In today’s competitive landscape, businesses must continually adapt and evolve to stay ahead. And empowering your workforce with new technology is crucial to achieving these goals.
Digital technologies have transformed modern workforces, improving efficiency, agility, and adaptivity. Through digital transformation, employees can collaborate better, focus on more specialized tasks, and make data-driven decisions.
And while AI and automation have raised some concerns, the benefits of digital transformation for employees far outweigh their potential drawbacks.
What does digital transformation mean for employees?
Digital transformation enhances employee experience by promoting collaboration, streamlined workflows, enhanced productivity, employee engagement, and a more inclusive workspace.
Digital transformation doesn’t only streamline internal operations, though. It also helps employees deliver greater value to your customers and organization.
A well-enacted digital transformation strategy allows employees to improve customer experience, automate their day-to-day workflows, and use their skills in developing better products. Moreover, employees can draw insights from data, and focus their energies to acquire digital skills for the future.
7 benefits of digital transformation for employees
1. Seamless workplace collaboration
Imagine enhancing your team’s productivity and efficiency without increasing the hours of work put in or the number of team members. Automation in the workplace allows you to:
- Keep track of assigned tasks via project management software
- Stay connected on the go with the facility to work on and off office in a hybrid work environment
- Seamlessly share ideas, feedback and change of plans, making collaboration increasingly easier.
2. Streamlined workflows, enhanced productivity and employee engagement
By increasingly integrating automation in every facet of the organization, employees can gain the freedom to work only on tasks that truly matter, things that require an invaluable human touch to come to fruition.
I. Ease of work for HR
From a HR perspective, digital transformation can reduce monotonous, time-consuming tasks and help your team focus on adding value. HR teams can leverage automation, analytics, and predictive capabilities to achieve better outcomes.
For example, digital onboarding and integrated payroll systems streamline otherwise tedious HR tasks.
HR teams that embrace digitalization can leverage workforce data to make decisions that drive both better business, and people outcomes.
II. Better facility in outsourcing
Since digital transformation promotes easy and fast handling of tasks beyond borders and timezones, you can outsource additional work by tapping into talent anywhere in the world. Then, you can monitor the progress via secure project management software.
III. Mundanity begone
Tedious, repetitive activities weigh employees down and distract them from more specialized tasks. Fortunately, more businesses are leveraging automation to free their workforce up from the mundane.
RPA (Robotic Process Automation), in particular, has gained traction because of its flexibility and agile deployment. RPA works by emulating human clicks and keystrokes on an application user interface. That makes it a copycat system, through which the possibilities of automating mundane tasks are endless.
A survey by Salesforce revealed that automation can reduce employee stress levels and improve productivity. So, implementing automation within your organization may keep your workforce happier and help them focus on high-value tasks.
3. Greater cost-effectiveness
Digital transformation saves costs by:
- Significantly reducing the need for manual intervention
- Saving resources and material costs in manufacturing
- Enabling immediate access to information which saves transport costs
- Remarkably reducing the possibility of errors, thus preventing expensive compensations
- Setting up a cloud-based system that\’s seamless and secure, instead of making hefty investments on a physical infrastructure.
These cost reductions cause a definite increase in profit margins. You can allocate the saved resources to build a better work environment, invest in ways that boost employee satisfaction, and acquire advanced tools to further automate and upgrade workflows.
4. Data-driven decision-making and improved accuracy
With an ever-growing sea of data, managers and employees are required to make sense of all of this complexity in real-time. In general, you have three big sets of data: employee data, customer data, and operational data.
Businesses rely on this data to make strategic decisions, but linking the three data sets can be challenging. Digital transformation, however, helps you achieve a more unified view with necessary integrations.
Data-driven decision making enables employees to get the right data, to the right people, at the right times, to effectively use the data to problem solve, and improve performance. Using a data-driven decision-making approach promotes:
- Awareness and transparency
- Real-time monitoring and tracking of progress
- Consistency throughout the organization
- Proactiveness in employees
- Future leaders within the workspace who think intuitively and plan analytically
Data-driven leaders also know that data provides the confidence to launch experiments and learn, helping to drive an experimentation mindset within the organization.
5. Astounding potential for employee professional development
A growing body of research reveals that employees value training and professional development opportunities greatly. However, many organizations struggle to offer these opportunities due to a lack of resources.
But digital transformation has created new, more accessible opportunities for professional development. Leading enterprises like Microsoft, Google, and IBM have rolled out valuable courses and professional certifications. Similarly, skills assessment platforms help organizations conveniently upskill and reskill their tech workforce.
Moreover, thanks to the growth of learning management systems, organizations can affordably create in-house courses and training programs. Hosting your courses on the cloud also makes them easily accessible to hybrid workforces.
6. Enhanced customer service delivery
In terms of enhancing overall customer experience, digital transformation helps employees in:
- Providing customers with newer and better communication choices — from messaging, voice and video chat, to on-screen collaboration and personalized experiences.
- Using bots to scale the mundane customer service tasks, minimizing errors and ensuring faster service delivery
- Employing their energies in creating innovative ways to solve emerging challenges
It is true that technology is the driving force for marketing and customer experience. But the cog in the system that drives that progress is data.
By using data analytics, employees can apply preemptive measures, enhance individual customer experiences, and control data security.
7. A truly inclusive workplace – breaking barriers through automation for the differently-abled
According to a report published in Harvard Business Review, 90% of the world’s companies value diversity. However, only a minuscule 4% prioritize the inclusion of the disabled.
Unfortunately, differently-abled employees are excluded by design. Workplaces are generally engineered with fully-abled employees in mind, discouraging an inclusive workforce.
Including automation throughout the system, from policy building to workplace design, can fundamentally change that.
Many modern car manufacturers have begun introducing exoskeletons to help the disabled (a feature that also further protects the abled) from shock while driving.
Similarly, smart workplace construction using ergonomic design and special design considerations, keeping in view the unique demands of the differently-abled employees, can help eliminate performance barriers right from the get-go.
These adjustments can include using software that assists the differently-abled, e.g. using software that assists visually impaired employees, or integrating apps in the hiring process to hire autistic employees whose unique strengths would add to the collective social fabric of the organization.
All in all, automation helps differently-abled employees successfully integrate into your workforce.
Conclusion
Digital transformation has benefited employees greatly, improving workplace collaboration and the quality of work. Digital technology empowers workforces by:
- Streamlining internal operations
- Automating repetitive, mundane tasks
- Facilitating seamless, real-time collaboration
- Optimizing data management and access
Embracing digital transformation is crucial to improving team productivity and building a happy workforce. So, how has the digital revolution benefited your organization?
