Digital Transformation: How to motivate employees

Publication: Harvard Business Manager 1/2018

Article: "How to motivate employees to truly engage in digital transformation?"

In this Harvard Business Manager article, Wiebke Köhler from Axa and Stefan Behrendt from DSP-Partners share experiences from their collaborative conference-series "HR Knowledge Exchange Workshops on Digital Transformation". This format is active since November 2015 and hosts HR-managers from 40 companies from different industries such as insurance, transportation, publishing and ranges from A ("Allianz") to Z ("Zurich Insurances").

The workshops aim at developing a roadmap to make large organizations more nimble, agile and innovative by leveraging and packaging the know-how and various approaches from the member-companies into a "blueprint" for digital transformation. Along the evolvement of the digital maturity of organizations, measures such as

• Field trips to Silicon Valley, Korea, Berlin or Israel
• Broad roll out of methods like desing-thinking or scrum
• Introduction of a social intranet

are first steps to move people into new ideas and ways of thinking. But transformation shouldn't stop here. Over the course of the workshops, it became obvious that a cultural transformation is strongly depending on a holistic and well-formulated digital strategy - which needs to be further operationalized via measurable KPIs (OKR - objectives and key results is a framework used for this purpose by google and other digital organisations).

In one of the workshops, personnel managers were asked to provide a realistic assessment of their "digital readyness" with regard to their digital culture. On an S-curve, around 40% see their organizations still in phase 1, the "traditional" way of working. The majority of companies see themselves within phase 2, "in transition" from a traditional corporation to a digital one. Less than 10% believe that their enterprises already are in phase 3 of a "digital culture".

In order to exchange best practice and experiences, companies like Fraport and Klöckner & Co shared their approaches to become more "digital":

Example Fraport

Over the course of the workshops, Frankfurt's Airport operator Fraport AG presented initiatives around Big Data, Social Media, Storytelling and their Innolab to strengthen the organization's "Digital IQ".

Example Klöckner & Co

Steel- and metal trading player Klöckner & Co SE showcased initiatives to digitize the value chain in order to derive a significant of revenues from digital channels. One of the measures is the newly formed digital unit kloeckner.i which is the Berlin-based digital competence center and recruits start-up experts & digital thinkers from outside the steel-industry. Kloeckner Ventures holds stakes in start-ups which are complementary to Kloeckner's steel-trading activities. In order to actively engage all of Kloeckner's employees, Microsoft's Yammer was introduced as an internal communication and knowledge sharing platform.

Titel: "Wie begeistert man Mitarbeiter für die Digitale Transformation?"

Link to article ($ Paid Content from Harvard Business Manager)