Bringing a transformation into your workforce can be a massive task, even if you have the capital, the correct planning, and the most advanced learning mediums. Unfortunately, developing human resources is one of the most challenging tasks organizations have to undertake, and many give up and hire new resources instead.
Through this article, we will have an in-depth look at workforce transformation, its business benefits, and ways to achieve it. We will also look at the challenges that most organizations face and the principles governing workforce transformation.
So let’s begin. Shall we?
What is Workforce Transformation?
Workforce transformation is the process of improving your workforce’s skills, abilities, and tools to keep up with the constant changes in organizational objectives and business strategy. It aims to upgrade and equip the workforce for present and future challenges and bring them up-to-speed with the changing market conditions to boost competitiveness.
Workplace transformation imperatives can be broadly classified into four areas: improving competitive stature, innovation readiness, employee self-fulfillment, and environmental impact. Work transformation is an outgrowth of the latest technological revolution fueled by cloud, data-driven insights, mobility, and the need for data automation. This was further accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, which put additional stress on the global workforce, with new skills coming into demand and unemployment peaking in certain sectors.
Why is Workforce Transformation important?
The global market for workplace transformation is valued at USD 16.47 Billion in 2021, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 17.7% from 2022 to 2030. Workplace transformation relates closely to productivity gains needed in the public sector and private firms. The Covid-19 pandemic-induced changes in the operation strategies of the workforce (e.g., how they work, where they work and how they communicate with employers) are all part of modern workplace transformation trends, which will have a massive impact on the future.
Many organizations today need help with hiring the employees they need since several skills vital for work transformation are hard to acquire through hiring. As a result, many organizations are trying to upskill employees to fulfill their changing business needs. Organizations also need to rethink how their workforce operates in the long term, redesign their workflow to attract new employees, and take advantage of the strengths of their existing staff.
Elevating your workforce’s skillset to match your organizational objectives requires detailed transformation strategies to motivate, mobilize and mold them. There are also aspects of competitiveness and self-fulfillment of staff that companies have to take care of for effective workforce transformation.
What are the Benefits of Workforce Transformation?
Workplace transformation is a crucial driver of innovation, agility, and flexibility in the organization, especially for a dispersed and mobile workforce. It transforms how, when, and where the work occurs and modernizes workspaces for better collaboration, Virtual onboarding, and seamless communications.
Source: Econocom
Providing the flexibility of work to employees by having technology as the centerpiece of staff experience helps in better engagement and relationships, boosted employee productivity, and higher job satisfaction. Typical workforce transformation examples aim to offer employees a consistent and streamlined experience across multiple locations and devices.
Apart from improving employee experience, workplace transformation can lead to a range of employer benefits, which include:
- Better communication and collaboration
- Faster innovations
- Better utilization of talent
- Flexible work environment
- Better talent acquisition and work management
- Increased efficiency and productivity
- Boosted employee morale
5 Steps to a Successful Workplace Transformation
Below are a few steps that can help you bring about successful transformation of workspace:
1. Adopt cutting-edge technology for business operations
Digital adoption has quickly become an embedded function for most forward-thinking businesses. Implementing and exploiting the latest technologies allows organizations to stay relevant and competitive.
Early adoption of technologies like cloud computing, artificial intelligence, IoT, Workflow automation, and data analytics is imperative to organizational growth these days. Such technologies also have transformed workplaces for the better and equipped organizations for the future.
2. Leverage modern workflows, business processes, and tools
A traditional business operations model can work only in a stable and slow-moving economy where competition is scarce. However, during these turbulent times of constant disruptions, it is wise to adopt new business transformation models and workflows.
Agile, Six Sigma, Lean, and Lean Six Sigma are some of the process improvement methodologies that have become very popular in recent years. Such transformation strategies are built around customer-centrism and continuous improvements, which constantly enhance organizational performance and quality wherever they are applied.
Here are a few other techniques that can enhance an organization’s agility and efficiency further:
- Business process management improves the effectiveness and efficiency of individual processes.
- Change management can be used to streamline and outcomes of the change initiatives of an organization.
- Process mining can assess gaps that exist between a company’s designed processes and what they would actually look like in the real world.
3. Cultivate a culture of learning and agility
People lie at the heart of every business, more than just processes and technology. In order to ensure that their workforce can actually drive transformation in workplace, managers must cultivate an organizational culture that fully supports change and mobility.
A culture of learning and agility can help create behavior change, reduce the resistance to change, speed up the adoption of new tools and technologies, and help organizations grow at a faster pace.
4. Create a consistent employee experience across the hybrid office
A hybrid office is a distributed workforce consisting of remote and onsite workers. Organizations are expected to adopt modern remote working software and deploy hybrid-friendly office equipment, with most technology and modern workplace transformation becoming hybrid environments.
Most organizations are also expected to monitor the performance of their onsite and offsite employees and conduct surveys to understand staff needs. There are also numerous remote employee training tools to upgrade staff’s own skills and improve business focus, making them agile, resilient, and future-ready.
5. Implement a digital adoption function in the workplace
Digital adoption is essential to businesses today and deals with deploying new technologies, maximizing staff performance, and training/onboarding new generations of employees. The increased use of digital adoption platforms and tools helps firms in the following ways:
- Contextualized in-app guidance through digital walkthroughs
- Monitoring employee interaction data for better process mining and improved collaboration processes
- Conducting digital performance reviews
- Streamline the adoption of digital skills using modern tools
- Improve ROI of software investments
- Reduce technical challenges while learning new tools
What are the Challenges in Workforce Transformation?
One of the biggest challenges employers face today is keeping their distributed workforce engaged and efficient. This may often impact management strategies, which may have to be customized to meet the needs of a remote or hybrid workforce.
Source: PwC Australia
Many business leaders feel that workforce transformation has been forced upon them as a direct result of the Covid-19 situation and its global shutdown. Some of the challenges that organizations globally have faced while emerging from this crisis include:
- On-going cloud migration or digital workplace transformation projects
- Platform limitations of existing connectivity and collaboration solutions
- Knowledge gaps due to rapidly evolving security and privacy demands
- Lack of executive buy-ins
- Limited capabilities to provide quick employee onboarding
- Inability to monitor user and employee access to business-critical data and applications
- Providing comprehensive support to a distributed workforce
Principles of Workforce Transformation
Workplace transformation principles can be divided into three broad categories, which are mentioned below:
1. Respond
The first principle of workforce transformation is to act quickly, assess the present situation, and offer consistent user experiences within the organization. It also focuses on the organization’s performance and easy availability of resources, technology, and applications.
2. Adapt
The second principle deals with managing and securing devices. Adapting to new technologies leads to maximized workforce flexibility and easier collaboration.
3. Accelerate
The final principle of workforce transformation to focus on gaining intelligence and visibility into the endpoint environment to drive innovation and engagement throughout the organization.
Wrapping Up
Before planning for workforce transformation, firms must consider their business priorities and objectives so that the transformation of work can be measured against such goals. The metamorphosis must begin with the highest impact roles in mind and focus on empowering employees on the skill sets that are vital to achieving high-priority business outcomes swiftly.
Workspace Transformation FAQ's
Digital workforce transformation involves incorporating computer-based technologies into an organization's products, processes, and strategies to upgrade its workforce's skills and make the company future-ready.
To implement workforce transformation, company leaders must first assess their existing capabilities and skills, identify the skills needed to achieve their future objectives, and find any gaps in organizational skillsets. Then, once the gaps are identified, they need to be mitigated through targeted reskilling, hiring top talent, and upskilling throughout the organization.
Transformation of work can be improved through a deeper understanding of workplace objectives, its existing skills, and measuring the impact of each positive change on the organization. It also deals with understanding and fulfilling your staff's requirements through proper planning.
According to National Health Services(NHS), UK, workforce transformation is a way for them to recruit, retain, develop, deploy and continue to support their healthcare workforce to meet the changing and growing needs of the local population.
Some of the best HR software options are:
- Adopting the latest technologies
- Leveraging modern workflows and processes
- Creating a culture of agility and learning
- Creating a consistent employee experience across hybrid workspaces
- Implementing a digital adoption function within the workplace
Updated : February 13, 2023
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