12 Nov Transform the World of Work Through Inspired Leadership
Are you leading workforce and leadership transformation? Tasked with crafting new ways to drive business forward across all avenues (technology, culture, and leadership), HR professionals and executives are spearheading innovation in the workforce. Gloria Burke, senior director and Andy Jankowski, founder and managing director of Enterprise Strategies, bring inspiring thought leadership into the opening keynote address at the Future of Work Conference in Boston on December 7th and 8th, this year’s premier event for those tasked with transforming the world of work through inspired leadership.
Opening up the morning session by sharing her perspective on the challenges and issues facing businesses as they prepare for the 2020 Workplace, Burke will highlight critical areas where leadership must focus in order to drive innovation and business growth. Jankowski will then take the stage to explore key components of the digital landscape—social, mobile, cloud, data analytics and security —and how various employee personas will leverage each of these in order to deliver value to the entire ecosystem.
Debbie Lynd, Future of Work event producer, interviewed Burke and Jankowski in early November leading up to the conference. For a sneak peak of the insights both will share at the conference, read the podcast transcript found below.
Podcast Transcript–
Question for Gloria: You are coming to the FOW in December to talk about holistic transformation in the organization – Can you describe holistic change for us?
Answer: Holistic transformation is about taking a step back and thinking strategically about how a company or organization must change—not only from a technology perspective, but also from a culture, process, governance and economic perspective — in order to maximize value from emergent technologies across the business enterprise. Holistic transformation aligns leadership and key stakeholders toward a shared vision and objectives and builds a common, collaborative roadmap or path to the desired end-state. Companies are now realizing that digital transformation, and in particular social business capabilities, have an impact on every part of the organization, from human resources and employee learning and development, to operations and engineering, to marketing, sales and customer service. Expertise, Learning, Collaboration and Innovation are now fueled by the open and transparent sharing of knowledge and information across organizations and geographies. Siloed organizations and departments are now a thing of the past. And, hierarchical organization models are flattening to allow more direct communication and interaction between employees, managers and leadership. Companies that are quick to adopt this new business model will have a competitive advantage over those who are reluctant to embrace change.
Question for Gloria: Can you give us a little background on how you became so involved in culture change and specifically focused on what the future of work looks like over the next decade?
Answer: I spent 14 years of my career working at Booz & Company, an international management consulting firm now known at Strategy&. During that time, I witnessed many transformation projects at client companies across a variety of industry sectors. Whether the transformation initiatives were enterprise wide or organization specific they all shared a common critical element to their success: a well-orchestrated change management program – focused both on organization and process change as well as the culture of the company. I saw first-hand how these change programs significantly impacted the overall success of the transformation by institutionalizing new organization models, workflow processes and influencing employee behaviors. I’ve been hooked on helping companies traverse the road to change ever since.Today and as we look to the future, companies are facing massive disruptions to business. From a technology perspective digital technologies, in particular social, mobile, cloud, data analytics, and security, are having a significant impact on operations and business process. However, the biggest catalyst driving the need for change is the expectations and workstyles of the emergent workforce. Companies will need to adapt to this hyper-connected mobile “work from anywhere at any time” employee who relies on technology to facilitate open and transparent communications, seamless connection and collaboration with colleagues, the ability to crowdsource ideas and evolve skillsets through interaction with peers, experts and leaders alike. It is important to the future employee to “have a voice” and to be able to make meaningful contributions regardless of their level or role. In order to successfully adapt and transform, companies will need to focus on four foundational pillars: People, Process, Governance and Technology. Note that I stated “people” first. It is important to recognize that “people” drive the success of a change initiative — technology is just the enabler. Equally important is to focus on business process integration or re-engineering with the goal of embedding desired behaviors into the daily workflows. This substantially increases transformation success.
Question for Gloria: At Unisys, you led a cultural transformation to a very social, collaborative environment. Based on that experience, what are the 3 biggest hurdles for companies that have not adopted a social/collaboration strategy.
1. Take the time to develop an end state vision, strategy and high level implementation roadmap. You must know your destination in order to create the path to get there. Then boldly implement. Don’t fall victim to endless pilots that paralyze progress and alienate larger audiences. You can refine as you move forward. Always keep moving forward.
2. Leadership buy-in and active engagement is critical to success of any transformation initiative and it is essential to drive cultural change. When this type of initiative is launched, the first thing employees do is to watch the behaviors of company leadership and their direct managers. If leadership does not “walk the walk” it is unlikely that employees will follow. At Unisys, we were able to drive a 91% employee adoption rate of the new collaborative platform within 18 months of launch. This would not have been possible without senior leadership being active agents of change – blogging, posting in the newsfeeds, evangelizing our new culture and way of working together in town hall meetings, etc. To put this into perspective, of all the companies who have transformed to a social-enabled business platform, only 17% have been able to drive adoption and engagement over 75%. 83% of company initiatives stall with only 28-35%. If you dig into the transformation approaches, you will find it heavily focused on technology. However, if you look at the strategies of the 17%, you will see an emphasis on People and Business Process Integration, with technology being an underlying enabler.
3. Involve Stakeholders and Champions early on. People support what they help to build and then they have an ongoing stake in its success. Identifying and prioritizing business requirements up front and aligning them with business objectives helps to get organizations on the same path forward and removes potential barriers to change.
Question for Andy: So, Gloria just talked a bit about technology at Unisys. This is a great segue to you Andy and your topic for the conference which is all about the technology behind the changes ahead for organizations. As someone who is working directly with many organizations to help them move into this new world, what are you seeing as first steps for organizations who are just starting to create their social world.
Answer: The first technological step in this transformation is actually centered around people — in the form the people directory (or corporate directory) inside your company. People are at the center of enterprise social … In fact one of the primary benefits of Enterprise Social is enabling employees to more efficiently and effectively find the people and information they need. To do that you need to have one, social enabled, easily searchable people directory. And while that sounds simple, often times it is not — a great example are companies that have traditional corporate directory with standard information fed from HR systems (name and position title that does not actually match what you know and do) and then implement an Enterprise Social Network (like Yammer for example) which has it’s own personal profiles as part of the system. This duplicity is bad in a couple of ways. One it gives people two places to go for the same information. And Two left unattended, it forces employees to update their information in two systems — creating a suboptimal user experience that will literally stifle your transformation efforts. So that is a very tactical first step. But as Gloria mentioned, equally as important is strategy and its alignment to business objectives. And it is important to remember that when we are talking digital, we are really talking about 5 things: Social, Mobile, Cloud, Analytics and Security. It is important that the strategy your company lays out to enable business objectives to be accomplished looks across each of these 5 pillars to determine a holistic approach to how each can support this enablement.
Question for Andy: How can HR and IT work more closely together to achieve each other’s goals.
Answer: Kare Anderson is an Emmy award-winning Forbes Columnist and internationally acclaimed professional speaker – and i credit her for introducing me to the concept of Mutuality. “a high degree of mutuality of respect for each other’s expertise”For IT and HR to work more closely together this respect needs to be in place. HR professionals can improve this relationship by recognizing both the potential enablers that their IT professionals can be — and also the ridiculous demands and constraints they are faced with daily. There is no simple change in IT because everything they touch has a downstream impact – and thinking through and avoiding those downstream impacts is what they get paid for (and you want them to do). Reciprocally, IT professionals need to view HR Professionals as business partners and customers. They need to understand that changes are being presented for a reason and that each change is an opportunity for them to showcase their value to the company — not just another thing for them to do. It is complicated, but no matter how complicated the situation Mutual respect for each other’s expertise is the only way to pass through the complications and get to productive results.
Question for Andy: What do you see as the largest challenges facing companies in the next 5 years?
Answer: Recognizing and addressing the challenges of the changing relationship between employees and employers and proactively putting the systems and processes in place to support this evolution. Policies that limit the personal brand building and outside development of employees will need to change. New, social and mobile enable technologies are not “nice to have” you needed them yesterday. Viewing employees as “thinking beings” and empowering them with analytics capabilities in all facets of their jobs so that they can analyze and use data to make better decisions on behalf of the company. And, here is the biggest challenge –complacency. No one is going to force your company to make these changes. But by choosing the path of procrastination or no action at all you are simply going to slip farther and farther behind, until one day … when the problem is finally diagnosed and recognized and you all realize … it too late for treatment.
——————————————————————————————————————————–
Come meet Gloria and Andy at the Future of Work Event on December 7th and 8th. The event is being held in Boston at the Seaport Hotel. You can register here.
Keynote Speaker Bios:
Andy Jankowski is the Founder and Managing Director of Enterprise Strategies, a consultancy committed to Delivering the Future of Work through practical digital strategies and adoption programs.
Recent Enterprise Strategies’ clients include AIG, Aon, Marsh Inc., Allianz Global Assistance, XL Group, The Laclede Group, Indianapolis Power & Light and The Student Success Network among others. He has written for, and been written about in, Forbes and The Huffington Post. He is a PIVOT Advisory Board Member and a charter member of the Future of Work Community. Andy is a frequent keynote speaker and an avid road cyclist. He enjoys connecting people and dots.
Gloria Burke is a Senior Director at Enterprise Strategies, specializing in Digital and Enterprise Social Business Transformation and Change Management. As a member of Enterprise Strategies’ leadership team, she brings more than 25 years of experience in helping companies across multiple industries define and sharpen business vision and formulate game changing strategies to maximize value from emergent technologies. Prior to joining Enterprise Strategies, Gloria was Chief Knowledge Officer at Unisys Corporation where she was responsible for the company’s enterprise social business strategy, intranet and extranet platforms, and global knowledge management and collaboration programs, as well as its supporting culture transformation initiatives. Gloria is a published author and presenter on emergent technologies, culture transformation and the future workplace. She has been named by Information Week Magazine as #2 of the Top Ten Social Business Leaders of 2013, and was also recognized in this leadership list in 2012.
Future of Work Event: Agenda