You may have invested in digitalising your customer experience, but your employees cannot be an afterthought.
To truly transform your customer experience and bring it into the digital age, your digital transformation has to start from the inside out!
Read on to hear about the key ingredients of building a Digital + Human Ecosystem for your people that will supercharge your digital transformation.
Digital, in one form or another, is something that we use each and every day. It's in all parts of our lives, and our workplace should be no different.
1 World Economic Forum, 2016, Digital Media and Society: Implications in a Hyperconnected Era
Only 17% of leaders feel ready to manage a workforce with humans + digital working side by side.[2]
Yet, almost every organisation’s strategy for the coming years is to be more “digital”.
If you want to read more about the impact of digital, we've got a couple of links below, or if you’ve already seen the facts, read on to hear about digital in the workplace.
2 Deloitte, 2017, Rewriting the Rules for the Digital Age: 2017 Human Capital Trends
Digital is already a fact of our social and retail lives, but it hasn’t made the same strides in our working world as our day-to-day lives.
I can get a reply from friends instantly through social media, but at work I still rely on, and am encouraged to use, emails, which seem inherently slow and formal.
You may even be one of the unlucky ones that has to call IT every time a visitor wants to connect to your Wi-Fi. In short, our working lives have not been transformed in the same way.
Organisations have invested heavily in digitalising the experience for their customers. And we don't blame them, customer is king.
But employees can't be an afterthought.
Here's why it’s so important to do it from the inside out...
Our core belief is that for any change to succeed, and ultimately achieve sustained profit and growth, it will be a result of great products and a differentiated customer experience. But key to delivering that are your people. A team of highly skilled and engaged employees who embrace and enable the change you want to see happen.
But to achieve that, they need to intrinsically understand the change and the type of experience you want to create for your customers. The only way to truly do that is if the experience for your employees mirrors that of your customers.
That’s really what we mean by inside out!
Our Human + Digital Ecosystem helps to create that experience for employees.
Take a look at this animation explaining the NKD Human + Digital Ecosystem:
HUMAN
PersonalisedDigital allows us to personalise the information and learning we provide to our customers and team members.
ScalableReach all of your customers and employees, anywhere, in any language.
SpeedDevelop and deploy solutions quickly, share content more quickly and regularly, far and wide, with all of your customers and employees.
AdaptabilityEasily amend and adapt based on feedback and changes within the organisation or from feedback your customers give you.
FlexibilitySmall, bite-size pieces of communication and learning give people the flexibility to decide how much they want to access and when.
Ease of accessAccess it anywhere in the world, and cater to all abilities.
ConsistencyAvoid mixed messaging and communicate clearly every time.
Cost-EffectiveYou may pay more initially, but over time you’ll pay less for deployment and ongoing use.
Digital today is about getting smarter, faster and more creative in the ways we interact with others, solve problems and learn – it has been defined as ‘the application of information and technology to raise human performance’.
Put simply, things are happening faster, more smartly, and to more people.
It took the landline telephone 75 years from its invention in 1876 to hit 50 million users. Radio took 35 years and TV took 13 years. But, since 2000, the pace of change has accelerated. It took only 3.5 years for Facebook to hit the 50 million mark, and an astonishing 35 days for the Angry Birds app to be downloaded by 50 million users.[3] With numbers like this it’s easy to feel overwhelmed when we are trying to keep up with it in our work and personal lives.
3 Citi GPS & Oxford Martin School, 2015. Technology at Work: The Future of Innovation and Employment
Digital has become integrated into the way we live our lives. It’s all around us in everything we do. We can buy anything from lunch to laptops at the click of a button, and all from the same website. We can track our body’s inner workings on a wristband. We work, we play and we learn on digital platforms. Our children live in a world where digital is the norm, and where six-year-olds understand technology as well as, if not better than, their parents[4]. It changes our expectations, how we approach tasks, how we shop and bank, how we communicate, how we fall in love, how accessible we are, in fact, can you think of a part of your life that isn’t affected by technology?
4 Ofcom 2017, Market communications report
A digital mindset is about enabling people to maximise the opportunity the digital world presents. That could be new ways of working – collaboratively, autonomously, etc. – or new tools and systems.
It can be tricky to do because sometimes it means unlearning some old ‘analogue’ behaviours and being open to new ways of thinking and behaving.
What do you think that means for the role of leaders in today’s organisations?
So how do we shift people’s thinking and change their behaviour as we go through our digital transformation?
Psychologists Susan Michie, Maartje van Stralen and Robert West developed a framework for successful behavioural change, called the ‘COM-B’ system[5]. At the heart of this framework are three things: Capability, Opportunity and Motivation. In other words, people will change their behaviour if they believe they can do it, believe it is worth it and if their environment supports, encourages and incentivises the change.
5 S. Michie, M. van Stralen, R. West, ‘The behavioural change wheel: A new method for characterising and designing behaviour change interventions’ in Implementation Science, Vol. 6, No. 42 (April, 2011)
TAP INTO MOTIVATION
Help people establish what’s in it for them.
DEVELOP SKILL + KNOW-HOW
Equip people with knowledge and understanding to do things differently.
LEVERAGE THE POWER OF CULTURE
Connect your digital vision with the values of your people and the best parts of your current culture.
INVOLVE OTHERS
Harness the power of social networks and human touch-points to inspire collective change.
INCENTIVISE KEY BEHAVIOURS
Reward, recognise and incentivise people for desired behaviours.
ALIGN THE SYSTEM
Remove barriers to change and give support where it’s needed.
Digital solutions are interventions we make using media and technology to communicate, engage, upskill and develop people – but while the execution is digital, humans remain at the centre of the design.
At NKD, we are passionate about people. We’re always trying to better our understanding of what motivates them, what makes them tick and how to inspire them to do more, dream more and achieve more than they think is possible. We are experts in developing a range of digital solutions from films to websites, and from VR and AR games to app-based content.
After completing a successful program with DHL Express Managers (see the results here) we quickly realised there was vast untapped potential in another group: their Supervisors.
Why? This group manages the people who represent DHL Express every day on the frontline. They are the brand, they make the difference. They are the leaders of tomorrow. And so, CIM Supervisory Academy was born.
What did we do? We created a truly blended learning curriculum, translated it into 26 languages and ran it in 220 countries and regions. 7,468 hours of blended learning design, 5,232 hours of creative magic, 21 apps developed, 10,647 tablets deployed, 500+ facilitators trained.
What did the learners experience? 6 distance learning modules, 6 face-to-face modules, 36 formal coaching sessions, 36 back-to-work challenges.
What results have we seen? Employee Opinion Survey results shifted in both Active Leadership (+3%) and Employee Engagement (+4%). 100% of Supervisors and their teams have seen an improvement in their communication › 95% of Supervisors have seen an improvement in their performance and the performance of their team. Ken Allen, CEO, is a proud sponsor and advocate of CIS, citing it as “one of the standout contributors to the performance of DHL Express over the last three years”.
Digital platforms harvest, analyse and present data that we can use inside the organisation to make informed decisions about performance, enabling us to communicate, engage and develop people in the best way possible – for them and the business.
These platforms make connections between different data sets that help people to make informed decisions. This is why we can confidently say engaged employees are more profitable – the data tells us.
These platforms help to create social interactions and connect individuals to communities. They can also, intelligently, pick up on and analyse sentiment, giving you a picture of the ‘mood’ of your business, or what people are talking about most.
For a large national airline we developed the concept of a performance management app based on providing everyone in the organisation the opportunity to provide strengths-based feedback against the organisation’s customer service behaviours.
Using an Uber-style rating system, team members could ‘star rate’ their colleagues and managers, and managers could also do it for their teams.
All of the data can be presented using a dashboard to have performance conversations and push out learning suggestions to users.