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If your business is trying to decide whether to launch a digital transformation initiative, you may be wondering how this effort will affect your team members. Will your team perceive this effort as adding work to their already heavy workload, or resent having to learn new systems and solutions? Will your team benefit from the initiative or will you be challenged to convince them of the benefits the enterprise will reap and why they should care enough about the organization to sacrifice their own productivity or to learn something new?

This article provides four examples of positive considerations and how digital transformation will affect your team, and it will provide you with some ideas and arguments to use for your own initiative.

“With the commitment and understanding of team members, the initiative is much more likely to succeed.”

Here are four benefits and considerations you can use to promote the concept of digital transformation to your team members:

Addressing Information Overload

Every business and team struggles with information overload. With the right, comprehensive review of existing systems and data repositories and a comprehensive plan to integrate data, improve the automation of data migration, analytics and other tasks, the organization can support its team with systems and solutions that remove delays from manual tasks and processes and allow users to quickly gather and analyze and report on data so users can get to the heart of the information and use that insight to make decisions.

Making the Job Easier

Productivity is of concern to the business at large but every team member should also be concerned about their own productivity and the productivity of their fellow team members. Digital transformation and the leverage of technology to build automated processes, share data and provide alerts and reports without manual intervention, team members can more easily share data, find information and complete tasks without delay. This transformation allows team members to focus on other, more crucial tasks, and will make the job easier NOT harder. While many team members may believe they will have to learn new, complex systems, it doesn’t have to be that way. Rather, the review and implementation of new solutions, improved systems and automated workflows should and can be easier. These efforts will eliminate redundant data input and manual approvals, etc.

Improving Communication

By implementing digital technologies and using these to build social networks, team members can more easily share and collaborate on projects, smooth approval processes and eliminate redundant or unnecessary steps in work processes and tasks. Everyone has access to the information so communication is seamless. No more voicemail messages to find out the status of a project or purchase order approval. Suppliers, vendors and team members can communicate and enter information and move things along without detailed email threads and multiple phone calls. Data sharing, reports and alerts allow everyone to get the right information at the right time so communication does not depend on someone remembering to make that phone call.

Improving Customer Engagement and Relationships (Yes, Your Team Will Benefit from This)

While team members may be looking at their role from a personal perspective, any team member that interacts with customers or whose employee evaluations depend on customer satisfaction should and will care about customer satisfaction. And, that team member will improve productivity and have the time to focus on critical issues if customers have access to digital solutions and tools that allow them to check the status of a trouble ticket, an order or a return. Team members can communicate with customers using task notes and even online chat as appropriate so the organization can optimize resources and customer satisfaction will improve.

“Will your team benefit from the initiative or will you be challenged to convince them…why they should care enough about the organization…to learn something new?“

If your business wishes to succeed with its digital transformation initiative, it must plan the initiative to address business user concerns and to roll out and launch new and integrated solutions in the right sequence and with the right support. With the commitment and understanding of team members, the initiative is much more likely to succeed. 

If you want to build a comprehensive foundation within your own organization, read the digital transformation report to discover the fundamental importance of and path to digital transformation.