Enhancing Your Workforce’s Productivity with Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is creating waves in the business world, with almost every organization today embarking on the journey to enhance the capability of their existing systems, improve the efficiency of their business process, and be responsive to changing market conditions. It is estimated that the global digital transformation market size will grow from $469.8 billion in 2020 to $1009.8 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 16.5%.

However, most digital transformation efforts focus on increasing efficiency and throughput; not many look at how transformation can enhance the productivity of their workforce. Unless your workforce is empowered with modern tools and technologies, there is no way you can meet organizational objectives that are an integral part of your digital transformation strategy.

Why Enhancing Workforce Productivity is Imperative

Of all the different ways in which the pandemic has impacted business operations, the bearing it has had on employee morale, optimism, and team-spirit has been particularly distressing. As nations went into complete lockdowns, organizations found themselves in a fix: they had to seek new ways to keep their business operational. Thankfully, the work-from-home strategy soon came to the rescue and it allowed businesses to keep their lights on – despite all the turmoil around.

But although the remote work model enabled certain industries to continue operating their business as usual, in sectors such as travel and hospitality, the fear of job loss and low pay is still looming large. Although most nations have now eased restrictions, these industries continue to bear the brunt of the crisis. And even for those who are now accustomed to working from home, productivity concerns are still rampant. Irrespective of the industry, organizations need to drive efforts in enhancing the productivity of their workforce to:

• Improve engagement and satisfaction levels and ensure greater well-being
• Build a happier and more effective workplace that in turn enables better customer loyalty
• Enable greater fulfillment and a sense of purpose in whatever they do
• Improve the overall work culture of the organization and ensure high levels of retention
• Add value to their roles so their efforts can drive the business forward into the future
• Empower them to contribute to the overall success and revenue of the organization

How Digital Transformation Can Improve Productivity

The best way to enhance workforce productivity with digital transformation is to provide employees with the tools, resources, and systems they need to efficiently do their jobs. The right tools can not only help in improving day-to-day efficiency, they can also open doors to new opportunities for growth. Here are some ways in which organizations can use digital transformation to improve productivity across various job functions:

1. Finance: For the already strained finance function, digital transformation paves the way for efficient strategic planning and risk management. By automating mundane and error-prone administrative tasks, finance professionals can focus on initiatives that are important while paving the way for technological change across the organization. For finance professionals, digital transformation via robotic process automation, AI, and ML can aid in:

• Standardizing document formats across POs, invoices, and expenses
• Running automated anti money laundering and KYC checks
• Automating the identity verification process to improve security
• Improving efficiency of transaction processing via automation
• Unearthing critical insights from diverse data sets for enterprise risk assessment

2. Marketing: Digital transformation of the marketing function can help improve marketing effectiveness while keeping budgets in check. Right from creating marketing strategies that make business and financial sense to ensuring they effectively reach the target audience – using modern technology can help marketing executives in:

• Collaborating better with peers via modern tools and systems and getting a holistic view of the marketing funnel
• Breaking silos between different teams and managing different aspects of email marketing, social media ads, and mobile messaging using a single unified system
• Extracting insights from market and competitive data and using it to create compelling marketing campaigns
• Accurately forecasting customer needs and personalizing interactions and engagements
• Tracking metrics to keep a tab on effectiveness of campaigns and making edits as required

3. Human Resources: For the HR department, digital transformation delivers capabilities in enhancing the hiring process, improving process design, as well as enabling scalability to achieve uniformity in HR practices. In addition to optimizing business processes, digital transformation can enable HR professionals in:

• Using AI to scan through hundreds of resumes to identify candidates with the required skills and make better hiring decisions
• Understanding the psyche and satisfaction level of employees and introducing workplace policies and tools that help boost levels
• Improving the performance management and evaluation process and paving the way for better goal setting and more training opportunities
• Automating approvals across invoices, travel, leave, budgets, and marketing initiatives, thus improving turnaround time

4. Product Development: In the realm of product development, digital transformation can enable you to get more done from your resources in the same or lesser amount of time. Innovations across the latest technologies can help product development teams in:

• Improving communication and collaboration across geographically dispersed locations and ensuring quicker realization of goals
• Unearthing insights from the development process, flagging roadblocks and issues in time
• Measuring and monitoring their productivity and getting recommendations on how best to improve performance of the team as a whole
• Automating tasks across coding, testing, and deployment, thus improving quality and timeliness of the software being delivered

5. Legal: Digital transformation can make a huge impact on how legal departments work – helping them enhance performance while saving time and costs. Adoption of technologies like blockchain, AI, and analytics can help legal professionals in:

• Improving safety and security of legal documents including contracts, client information, and confidential data
• Reducing the time taken to bring IP licenses, patent applications, and finance agreements to closure
• Locating, processing, managing, and analyzing vast volumes of data to make informed legal decisions
• Going beyond risk and compliance and onto effective litigation management, budgeting, and reporting

Organizations of all sizes are currently looking at how they can set off their digital transformation efforts and move away from their current, inefficient processes. Although its laudable how organizations are finally considering adopting modern technology, most drive all their attention on increasing profits; very few look at how they can use this transformation to empower employees and improve workforce productivity.

Productivity and engagement are crucial to growth, and if you really want to get the best results from your transformation efforts, you need to look at ways in which you can empower your workforce via investments in IT.

Is productivity on your transformation agenda yet?