How to engage your employees with a successful digital transformation

With digital transformations disrupting the way companies do business, keeping up with the digital curve is vital to every company's success today and in the future. To give you an idea of how fierce the competition is expected to become, digital transformation technology spending is projected to surpass $2 trillion in 2019, according to International Data Corporation (IDC).¹ Companies are changing quickly, so moving beyond a traditional workplace model to get your employees more engaged is critical to keeping a competitive edge.

As we discussed in our second digital transformation blog post, “3 ways to drive business outcomes with a digital transformation," the most convenient technological experiences that employees enjoy outside of work become their minimum expectation within the workplace. If you aren't set up to meet these expectations, you run the risk of reducing employee engagement which, in turn, negatively affects their ability to engage customers and help you surpass the competition.

To communicate effectively and stay productive, employees must be invested in helping your company succeed. They must care enough to listen, reflect and keep work moving. In fact, Gallup's rolling survey of employees not only shows that a mere 30% of employees are engaged at work, it also notes, “16% of employees are actively disengaged — they are miserable in the workplace and destroy what the most engaged employees build. The remaining 51% of employees are not engaged — they're just there."²  Experience in the workplace shows us that actively disengaged employees communicate in ways that reduce morale and create more disengaged employees. Therefore, it's of vital importance that you put changes in place to proactively overcome this issue — not only to help employees improve communications with peers and customers, but to also keep the health of your organization as strong as possible.

Increase user adoption and fuel growth with business intelligence

According to IDC, 77% of executives' top priorities depend on technology. Unfortunately, just because executives have deployed new technology doesn't mean it's being embraced by your team — a prerequisite for engaging employees and putting new technology to optimal use. How many times have we gone into a meeting room and seen a whiteboard that nobody uses for presentations? How you utilize your technology is important, but if it's not adapted to your company's specific needs, employees will rarely take the time to learn how to use it — especially if the learning curve and time investment is high. Ultimately, this scenario can lead to an unproductive and frustrating work environment that creates more disengaged employees. The key is to do the extra research to help ensure that you're not buying technology that isn't user friendly and doesn't serve your purposes efficiently.

Employees need to be able to walk into a meeting room and feel confident that they can use your collaborative technology with the knowledge that it will be effective and help them gain buy-in for their ideas. Sharing ideas and collaborating effectively are highly important necessities when it comes to driving innovation. This means employing collaborative technology that's easy to learn quickly and use effectively. But even the most ideal collaborative solutions have little use if employees don't have the smart data they need to help them prepare to present their ideas.

When looking for tools that can help you turn your data into insights, keep in mind that you need to enable your team to:

• Pinpoint accurate and precise data that supports the points they need to make.

• Understand how the metrics, KPIs and other statistics they're using help to improve your return on investment.

• Understand and be able to easily translate how much that data is worth.

Although the value of specific data that employees can use to help your team innovate is important, understanding the value of all of your information is vital to finding technology that will help your team capitalize on this value.

Wang notes, “Since 2000, 52 percent of companies in the Fortune 500 have either gone bankrupt, been acquired or ceased to exist." This has a lot to do with the inability to keep up with the digital curve and the increasing competition in the marketplace. Arguably, it's also due to the fact that companies are trying to drive digital transformations without a full investigation into how the right technology can be used to drive business outcomes and engage employees. Seeking technology for technology's sake is never the answer.

This is why keeping a focus on how you can use technology to better engage your employees is so important. Meeting the expectations that have resulted from technological conveniences employees experience outside the workplace is an important consideration that should inform your decisions at every step along your digital transformation journey. Your goal should be to get to a place where your employees are happy and engaged. This will lead to increased productivity, improved customer experiences and more opportunities that arise from employee innovations.