How Technology Can Help Unlock the Full Potential of Your Workforce
Technology is changing the business landscape at a rapid pace and significant scale that are challenging every organization, either to adapt or risk leaving behind.
Organizations’ management and executives teams know that digital disruption can elevate their businesses to places never seen before, and the best time to build digital transformation is today - before newer and more advanced technologies become available.
However, technology only makes up half a story, the human aspect is just as equally important.
In fact, a digital business needs talent resources that are capable of not only keeping pace with the continuous technology innovation but also anticipating and become adaptive to it. Many business leaders are investing heavily in technology and R&D, but only a small percentage of them, have a long-term plan to develop and retain their workforce.
Generally speaking, traditional workforce planning focuses more on the improvement in overall efficiency, without much attention paid to other aspects such as the passion, of an ever-evolving workforce.
Due to the advancement of software and digital disruptions, business is finally capable of becoming more employee-centric - personalizing the workforce experience, unlock the full power of their people and streamlining the process of how we work.
Today, many businesses are no longer rigidly bound to defined jobs and organizational structures. Before the covid-19 pandemic, organizations are already adopting new software systems to optimize the ways people work. Yet, the pandemic has accelerated the process, and working from home is now becoming the norm.
Future-Proof Your Workforce With Technology
In the new digital era, technology and humans work together in new ways to provide the best-case user experience, delighting consumers at every touchpoint. Similarly, the same should also be applied for internal employees, creating individual preferences, and expectations rule, ultimately transforming the employee experience.
Like a modern consumer in the digital business, people also are expecting personalized, and immediate consumer experiences at the offices.
So, the question is: “How does technology help unleash the full potential of your workforce?”
Let’s find out
Digital WorkPlace
The digital workplace refers to all the technologies and tools that business organizations leverage to complete their work in today’s workplace - this includes ones that are in operations and ones that are to be adopted. The digital tools and technologies spanning email, team messaging & virtual meeting platforms, enterprise internal social networks, HR portal, document management systems, etc.
In fact, many business organizations have already use the mentioned applications, they do not have to build a digital workplace from scratch. For example, if your workforce has been using smartphones to check and respond to emails, or record leads data and sales opportunities into a CRM on their mobiles, you could be one step closer to a digital workplace than you think.
Why adopt digital workplace initiatives?
The world is shifting to digital and the benefits of transformation can significantly outweigh the risks. Thus, gradually adopting a digital workplace could provide immense advantages to businesses in the long run.
- Attract talents: instead of having to travel to offices 5 days a week, many employees prefer to work remotely these days. Technologies enable an efficient WFH model.
- Ease of communication: many workers opt to communicate via new methods such as instant messaging, over more traditional ones like email or in-person meetings.
- Employees engagement: tools such as social networks (whether internal or external ones) can help improve engagement among team members.
- Employees satisfaction: Good employees engagement can subsequently boost employees satisfaction, corresponding to better employees retention as a result.
As it is becoming more challenging to attract and retain a workforce, especially in the IT industry where the shortage of talents is still an issue. Businesses need to keep their talents highly engaged and motivated.
Thanks to the advancement of technologies, businesses can now offer such sophisticated experiences to employees, allowing the workforce to channel their creativity, elevate their thinking and reach their fullest potential to make the greatest difference through their work.
Given these benefits, more and more business organizations are investing in building their digital workplace foundation to fully realize the hidden potential of their workforce, enhancing communication and information sharing across the organization.
Yet, it’s also important that you provide employees with the necessary tools they need to perform their tasks, as well as to collaborate and connect within the teams, departments.
Nurture & Retain Talents via E-Learning Program
Many workers expect many parts of their jobs to become automated in the next few years, and they are eager to adopt the new technical skills to prepare themselves for the future.
Thus, businesses need to take a closer look at re-skilling or up-skilling initiatives to ensure that they’ll have a sufficient workforce to be proficient at those technologies. This requires the active involvement of the organizations themselves, including a well-designed e-training program that enables employees to learn the right skills, helping them become more agile within the organization.
By motivating the workforce to continuously grow and adapt their learning, businesses are bringing the workforce to fill the technology gaps and scale and allow businesses to pivot quickly.
Realizing the full potential by unlocking skills and talents can be a catalyst to accelerate growth for both businesses and individuals.
Conclusion
Technologies help to eliminate the traditional boundaries, create an agile environment, and enable businesses to adopt new training and e-learning programs, realizing the full potential of their workforce as excellent humans.
Businesses with a plan to leverage technologies and future-proof their workforce will be able to unlock the hidden talents and unique capabilities of the people to fuel growth and become market leaders.
