When Workers Become Business Consumers: Trends in Digital Transformation

The most successful companies know that to succeed, they need to invest in their people. Increasingly, impactful investments focus not on conventional HR strategies, but rather on using digital innovation to create new ways of working – by investing, in other words, in digital transformation. This transformation allows businesses to reimagine business models and make investments in digital capabilities to support these efforts.

Inside the enterprise, digital strategies recognize employees as business consumers who bring their digital expectations and behaviors to work, and expect consumer-grade experiences on the job. This becomes a crucial input into designing a digital Employee Experience (dEX) that empowers and enables employees to work seamlessly in a digital world.

While the value of digital transformation has become widely acknowledged across industries, many organizations vary in the level of digtal maturity within their workforce. New generations easily adapt to the transformation of the organization because these changes resonate with their personal experiences, advanced technical skills, and mind-sets, while other generations of employees are still embracing the concept of digital in their day-to-day work.

Digital transformation brings significant change to employees’ work and behaviors and a majority of organizations are still in the early phases of the transformation journey; however, some emerging trends amongst the early adopters of digital transformation are now being applied more broadly to drive the consumerization of the workforce.

Enterprise Connectivity

Organizations are breaking the siloed nature of their culture – where functions, roles, and work sites separate colleagues and stifle the flow of ideas – and focusing on strategies to enable enterprise connectivity. Leadership is working to encourage social behaviors across the organization to facilitate community building, networking, and knowledge-sharing in broader business and people contexts, and organizations are making major investments in collaborative platforms and capabilities to support this shift in culture.

Working Anywhere and Anytime

In a digitally mature organization, we see employees expecting to connect anywhere and anytime. Being able to perform their jobs from any device (including mobile, wearable, and other form factors) becomes a high-priority capability. There is a big value add in digitally transforming the way employees work, whether it is digitally enabling their physical workplaces or providing flexible and fluid work environments where they can seamlessly perform their jobs and interact with peers.

New Expectations in the Workforce

Organizations now understand that the new generation of the workforce brings expectations and attitudes to the workplace that dramatically change corporate culture. Embracing and recognizing this change must influence the dEX strategy. Some of the key expectations of business consumers include:

• Greater work-life balance and integration
• More flexibility in ways of working (location, hours, virtual workspaces, collaboration, teamwork)
• Feeling good about the organization they work for and knowing it is progressive and invested in its people
• Foreseeing their potential for leadership opportunities and being free to grow quickly
• Having easy access to knowledge and people across the organization to develop new and meaningful relationships and broaden skillsets
• Receiving timely and frequent feedback so they can track their growth and opportunities

At Logical Design Solutions, we believe designing an Employee Experience needs to address – and exceed – these expectations. Our strategy focuses on people-centric design principles, with a solid foundation of knowledge about who your employees are, how they work today, and how they want to work in the future.