How To Lead Digital Transformation At Your Workplace? 7 Ways To Get Started

In the wake of the current pandemic, more and more companies are embarking on a digital transformation journey since the benefits and merits of such a revolution are very promising, but only a few succeed at doing so without a hitch. In fact, that number is as low as only 4-11%. If your company is experiencing obstacles in grasping this transition of technology, here are seven tips for leading a digital transformation in a small or midsize company. Hopefully, these tips from the biggest technology leaders will help you come up with creative solutions to level up your business in this digital age and enhance efficiency.

Leverage Effective Digital Technologies That Can Benefit People

The best place to start is to leverage and invest in state-of-the-art digital technologies that are known to be efficient and effective, technologies that can bring your business, brand, and company closer to people. Using the right blend of digital technologies will open doors for you to attract potential clients and customers to your business. Clients will greatly appreciate your company’s improved digital technology and new platforms that enhance their experience.

The top reason to capitalize on these technologies is that they allow you to enhance the efficiency of your business models and build value. When crafting new strategies to keep up in the age of the pandemic, try to incorporate all these digital technologies in your business model. Start by understanding why you need these technologies, what they can do for your business, what their function is and then leverage the big data and information you collate. Doing so can boost your work productivity as well as the quality of your products or services. Here are a few tips to get started:

Make use of a Project Management Tool

Perhaps the most important tool you can make use of is a project management tool, such as Asana, Taskque, or Trollo, which will help your team be more cooperative and productive. With you project management tool in place, you will be able to leverage your efforts and time efficiently.

Use a Time Tracking Tool

Cutting-edge time tracking tools, such as Toogi, Harvest or Timecamp, will help you keep track of how much time each employee is actually working and measure their productivity against the assigned tasks. These tools will help you keep tabs on each employee’s individual performance.

Invest In Social Media Management Tools

Automated digital tools, such as HootSuite, Buffer and Sprout Social will help you save precious time by aiding you in your social media marketing efforts. Such tools allow you to create content in advance and schedule it, as well as keep track of how your content is performing.

Provide Direct Access To Information

The more accessible you make information for your employees, the more you augment efficiencies within your company. Make information easily accessible for anyone who wants it. If someone wants access to some reports, they should be able to access them directly instead of going over to the finance department. This helps speed up processes and makes sure that you only make reports that people will actually use.

Convince Employees To Be Open To Digital Transformation

47% of global executives are of the opinion that the risk-averse culture prevalent in our society poses the greatest hurdle when it comes to adapting to digital transformation. This unprecedented dilemma calls for some out-of-the-box solutions. Word-of-mouth campaigns might not suffice in this situation alone. Unless digital transformation is emphasized in the core values of the company or incorporated in corporate policies, you can’t expect your employees to take it seriously.

You should strive to persuade even the resistant members of your business organization to be open to change and embrace digital transformation with an open mind. Employees will eventually resist new digital disruption and technology, but with the right strategy, you can encourage and inspire your workforce to see the benefits and advantages of these digital technologies, and gradually get them on the same page. Once you have brought your top executives around, the entire community of workers and even customers to adjust to the new technology. Your business will thrive when digital transformation is supported, rather than ignored or rejected.

Develop User-Friendly Digital Systems

In essence, we build and implement digital systems to take manual and trivial tasks off the hands of your human workforce and allow them to focus on enhancing quality and productivity. It also allows for more output in less time. Since these systems are designed to facilitate your workforce, they should be user-friendly and easier to use. In a nutshell – ensure that the purpose of having digital technology is justified. All such solutions should be easy to operate, install, remove, hassle-free to operate, and efficient, without the need of third-party software. Ideally, all such systems need to abide by set standards. We cannot stress how important the user-friendliness of the systems is.

Give Your Team Time To “Play In The Sandbox”

You can’t adopt people to learn something new in a day. Give them the pertinent tools and time necessary to adapt to new processes. Even if your vendor says you can implement a new ERP system in a quarter, take a whole year to do so. Ease your employees gradually into it. Give your team enough time to ‘play in the sandbox’, get used to the system, before you fully put it to use. Start with a fake system that you can do transactions so that they better understand the process, without any consequences.

Create Processes That Compel Your Workforce To Adapt

Once you’ve implemented new processes, the key is to stay committed to them. Failure to adhere, would inevitably tempt people to fall back into old workflows. For instance, let it be known that if your employees want their expenses paid, they have to use the automated expense report process. If they want to book trips, they can only do so via the new automated platform. You can’t submit anything on paper; sometimes you have to take the old way. If you want it done, you have to adapt.”