The pace at which digital transformation is progressing has experienced a real boom in the context of the pandemic – and across all industries. However, it has added to the already existing concerns of employees. Many of them live in the mistaken belief that the digitalisation of their company would mean that either everyone would have to become programming experts or jobs would have to be replaced by new technologies. In fact, however, this assumption is completely unfounded. And more than that, because the exact opposite is the case: the risk of losing one’s job is actually much greater if companies do not invest in the digitalisation of their departments and business processes. But what are the consequences for employees and especially for HR managers?
An urgently needed cultural change
Data has become indispensable for the success of any company. It is no longer a matter of collecting large quantities. In order to actually benefit from its value, a company must also be able to carry out targeted analyses with it. Humans play a central role here – but unfortunately this is still far too often underestimated or even completely overlooked by those responsible.
On the one hand, no company is able to evaluate large amounts of data without smart tools. Millions of data sets often have to be analysed and correlated with each other in order to gain useful insights and identify optimisation potential. For the human eye, these remain invisible without the right technology.
On the other hand, even the best tool in the world cannot help to achieve lasting success for a company. What is needed for this to work in practice is always the analytical mindset of the human being. Ultimately, only he or she can ensure that concrete insights and recommendations for action are derived from the results of the data analyses.
The good news is that every human being has extremely good analytical skills by nature. Making them realise this is one of the most important tasks now for business leaders, but also for IT and especially HR managers. Their goal must be to finally take away the employees’ worries and fears of contact, which still exist among many, especially in the UK, with regard to modern technologies. In order to make this change sustainable, on the one hand a technological infrastructure is needed that makes it possible to analyse the available data in a simple way. On the other hand, it is a matter of giving employees the necessary self-confidence, as well as the ability to formulate their questions as modelling problems. Only in this way can the employees themselves develop into data analysts who are able to solve the problems of their daily work independently with the help of the established infrastructure and the collected data volumes.
The starting signal for a digital future
The global outbreak of the coronavirus has turned the working world completely upside down. In order to remain business-capable, collaboration tools and cloud systems became indispensable virtually overnight, and suddenly many have found themselves at a point where, without this unexpected boom, they might not have arrived for several years. This enormously fast digital transformation has cost both management and employees a lot of energy, but all these efforts were by no means in vain. On the contrary, they can already make the decisive difference today, which is not only needed to continue to do business successfully. Digitalisation offers all companies countless opportunities to improve their processes and boost their sales. For this to work in the long term, however, the symbiosis between people and technology is needed. Creating this symbiosis is the central task that needs to be mastered.
