Agile & Digital

5 essential digital ways of working

Serious money is being poured in to ‘digital’ – with a new Forbes report for Dell finding that 85% of the 500 senior executives surveyed are spending up to a quarter of their total budget on digital transformations. However, is this money being well spent?

Even back in 2015, a global survey of managers and executives by MIT and Deloitte found that although 90% felt their industry would be disrupted by digital trends, only 44% felt their organization was preparing in the right way. But what is that right way? Digital working is inherently global, non-hierarchical and transcends distance – and so requires a turbo boost to virtual, cross-functional and matrixed ways of working.

To truly thrive, we need to rewire our culture and skills so that they are fit for the digital age. Based on our research for our new digital white paper, the key areas to focus on are:

What’s different in a digital world?	How must I change my team/organization’s skills, culture and ways of working?
Accelerated rate of tech adoption and absorption	Always start with the business goal and benefit for the internal or external customer Adopt – get people to use the new technology fast Absorb – change ways of working and culture to embed and sustain Essential to get the late-majority and laggards on board too Help people learn to adapt continually Spread expertise beyond the Digital Center of Excellence
Faster clock speed for everything	Develop a 2-speed organization/ department: stable core, fast change around it Use technology to manage and adjust in real time Master remote agile working Form durable multidisciplinary teams Figure out who to partner with
Constant experiments and insights from data	Conduct rapid prototyping: pace before perfection Think like a start-up Develop a culture of risk-taking and cross-silo working Make sure people feel it is safe to fail fast Work with data to insights
Ever higher customer & employee expectations and voice	Bring customer-centric thinking in-house Deliver a great digital service to our internal customers Create personalized employee journeys for our team Digitize our own workflow
Supercharged digital collaboration (for full details see our separate white paper on ‘mastering virtual, matrix and digital teams’)	Adapt to working in fragmented, multiple short term and longer term virtual teams Master horizontal and cross-functional/ cross-organizational “matrix” working Get used to extended teams: inside and outside the traditional company boundaries Change team and organizational cultures towards flat hierarchy and distributed control with light governance Encourage shared and emergent leadership Manage your digital footprint – remembering the importance of personal brand/trust and visibility Build your learning ecosystem – continuously connect to others to learn and improve Work out loud – publish and record work for others to use and build on

See our agile and digital white papers, webinars and blogs or more about our agile and digital leadership training.

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We are deep content experts in remote, virtual and hybrid working, matrix management and agile & digital leadership. We are highly flexible in how we deliver our content and ideas. We can tailor content closely to your specific needs or deliver off the shelf bite sized modules based on our existing IP and 30 years of training experience.

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