digital for Business
The primary difference between a ‘digital reluctant’ and a ‘digital savvy’ organisation is access to social media channels. On the other hand, companies that ‘use digital for business’ will invariably see higher motivation, responsible employees and better employee retention.
All organisations need to aspire to reach to the level of using digital for business because it helps in cutting costs, easing the work flow and enabling better communication and reporting.
Trust
There are dynamic environments at play where the employees are working from home, part time, or on a contractual basis. Therefore effective communication from the company helps in building trust.
For instance, a company Townhall on a weekly basis is important. But what about doing a Townhall across cities through Hangouts, Skype, Video Conference? It may not have the same impact and level of personal connection, but it does communicate.
One important problem companies face in internal communications is digital space (or the lack of it) – your emails are full, server is full, your bandwidth is full and then you need to spend three hours or more to delete those unrequited and completed documents from each of those platforms. Instead companies often move to using:
- Google Drive, Dropbox for teams working on the same document
- Wikis for teams working on a knowledge base
- Yammer, Slack for seamless interactions between teams. WhatsApp is another tool but it is not secure.
- Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar to schedule team meetings
- Basecamp for project management between teams
- Internal social networks that are used for building content on motivation, negotiation, team building, conflict management, leadership and sales techniques
But before we implement a Digital Transformation process for an employee engagement program, we need to understand and keep the following points in mind –
- Being Mobile First – On an average, the technology-obsessed workers use their devices 7.5 hours per day. When you are designing a intranet you need to think how it can be accessed from a mobile phone.
- Secure Access to Files – As a company or enterprise we need to ensure that the file sharing platform should be safe and secure
- Knowledge Gap – Employees should be given access to training programs to fill the knowledge gap, which helps in building personal brands within an organisation.
- Empowering Employees – Providing them timely information about the company will lead to a channel for marketing. The informed advocate gives a competitive edge while hiring.
- 38% are more likely to share relevant company content with coworkers and customers when the company shares content on social media.
To reduce the knowledge gap and build the required skill set, companies are providing employees with training modules. But the next level is gamification of these programs. For example, employees earn points to complete a course and these points can be redeemed at the office cafeteria.
Communication is key during a digital transformation. The fallout of improper communication is having to deal with bad reviews on Glassdoor.
You need to give the individual enough time to absorb new communication tools. Changing to a new email address is stressful enough!
Last year, Moksh successfully launched an innovative new app called ‘PeeProvider’ that helps locate clean public toilets in the vicinity, using crowd-sourced information.
Interesting,informative and quite absorbing, gives new ideas.
That’s a great insight…thanks for sharing…
Quite a unique perspective in terms of incentivising employees for completing their course and getting points redeemable in office cafeteria. Wonder why isn’t anybody doing that. Great piece of writing.