Digital Workforce Hybridity

The digital paradigm that is emerging is the dynamic organization with hybridity of knowledge, processes, and competencies.

As our digitized world becomes hyper-connected, over-complex and interdependent, digital system themes with all the aggregates-spanning business challenges, paradoxes and opportunities bring organizations further towards the challenges of constructing and enacting "hybrid realities" across individuals, teams, looser groups, organizations, network-enterprises, and holistic digital ecosystems. The digital paradigm that is emerging is the sociological organization which is alive, holistic, vibrant, energetic, responsive, fluid, innovative and resilient with hybridity of knowledge, processes, workforce, and competencies.

The hybrid digital workforce: Today’s digital workforces are multigenerational, multicultural, multi-geographical, and multitasking. Each generations—Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Y (Millennials) and Z has different leadership, communication, working, and learning styles, they also evolve digital in a different way at different paces. There is the mix of old and new, physical and virtual things in organizations today. The digital workforce and workplace will be shaped by changes that take place in the way people relate to themselves and to their experience of their environment and others around them through cross-functional communication and collaboration. It is a hybrid, networked, and extended modern working environment in which the powerful digital platforms and computing technologies enable seamless conversations, delayer overly rigid hierarchical organizational structure & processes; inspire idea sharing, and brainstorming, engage employees and partners, as well as improve customer experience.

Knowledge ‘Hybridity’ (Interdisciplinarity): Digital organizations are complex and diverse, single dimensional operation-driven management discipline perhaps does not work out. The dynamic digital ecosystem can be perceived through the lenses of sociology, anthropology of cultures, economics, technological, organizational and communication sciences, poetical science or philosophical lens. That means the border of knowledge domains is blurred and the scope of knowledge is expanded in the continual base. It requires fundamentally different mindsets and paradigms such as accepting that digital influence is multidimensional and attainable, but control is not. Different organizations must tread on their own path of the quest to understand the symbolic language of nature contributing to evolutionary processes. Knowledge hybridity or interdisciplinarity can be applied to digital management by integrating multidisciplinary methodology which involves applied science (engineering), art (design), principle (Philosophy), Cognition (Psychology), Social norms (Culture) and group behavior (sociology) for reaching the next level of digital management maturity.

Innovation hybridity: Digital is the age of innovation. Innovation in the digital era is coming at seemly must faster pace, more changes and potential disruptions, but the patterns and rules of communication are pretty much the same. Nowadays it is hard to think of any innovation as not a hybrid combination of something old with something new or a number of new things. The broader the scope, scales, and impact of change, the more one leans toward calling it as an innovation. You could consider all innovations by hybridized in that sense. Digital innovation management does require interdisciplinary understanding to connect wider dots and see what’s possible, as well as the technical expertise to create disruptions. You need a certain form of framework and processes to ensure that you can qualify ideas, direct the right amount of resources, and make the wise investment to the most promising ideas based on their incremental or radical nature. The goal is to manage a healthy innovation portfolio with hybrid types of innovations, shepherd them through several phases of development, know when to move forward and when to return to an earlier phase, to improve innovation success rate.

Digital organizations with the knowledge, innovation, and workforce hybridity are able to adapt to the continuous changes and reconfigure the organizational structure and change their own behaviors for improving business responsiveness and flexibility. It is also important to build a high level of trust within the upper rankings of management, share the same vision, set the strategic goals, be able to coordinate and communicate effectively across departments and manage business performance to ensure the organization achieving the high-performance result and making a seamless digital paradigm shift.

Posted in: Digital Balance,Hybrid