Digital transformation is as much about people as it is about technology. Yet, people are often overlooked in a rush to go digital, significantly hindering a transformation strategy’s success.
By upskilling people with these Best 5 Digital Transformation Strategies to prepare them to implement new technologies and processes, business leaders can ensure that their digital transformation won’t fail due to a lack of the right skills.
Let’s dig into Best 5 Digital Transformation Strategies to Upskill Your Team to achieve digital supremacy.
What is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is integrating digital technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how you operate and deliver value to customers. It’s also a cultural change that requires organizations to continually challenge the status quo, experiment, and get comfortable with failure.
According to statistics, digitally transformed enterprises will account for over $53 trillion in 2023, up from $13.5 trillion in 2018. This figure demonstrates the need for businesses to be digitally savvy to compete in a marketplace becoming more reliant on digitization.
Best 5 Digital Transformation Strategies to Upskill Your Team
Identify your mindset and skills gap
The first step among the Best 5 Digital Transformation Strategies to Upskill Your Team is to learn that Digital is now a requisite for your business. Your business needs leaders who understand Digital’s importance and impact on creating and cultivating a digital culture embedded across the organization.
The key to achieving this is to understand what the current mindset is:
- Are your employees worried about or scared to use digital technologies?
- Do teams know what digital technologies and processes are across the business?
- Do teams collaborate and share information using digital channels?
- Are your employees aware of the digital activities across the enterprise?
- Do employees understand and know the business targets and goals – KPIs, revenue, etc.?
Taking time to figure out where your employees are regarding their understanding of the business can help you put processes in place that enable transparency and information sharing. Hence, everyone is on the right page.
This mindset feeds into the skills in your business. Becoming digital doesn’t mean you need to use every channel and piece of technology on the market. It’s about choosing the right ones for your business.
Cultivate cross-functional teams
The second step among the Best 5 Digital Transformation Strategies to Upskill Your Team is There’s no point in your sales and marketing teams working in silos. They have to work together to ensure your company’s message is clear and consistent to engage prospects and convert leads.
Encouraging cross-collaboration takes all knowledge and skills into account. It allows the sharing of ideas to maximize the activities in your organization and enables employees to work with and experience new technologies. It also helps instil the same language and a shared understanding of Digital to facilitate future and cross-departmental thinking.
This empowers employees and provides new knowledge, encourages teams to think outside the areas they work in, and offers ways for recruits to get to grips with the company.
For example, it could be beneficial for a new marketing member to sit in on the weekly sales meeting to learn the vocabulary and see the tactics used to drive conversions. Or for the sales team to review edits of a blog to understand the importance of SEO keywords in lead generation.
Offer Continuous Professional Development
Companies that invest in the right experience for their people and prepare for the future tend to outperform their competitors, delivering 19% more growth in revenue than competitors and 15% more.
To prepare your employees for the demands of the digital world, you need to future-proof their careers. Continuous Professional Development schemes provide a way to offer relevant and up-to-date learning for a range of core and specialized skills.
There are significant benefits to both your employee and organization, and it doesn’t have to be complicated. Many specialist companies – DMI included – offer simple and effective ways to learn new skills and earn CPD points, such as reading an ebook, completing a short course, or listening to a podcast.
Once you identify the skills gaps in your organization, you can tailor your in-house pieces of training and regularly update them to reflect the changes in the marketplace to keep skills current.
Develop a Rewards Scheme to Incentivize Learning and Encourage your Employees
It can be difficult for your staff to fit in learning on top of all their other responsibilities. To encourage learning, it can be helpful to create a system of incentives to motivate and reward. These can take many forms:
- Offer dedicated time for training – this gives employees dedicated time to switch off work and focus on learning. It could be on a weekly or monthly basis.
- Credit learners publicly – shout about employees that take the time to learn through your internal networks or at meetings.
- Spot awards – this rewards a ‘learner of the month’, for example, with a voucher or company day off.
- Monetary bonus – a cash bonus or extra money in a paycheck on a quarterly or annual basis.
- Offer certifications – offering a recognized certification is a great way to validate learning that you can share in the company and on social networks.
- Include gamification – If you have a learning management system, consider including badges or leaderboards to encourage healthy competition.
Provide relevant training and functional learning
It may seem obvious to offer suitable training, but many organizations are still not doing it correctly. You may have a learning management system in place, but is it up-to-date with today’s skill needs?
Does it reflect the external world in terms of knowledge?
When you look at the skills required in the business, map that to the training you offer. So if you need a social media specialist, provide training in that area so other team members can be up to speed.
It’s also crucial to offer training that lends itself to active learning and ensure your staff are ‘job ready’. In essence, you need your workforce to have skills that are instantly applicable and relevant across business areas to carry out specific digital functions.
One of the challenges with digital, whether digital marketing or achieving social selling success, is that it changes. This means that skills can go out of date quickly, and new things – software, social apps, algorithms – need to be learned.
So, for the betterment of your company, think about the most important area to focus on first and set realistic milestones that will help you reach organizational objectives.
This could be improving the customer purchase experience, improving sales and marketing alignment, or improving in-house digital skills through a training program.
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