Digital transformation is the most important investment that organizations can make to drive enterprise value. That’s according to 68% of 1,600 business leaders surveyed by Deloitte. And while I largely agree with their thinking, I would take things one very important step further.
In my six years as CEO of Argyle, a technology company whose existence hinges on other organizations’ willingness to digitally transform their income verification process, I have learned this: A transformation that prioritizes the needs, skills, and experiences of the humans operating the technology being adopted is the key to long-term success.
Consider the users
Some call it taking a human-centered approach. I call it common sense. The point of automating business processes is to improve performance and drive efficiencies that allow humans to focus on tasks they do best. So it stands to reason that setting a digital transformation strategy in a vacuum and imposing technology on employees will fail at best, and backfire at worst.
I say this with experience. In our earliest days at Argyle, we were heads down building out an infrastructure that didn’t previously exist. We focused on the functionality of our platform and its output because we had to get to market and prove we had a viable product. In the process, we considered the needs of the businesses that would buy our products, but lacked the resources or bandwidth to prioritize every potential user’s experience. As a result, we managed to successfully sell our technology, but struggled to attain the adoption rates we considered indicative of true success.
As we matured, we learned better and amassed the resources we needed to do something about it. Now we know that widespread digital transformation only happens when people value and trust new technologies enough to change their behavior. And change is hard.
Prioritize people in your digital transformation
According to Accenture research, 80% of organizations intend to implement transformational change in the future. Meanwhile, 95% of organizations have undergone at least two or more transformations in the past three years.
At the same time, most organizations aren’t exactly optimistic about the transformation process or its projected outcomes. Only 30% feel confident about their change capabilities, and 30% anticipate their transformation efforts having a significant impact on performance.
That’s depressing. But it’s not unsolvable.
McKinsey research has shown that prioritizing people is one thing organizations that have undergone successful digital transformations have in common. They don’t lose sight of the fact that their efforts are in service of their employees’ performance and that success depends on their enthusiastic adoption of any new technologies introduced.
4 ways to put people first
In practice, putting people first means taking employees into consideration at every stage of a digital transformation journey. Here are four ways to do that.
Tedious work: When deciding where to focus your efforts, for example, you could start with the tasks and processes that employees find the most tedious or frustrating—the ones that stand most in the way of them getting to do the work they enjoy or derive value from. It also entails being realistic about the extent of technological change your team can reasonably handle in its current state.
Solicit input: When evaluating solutions, a human-centered approach could mean inviting employees to participate in a pilot program and soliciting their input. And it should mean working with technology vendors that proactively anticipate your employees’ needs in their solution’s design. Beyond that, vendors should also be willing, able, and agile enough to customize their solution to further meet your operational demands and team preferences. This goes a long way in eliminating or minimizing the disruptions and frustrations that could breed confusion among employees or trigger their resistance.
Communications: At implementation, prioritizing people means devising a concerted rollout strategy that effectively communicates the change being instituted, why it’s being instituted, and its timeline—erring on the side of overcommunication, if there’s any doubt. McKinsey’s research showed that companies that proved successful at their automation efforts were seven times more likely to formally engage their communications team at the implementation stage. Thoughtful, team-wide training is also key and should be deeply supported, if not actively co-managed, by the technology vendor.
Track and evaluate: And finally, digital transformation ought not to be a set-it-and-forget-it initiative. You should plan on regularly evaluating technology solutions with employee input in order to quickly identify and fix issues affecting adoption and performance. This will also allow you to successfully absorb, communicate, and provide training on upgrades as they become available.
At Argyle, in order for us to lead our own slice of the digital transformation, we now consider and account for the human element of transformation as much as the technology itself. We know that our collective progress depends on the receptivity of the people operating our products—and that depends on our willingness to see them, hear them, and account for them in all of our decisions. We encourage all technology leaders to follow suit.
Shmulik Fishman is founder and CEO of Argyle.
