Digitalization is causing a real tsunami in our work habits! Driven by technological innovations, it is also described as 4e industrial Revolution. Businesses must adapt to it, their sustainability depends on it. It is indeed a question of survival, because globalization requires, in addition to innovation, the agility to seize opportunities as soon as they arise. The health crisis has accelerated the effects, requiring managers to respect good digitalization practices more than ever. Marie Desplats, managerial innovation consultant, tells us about it.
One of the first changes imposed by digitalization concerns the physical boundaries of the company. They are gradually being called into question, with teleworking being the first step in this transformation. For employees who are losing their bearings, it is a difficult period to live through, often painful, because it causes anxiety. This is why digital transformation can only succeed if it is supported by managers. A prerequisite, however: the posture requires adjustment with practices that continue to evolve at the same time as digital transformation. Management and digitalization: it is a simultaneous evolution. The health crisis has deeply rooted new ones, here are seven:
1. Instill digital culture
The manager is on the front line to hear and soothe the teams' disagreements, doubts and reluctance and to facilitate communication. More than ever, employees are searching for meaning and the manager is the one who explains the why, who gives meaning to the transformation and who helps everyone feel involved and committed.
2. Give autonomy and move towards self-organization
In a context where the boundaries of work are becoming increasingly blurred, the manager becomes the leader of a community. Above all, it must unite around trust, transparency and agility.
3. Develop collaborative work
Digital tools allow the company to transform into a true collaborative laboratory. However, alone they are not enough. It is the manager who contributes to the emergence of collective intelligence, through the sharing of knowledge and skills, team work while promoting individual and collective initiatives with fairness and transparency.
4. Place employee user experience (Employee eXperience, EX) at the center of management
If we consider team members to be the manager's “customers”, the manager must treat them accordingly. It takes into consideration feedback, whether it concerns human relationships, teamwork or the technical quality of the equipment and tools made available for work. To carry out this work of analyzing and dealing with dysfunctions, the manager does not create any hierarchy between the professions of the teams he supports and takes care to show the company's involvement through concrete material evidence.
5. Management and digitalization: practice “test and learn”
It's up to the manager to encourage experimentation, with its share of trials, errors and adjustments, to gradually increase everyone's skills. This may require him to step out of his comfort zone, but he will quickly realize that it is a necessary step in the current environment.
6. Adopt bimodal management
According to Gartner, bimodal IT is “a practice of managing two separate and coherent modes of IT”. By analogy, Paul Heilbronner, HR Director of Tofane Global, suggests applying the term bimodal to management. It is based on the fact that, within the company, two approaches coexist: that of digital natives, familiar with new technologies since their childhood and that of employees for whom the Internet only became a daily reality two decades ago. To reconcile these different relationships with technology, management must promote “pairing” by retaining the best of each generational culture. This is a great opportunity to share knowledge and know-how in a spirit of openness.
7. Establish a joyful atmosphere within the team
What if the manager made pleasure at work a performance lever? According to research conducted by Michael J. Tews, professor at Penn State University in the United States, employees working in “fun” work environments are more inclined to try new things and less stressed about new things. mistakes they might make.
It is certain that the revolution in the world of work is underway. Even if we still have difficulty measuring their effects, new technologies have real potential to improve the daily lives of employees. Once assimilated, they allow better organization of tasks and, consequently, savings of this precious time that everyone is constantly running behind, but this is not yet the case. Management and digitalization have their share of challenges and opportunities, but they still need to be reconciled. Managers have mostly understood this, even if there are still a few holdouts. In this same vein, why not take advantage of this context of digital appropriation to rely onappreciative inquiry and thus imagine with the teams what is the desired and expected management in this new digital environment? We'll talk about it next time!
