Digital transformation: 6 ways to improve your workforce performance and ROI

For Digital Transformation in any organisation, it is imperative that the existing process and systems are made more efficient to be effective in creating value for your customers

Being digitally enabled means that the organization and the customers/ consumers of the organization's products or services are brought closer which not only helps the company to understand the buyer's needs proactively but also it helps to interact with new buyers. With this understanding, the organization then strives to meet the expectations of the buyers. Digital transformation hence helps organizations meet the current customers’ expectations but also ensure the acquisition of new customer and hence opening up new business opportunities.

It is the improved customer experience that helps organizations in retaining customers and also opens up new opportunities that organizations are investing in digital transformation.

Digital transformation brings in the holistic improvement of the businesses thereby not only in terms of retention and acquisition of customers but also enabling the organization to be future-ready.

Most of companies are already taking steps and implementing complex digital transformation strategies to ensure improvement in customer experiences. 

As mentioned earlier, digital transformation in an organization brings about holistic change within the organization. It essentially improves customer experiences but also enables an organization to experience tremendous improvements in employee engagement and overall company/ employee productivity.

Digital transformation is about using technology to overall improve the business models, in turn, bringing about the development of business revenue streams and also improving overall productivity by avoiding or reducing disruptions.

Ways to improve your workforce performance and ROI

1. Streamline processes and systems

Digital Transformation is not only about taking your data into the Cloud but to change and optimizing your systems and processes. It is to ensure that they are compatible and flexible enough to deliver reliable business insights and position your business for future success. 

The whole transformation process should involve employees in the change management process, ensuring the employees convert and integrate new digital methods and processes to existing working practices, helping bridge the traditional and digital parts of your business, to support the organization’s digital transformation.

Engage technical innovation managers with profound experience developing advanced solutions to support transformation.

2. Set up self-service portals

The whole process of digital transformation should follow the basic change management process, wherein the employees or verticals involved should own the processes and systems being developed. One of the best practices is to deploy self-serve digital technologies that all the stakeholders including employees and business partners can use and based on these can suggest improvements that not only embed the changes but also the buy-in of the end users of these systems. The process can be kicked off by starting with a small function and taking it to digital. Once the other functions realize the success of the initiative and based on the trust hence gained through a successful digital initiative, the Organization can go on with much large and organization-wide changes or digital transformation projects.

3. Leverage digital technologies and solutions

To bring in transformation, it’s a good practice to utilize digital technologies and digital platforms to transform business processes and systems e.g, training employees to work on new software platforms designed to help product launches happen more quickly. 

The digital transformation uses artificial intelligence, automation, hybrid clouds, and other digital technologies to harness data and enable more intelligent workflows, quicker, more informed decisions, and real-time responses to market disruptions. 

4. Harness real-time data

The biggest benefit of Digital transformation is that it helps in the collection of reliable data. The data can then be centralized for data storage and can be used for taking business decisions through different tools for data analysis and insights. 

The data can be for getting actionable steps e.g. revenue generation, proactive and predictive machine maintenance, machine productivity, cost reduction, new product development, etc.

Organizations can integrate powerful digital tools including AI and ML to automate processes and also enhance the decision-making process for the employees.

5. Ensure employee collaboration

With the centralization of data, relevant tools along with strategies can really help improve customer satisfaction. Some examples of improving customer satisfaction are the use of an automated chat process, which fetches the relevant data and helps executives respond to customer inquiries proactively; secondly, the digital tools help employees communicate across departments, continuous data flows within the organization seamlessly, ensuring a smooth phase-to-phase customer lifecycle – this makes the overall process more efficient and helps save time, money, and resources.

It is of paramount importance that the teams are well aware of the overall mission, create buy-in of the whole change process by empowering the teams in the workplace transformation, and most importantly have a properly designed implementation and roll-out program to help improve employees’ commitment and ensure the success of the digital transformation program.

Organizations realize overall increased revenues, cost savings, and increased profitability from better data capture to improved customer experiences. A data-driven corporate culture only helps drive significant changes in costs and revenues for the organisation.

Employees and leadership can enhance their best practices by improving visibility across various aspects of a company and boosting revenues by pattern recognition, assessing trends, and capitalizing on data-driven opportunities.

6. Improve operational efficiency

Executives said that improving operational effectiveness (40%), faster time-to-market (36%), and being able to deliver on customers’ expectations (35%) are among the main benefits of digital transformation.

One of the most critical improvements that digital transformation brings is improving operational efficiency. The data availability helps with predictive maintenance which can help reduce the breakdown of machines, and the proactive management of the effectiveness of machines can help reduce rejections and improve the productivity of machines. These are simple examples of direct improvements in operational efficiency through digital transformation.

Your employees will improve their performance by digitizing your company operations, streamlining your workflows, and improving information flows throughout the company.

Digital transformation involves changing the overall business processes and systems from the designed to manufacture and sell products to a data-driven organization flexible enough to respond to market needs and changes proactively.