When technology and people collide

Digital transformation projects often fail, creating a vicious circle where technology frustrates employees and talent moves on. Andrew Kew at QuadCorps explains why getting the culture right is a key lynchpin to success

 

While most businesses now see the value of digital transformation, many projects which start with the best of intentions end up unsuccessful, leading to very little sustainable, long-term change and falling short of overarching goals.

 

That is a major problem, not only because of the potential for budget bloat and other economic or customer service issues, but the consumerisation of IT means expectations are high for systems that just work; without the architecture and tools that make sense internally, organisations run the risk of frustrating top talent as well as customers: a double threat.

 

At the same time, building a digital savvy business with a positive workplace culture to match it is no small task. Technical change can be difficult enough, especially with the increasingly complex network of interlacing IT systems, both on-premise and cloud, that are necessary to power modern businesses.

 

Much has been said of the IT skills gap, technology worker shortages, and the so-called great resignation in the wake of Covid, which has seen employees quit their jobs in droves seeking greater flexibility and a workplace culture that fits their values. But the convergence of these issues all at once has meant that talent retention is more of a pressing concern than perhaps any other time in recent memory.

 

Organisations desperately need skills and talent to build, operate, and maintain their systems. They need their workforce to feel content, and employees must feel they can collaborate well with one another. Staff want to feel listened to, they want to know that there are training and development options for them internally so that their careers don’t stagnate, and, although we all face challenges at work, employees don’t want to commit time and energy to environments that seem built to frustrate them.

 

According to a recent survey from Boston Consulting Group, only 30% of digital transformation initiatives have met or exceeded their target value, resulting in long-term, sustainable change. While another 44% created some value, they ultimately failed to meet targets and introduced only limited long-term change. That same survey found that one of the key pillars for building longer-lasting change is talent. But a change of technology often brings a change in culture which, if left unmanaged, can result in this talent and their skills and experience walking right out the door.

 

In fact, according to the 2022 Gartner Global Labor Market Survey poll of 18,000 employees worldwide, IT workers are the least likely to want to remain in their jobs compared to all other careers. They know they’re in high demand, and are 10.2% more likely to leave than non-IT workers. The survey found that for IT staff, a positive workplace environment and flexibility are especially important.

 

Digital transformation and workplace culture may seem like separate issues but they are intrinsically linked. According to a recent Adobe Workfront survey, almost half of all employees in the USA would consider leaving their workplace due to poor technology and IT.

 

Before the pandemic hit, the numbers were high, but post-pandemic when technology played an increasingly front and centre role in collaboration, they were even higher. Today, according to a separate survey which found half of all office workers are ready to leave their roles, top among employee complaints are a lack of automation, lumbering staff with monotonous tasks that they feel are unnecessary but without the adequate IT systems in place to automate them.

 

Clearly, building a workplace culture that nourishes talent is as critical as carefully planning out the investment and implementation of digital transformation initiatives themselves.

 

When working towards ‘observability’ across all your systems, where all the moving parts are visible from one centralised hub, tools such as the API platform provided by Kong can provide value metrics and logs to help staff keep on top of issues as they happen and identify others before they do. This is crucial because building visibility into an organisation assists employees in addressing challenges more quickly and therefore reducing frustration.

 

But to accompany these shifting technological sands, there are also change management principles that organisations can keep in mind in order to encourage positive work environments that help retain and develop IT talent.

 

Communication and transparency are absolutely key. Especially for large organisations with employees that may have highly embedded, legacy ways of working, staff can’t be expected to shift to new tools, techniques and methodologies overnight.

 

To communicate the benefits of new technologies or features, businesses should promote internal champions who can talk their colleagues through the change with a persuasive, positive mindset, and demonstrate why it is useful to co-workers on the ground.

 

Leadership, meanwhile, could run frequent employee Town Hall sessions where employees are able to talk to senior management through all those changes and ask questions.

 

At the same time, hosting frequent workshops can help employees trial new technologies with experts on hand, so they can test out, and see, the benefits of working with it. This will demonstrate that both the internal champions and the leadership are all on the same page, and have really bought in to the value and potential outcomes of the technology for the sake of the organisation – rather than being a top-down diktat for the sake of change alone.

 

DevOps advocates have long argued for a blame-free culture; rather than pointing the finger at other staff, problems should be approached with a positive mindset that’s designed to focus on outcomes and how to fix them, rather than to punish. (As well as inadequate IT, poor management is another leading cause of employees leaving the workplace.)

 

The agile methodology at the heart of DevOps also means ‘failing fast’ – so that experimental approaches can either be scrapped when they don’t meet expectations or iterated and built on when they do.

 

Naturally, due to regulation and compliance requirements not all organisations will be able to bring in staging environments for new technologies immediately. And while employees value flexibility and freedom, there also should be reasonable guardrails in place to protect the organisation itself. The degree of employee autonomy about the tools they can use will ultimately be up to the organisation.

 

But even with this in mind, encouraging staging environments and sandboxes so employees can experiment with technology in a work-safe environment is also crucial to demonstrating the value of new tooling.

 

All of this can be a slow burn. But gradual, steady, incremental change tends to lead employees towards a tipping point where the implementation of new tools is less controversial, more enthusiastically adopted. This will ultimately lead to less frustration in the workplace – and more successful projects.

 

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Andrew Kew is an API and Integration Ecosystem Specialist at QuadCorps

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com