_Will global digitization impact how we live, work and play?
Where and how companies work in developing their digital workplaces to enable their digital transformation is a critical success factor as it is essential the transformation starts inside out.
In recognition of this, many organisations set up isolated digital transformation businesses, often operating from a co-working position, to drive the outside in change, but ultimately the new and old world need to come together, and so the role of Workplace and Real Estate is to help facilitate the inside out approach, working with other parts of the business like Operations, Marketing and Human Resources to answer two key fundamental questions:
A) What are the behaviours and culture of a digital organisation?
How things are done have an enormous impact on the success of transformation projects. Agile development techniques enable platforms to be created in short sprints with deployment, testing and learning in chunks 'as you go' that are widely deployed in many organisations.
This process needs to be supported by the workplace, creating environments that provide settings that support the process. Scrum spaces are widely deployed, enabling the teams to come together for short review meetings periodically during the day, typically in an open stand-up format.
But really successful businesses are applying far more science in trying to understand the psychology of the wider process. As a generalisation, developers tend to be more introverted yet we provide them with a ‘one-size fits nobody’ workplace solution.
Introverts typically need some quiet space to recharge and refresh and providing this space can energise the development process.
B) How are we going to attract digital talent?
Everybody recognises the importance of attracting tech talent, but it is also important to attract the best in your market sector.
Over the next five years, large companies will invest, on average, hundreds of millions of dollars—and some more than a billion dollars—to transform their business digitally.
And given that top engineering talent can, for example, be anywhere from three to ten times more productive than average engineers, acquiring top talent can yield double-digit investment savings by accelerating the transformation process by even 20 to 30%.
I worked with a client on Digital Workplace Transformation and the number one project objective was to attract the top six graduates from a specific Cambridge course.
The CEO saw the workplace as a key enabler and simply a marketing cost, to achieve this objective. The transformation involved a relocation and migration to an activity based working (ABS) ethos, supporting an agile development process that involved bringing clients into the workplace to co-create the next product development.
At every stage of this process the same question was asked – would this location, building, workstyle, building design, culture, workplace experience, management style and development approach attract a top graduate from Cambridge?
The business did successfully attract top Cambridge talent, but also grew its revenue by 30% in the following 12 months - 5 times more than its competitors.
In the future demand for such talent, particularly in areas like big data, will significantly outstrip projected supply and so businesses will have to work harder and harder.