Shaping a People-Centric Digital Organization by Cultivating Zest

People are the focal point of running a digital organization, with the ultimate goals to improve business performance and maturity.

Digital organizations are all about information savvy, adaptation, high-performance, and speed. Forward-thinking organizations today aim to move into a highly advanced stage of digital deployment by tailoring their own unique strength to build their core competencies. The digital era upon us is the age of people and options. It provides great opportunities to think better ways to do things, engage employees, delight customers, cultivate zest, and develop an intensive and effective working environment for improving business performance and accelerating organizational speed.

Communication: Communication is the linchpin to connect people, build trust, and solve problems in the organization. To cultivate zest and become people-centric, it’s important to keep communication open and creative, make all individuals feel responsible for the success of the business, engage them actively to make sure that everyone has a voice in how to make the business prosper and thrive. Lack of trust is an often overlooked barrier to communication. Communication should tailor the audience, leverage multiple digital channels and methodologies, pay more attention to what you want to communicate, how you communicate, and above all ensure you communicate effectively to convey the right messages. Communication is a two-way street. Thus, it is also important to foster an environment in which feedback and communication are based on reality and not simply what senior management wants to hear, engage all related parties actively and make sure that communication is the great tool to solve problems and develop the trustful business relationship.

Collaboration: Collaboration is at its essence, the intellectual harmony between humans. Collaboration happens in the space between people in relationship receptively and thoughtfully interacting with interest and caring for one another’s needs and co-solving tough problems. The organization can only achieve high performance by enforcing harmonized collaboration and seamless execution. With emerging enterprise collaboration platforms and tools, cross-functional collaboration and social engagement are the new normal in the effective digital workplace. The least effective culture at fostering a digital workplace is traditional command and control environments. It’s important to cultivate the zest for generating new ideas or solving existing or emerging business problems by breaking down silos, seeking out help and harnessing mass collaboration.

Gamification: Many digital organizations leverage gamification technique to increase team participation in problem-solving. By its definition, gamification is the usage of game thinking and game mechanics to engage users in solving problems by making a process more fun and engaging. Gamification can give a team a sense of urgency needed and to reinforce good behaviors. It can also provide a sense of recognition and achievement to the team. People are more satisfied when they feel they are contributing to the business, feel appreciated and feel they are improving their skills. Gamification is important to the business because it can improve productivity, increase collective insight, stimulate out-of-the-box thinking for problem-solving, and enforces team engagement, as a way to make better teamwork.

Recognition: Higher levels of engagement come from recognition, feedback, growth, and opportunity. It has been observed that recognition helps people participate in creative activities and improve employee engagement. A recognition system and high visibility for all positive contributions will help in creating a culture of innovation. Employees should be encouraged to think out of the box, go beyond their defined roles and demonstrate their intellectual capabilities to bring positive changes. In practice, the emerging digital platforms and collaboration tools make it possible to expand the talent pool and discover talented people based on their advanced mindset, proficient expertise and digital influence. It’s important to develop a creative environment, invest in human capital, cultivate zest and shape a people-centric digital organization.

Exemplification: Digital flow is all about consistency and transparency, Leadership exemplification is important to encourage the culture of learning for leading people to grow beyond existing levels of company performance and capability. It is also imperative that leadership effectiveness manifests respect, caring, and trust-building based on the leader’s vision, creativity, and knowledge, with the ability to avoid numerous leadership pitfalls and lead the digital journey confidently. It’s important for leaders to walk the talk and build a trustful relationship; connect with people by both touching the mind and the heart. Digital leaders today need to admit they don’t know everything and be open to learn and relearn. They lead by making influences, not via command-control, for driving changes effortlessly.

One key determinant of whether an organization can move to the new digital structure with high-maturity is the development level of its people. A digital organization starts with a transcendent purpose that leads to a unique natural design - a design most fit to achieve the purpose of businesses - running a business by the people for the people, cultivating zest and stimulating creativity. People are the focal point of running a digital organization, with the ultimate goals to improve business performance and maturity.

Posted in: Digital Master,Digitalization