As the old adage goes, you have got to speculate to accumulate. Nowhere is this truer than with technology. As we enter a post-pandemic recovery, many organisations are looking to invest in technology. And for good reason. Technology can facilitate cultural change within organisations and help develop in-built resilience. Executives today see culture, more so than talent, technology, or data, as the single biggest challenge to digital transformation. In fact, research by consulting firm McKinsey shows that 70% of transformations fail, and 70% of those failures are due to culture-related issues.
It is no exaggeration to say that technology can drive cultural change. The recently launched Microsoft Viva Insights is a perfect example. It allows business leaders to measure the status quo, and then measure the impact of changes as improvement plans are implemented. These insights are invaluable. They can nudge managers and employees alike to change known limiting behaviours that would otherwise stifle progression. By helping to identify where there are problems and providing the data-led insight needed to tackle them, Viva Insights could be revolutionary for businesses.
Investing in people
In these times of hybrid working, numerous collaboration challenges have come to the fore. It could be the excessive number of meetings we are being asked to attend or the fact that teams are forced to work from disconnected legacy data siloes. Both lead to a feeling of stress and disengagement. It is important that managers are aware of the biggest potential burnout risks and can identify departments that are working excessive hours. That way, they can make informed decisions about where they invest in people, money, or both to deliver services and protect the wellbeing of workers old and new. With no end in sight for the hybrid working phenomenon, it is important to use technology to inform strategic workforce decision-making.
In industries such as policing, staff attrition can be as much as 104%. This means forces are losing people faster than they can hire them. As is the case with most public sector organisations, police forces are having to navigate the perfect storm of increasing (and changing) service demand and rising complexity. This is leading to unmanageable workloads for people tasked with delivering these under pressure services. This is an unhealthy environment for staff. Increased sick pay is an inevitable consequence, as is staff churn. Hiring new people is costly and rarely advisable. It can negatively impact wider team morale and it often takes them several months to get up to speed.
A need to manage staff wellbeing
The benefits of technology are numerous. When correctly used it can identify capacity challenges, the potential for team and departmental burnout, improve business agility, enable multi-channel employee engagement, and enhance decision-making. Technology like Viva Insights provides a scientific approach to adjusting the types of behaviour that are most associated with poor culture. Most businesses start slowly by first looking at the most serious problems and then slowly expanding this and rolling out their wider improvement plans. Once an organisation has identified that an improvement plan is succeeding within a specific group or a small department, it can then extend it and drill down into further, potentially deeper issues within the business.
Across all industries, there is currently an acute need to manage staff wellbeing. Whilst there were plenty of issues before the pandemic, these have been intensified by the pandemic. Never has there been a better time to identify and measure where the biggest problems are and address them urgently. Luckily technology can help and takes emotion out of the equation. If decisions and plans are based on data, it is easier for business to remain objective and respond to the issues that that have been identified as causing problems for the general productivity and wellbeing of their people.
Driving organisations forward
Whilst culture is viewed as the single biggest challenge to digital transformation, even over and above technology and data, the great strength of technology such as Microsoft Viva is that, as an employee experience platform, it links all these parts of a successful business together. For example, it can bring the collaboration and organisational data together, analysing it against best practice, and providing improvement plans with nudges towards good behaviour, based on years of scientific studies and research. It is an example of technology and data working intrinsically together for the good of the culture within organisations.
The case for any technology is twofold. It must simplify processes for managers, to allow them to gain the right insights into the problems that they are facing. It must also improve the working day for staff by providing everything they need in one place. Whether this is in Microsoft Teams or elsewhere, it is imperative to have one go-to single version of the truth. Then make sure that that knowledge can be easily shared with others, allowing you to bridge organisational silos effectively. There is also the need for skills development. Luckily, technologies are now on hand to help organisations deliver continuous learning, monitor that learning and provide learning pathways that are appropriate for individuals.
Effective technology gives managers something they can leverage and rely on. It helps them see the wood for the trees. Technology can allow managers to identify types of behaviours that are problematic, so that they can be changed. It also helps empower staff to change their behaviours through prompting and personal insights. This can be in the form of reminders to book some focus time rather than being stuck in unproductive meetings all day. This is then followed up with recommendations to managers so that they can apply improvement plans to these groups of individuals to keep them motivated.
Technology today is powerful. It can not only enable organisations to move forward and improve both wellbeing and productivity but facilitate a more effective sharing of knowledge. Technology can link with data, culture and talent to drive organisations forward.
