By Kerry Jarred, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Ignium
According to Gartner, transforming into a digital business is the number one priority for most organisations. In fact, a brief look at Gartner’s Top Insights for the C-Suite, 2018-2019 edition, highlights that we have reached a tipping point, in terms of digitally driven businesses, for both the private and public sector.
Before we jump into the numbers what on earth are we talking about? Everyone seems to throw the term digital or data-driven around these days but what does it actually mean to businesses and how can they take advantage of it?
Several years ago, everyone talked about Business Intelligence (BI) and how thanks to advances in technology, software, apps and the adoption of cloud services, that we would suddenly be able to collect huge amounts of data on and about our companies. Fast forward five years and we finally have the means to interrogate this sea of data or, as some would prefer to call it, our data lake. It’s not all meaningless numbers; we can assess in real-time stock, servicing levels and times, peak sales periods and identify our best salesperson (and our worst). We have finally reached the data summit!
From this viewpoint we can start to get an incredible insight into how every aspect of our business operates. And with that insight comes the opportunity to make better and more informed decisions about the day to day running of our organisations. We can see what’s effective and what’s not and intelligently ascertain why our services and people are performing well or badly.
Now this isn’t the machines taking over. This is about embracing the very best of digital transformation, gaining actionable insights and using those to drive tangible business outcomes.
Key stakeholders need to embrace the data in front of them and use the insights intelligently to transform their organisational strategy. In 2016 McKinsey published a paper highlighting how businesses were adapting to an era of more data-driven decision making yet struggling to develop talent, business processes and organisational muscle to capture real value from analytics. While technology itself was making major leaps forward, humans were struggling to keep up with the ride.
Move on now to late 2019 and we’re finding that companies are starting to mature and appreciate how the data impacts their culture. Provider of organisation insights and Ignium partner, Temporall, believes that organisational health and a high-performance culture is unique to each company and that in order to measure these things accurately, it needs to continually capture true insights into the sentiments of an organisation’s workforce.
As Temporall founder and CEO, Thomas Davies explains, “By utilising real time data signals collected through the tools your workforce is already using, we are able to create a continuous insight feedback loop which supports both C-suite decision making and engages everyone throughout organisations through a true digital experience.”
The one size fits all approach no longer works. In fact, did it ever? Businesses shouldn’t simply have a ‘great’ culture, today’s workforce is looking for more than sterile and ambiguous employers. What does the company they work for actually stand for and do the stakeholders lead by example? For example, Microsoft is built on a culture of growth, Salesforce on customer obsession and Google a culture of innovation that ripples down from the very top of the organisation. This is how today’s successful businesses engage and retain their talent.
A recent Glassdoor survey found that companies with a highly engaged workforce are 21% more profitable than those with poor engagement and companies with great experiences outperform the Standard and Poor’s 500 by 122%.
To understand the level of engagement of your employees, you need insights. Insights into what your people really think, feel, … believe. Employee engagement surveys have long been seen as the primary tool to measure organisational culture but now with the likes of Temporall, businesses can unlock their data to do so much more. And this is the next level of maturity for businesses. Using the insight to create a cultural change and focus is of paramount importance.
Culture can, and should, be an intrinsic part of organisational strategy. We are not talking about a business’s corporate wallpaper; it isn’t just represented by the words written behind the reception desk. Culture should be seen in how people behave across the organisation in real time, not just when the light is shining on them. As is often quoted culture is ‘what people do when no one is looking!’
In our view, leaders can only do that if they truly understand their people; what they think, what motivates them, and what they believe. Gartner predict that by 2022, 90% of corporate strategies will explicitly mention information as a critical enterprise asset and analytics as an essential competency required of their people.
I can’t think of many organisations who don’t want to be more collaborative, more aligned, communicate better and improve trust, levels of employee engagement and accountability.
You don’t have to be a CEO or have an MBA to understand how all of those things – when executed well and are truly embedded into the culture – can lead to greater financial returns.
About the Author
As co-founder and Director of Ignium, Kerry has 21 years of senior management and consulting experience within leading professional, legal and financial services firms and a niche talent solutions consultancy. She has experience on both sides of the fence and has developed a real understanding of how purpose, culture and engagement drive business performance.
