Understanding Business Transformation
In his book Fragments, Greek philosopher Heraclitus coined the phrase, “Change is the only constant,” based on his observation that the natural world was in a constant state of movement. Today’s business climate certainly reflects this maxim. As the world around businesses adjusts to new discoveries, technology, and ideals, they are forced to adapt to the changing needs of their employees and customers. When going through these transformations, organizations can help ensure their success by adopting strong leadership, prioritizing impactful learning, leveraging technology, and creating a healthy corporate culture.
Navigating New Disruptions
Businesses are restructuring to navigate new disruptions such as artificial intelligence to become more adaptable to future disruptions. In addition, employees are demanding their own changes related to how work is accomplished. Employee-driven changes have shifted working structures, policies, workflows, and even culture. Workers have seen what businesses are capable of and are refusing to accept anything less than their best.
The Key Elements of Business Transformation
At GP Strategies, we believe that effective business transformation happens at the apex of three key areas: an aligned vision that delivers results, modern learning strategies and experiences that optimize performance, and a well-functioning ecosystem of tools, systems, and technology that enable effective learning and transformation.
The type of transformation experienced during the pandemic (and now artificial intelligence) is what Harvard Business Review refers to as “hijacked transformation”—a fast-paced transformation brought on by someone or something outside of the organization itself.
As we move into the post-pandemic world of work, businesses now have the opportunity to evaluate the landscape and determine how they want to meet the demands of their employees, customers, and communities. Leadership, learning, and technology are the three key areas to consider when establishing a business transformation strategy.
1. Leadership’s Role in Business Transformation
Engaged leaders are the driving force behind any successful company transformation strategy. When on board, they communicate, mirror, and reinforce the new behaviors, driving employees to align to the new effort more easily. When leaders are disengaged or contradict the effort, the initiative is doomed to fail. Aligning leadership early on in the process through alignment workshops, future envisioning sessions, change training, and leadership development efforts can be the key factor in a change initiative’s success or failure.
2. The Importance of Learning and Development
Employee development is an important factor in retention, employee engagement, and productivity. How employees experience learning and maintain critical skills throughout the lifecycle of their employment must be evaluated during any business transformation experience. At times this may even serve as the center of a transformation.
3. Leveraging Technology for Business Transformation
Retaining quality employees within your organization is critical for ongoing success in our current “war for talent.” As the world of work continues to change, employees expect their learning experiences to keep up. Whether this involves an innovative learning technology or on-demand training, employees want the learning experience to be meaningful. As companies begin to drive transformation across their learning organizations, they are forced to consider how their learning is structured, how they deliver content, and what type of content they provide.
Digital Transformation in Business
In our era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, maintaining a technological advantage is an endless battle. Maintaining this advantage requires a constant focus on what is available and how it can provide a competitive edge. It is easy for technology to become the driving force for change, but it is important to remember that technology works best when it is used to support the existing strategy.
Digital transformation in business is the adoption of digital technology by an organization to digitize non-digital products, services, or operations. This is becoming an increasingly prevalent part of today’s business transformations. The move toward a hybrid and remote workforce plays a significant role in the drive for digital transformation, but this is also a natural progression in an organization’s evolution.
Embracing Digital Learning
The goal of digital transformation and implementation is to increase value through innovation, invention, customer experience, and efficiency. Learning organizations are taking the lead in moving toward an increasingly digital learner and instructor experience. New learning technologies and workforce expectations are transforming the corporate learning environment, promising powerful benefits to learning and development (L&D) professionals. Meanwhile, continuous market disruptions are pushing organizations to move quickly to integrate the latest tools and training technologies into their learning ecosystems.
The Benefits of a Learning Technology Partner
A partner can help supercharge your learning environment by determining which technologies are right for your organization. Learning technology consultant teams help you ask and answer these questions by applying tried and tested methodologies that align with your specific needs. These experts also play a crucial role in helping organizations:
- Develop a strategy that guides their use of learning technology.
- Successfully integrate learning technology platforms.
- Manage their learning more effectively.
- Deliver content to learners across multiple platforms.
The value of your learning technology is optimized when the right tools are identified for your problems and learning ecosystems are crafted to meet your learners’ needs.
How Organizational Culture Impacts Business Transformation
Only a small percentage of business transformations succeed; a key driver of that success (or lack of it) is how businesses engage their employees and the culture of the organization. All organizations have an underlying collection of beliefs, values, and methods of interaction that create the organizational environment within which all decisions are made, initiatives are implemented, and actions are taken. Organizational culture defines how individuals work and function within the company, making it a crucial element that can make or break a transformation of any size.
Assessing Culture to Create More Effective Transformation Strategies
In the delivery of successful business transformations, understanding the individual corporate culture is critical to defining not only the logistics and details around the learning program itself but also how that initiative will be implemented to ensure successful delivery and adoption. The corporate culture impacts the employee’s journey with the change effort (including individual resistance to the effort, how that resistance is addressed by leadership, and policies and procedures that support the effort).
An open culture with engaged leadership and an effective flow of communication will more effectively address these challenges, allowing the initiative to be more successfully adopted. Cultures in which learning is not promoted or supported will require a different set of strategies to achieve ultimate success. With learning programs, for example, a comprehensive view of the corporate culture will impact the development of the program itself, how it is delivered, and the implementation plan. Many well-developed, best-in-class programs are rejected by an organization because of a lack of this in-depth understanding of the realities of the individual corporate culture.
Business Transformation Services at GP Strategies
Business transformations are bold, strategic shifts that help organizations operate more effectively or make a complete strategic shift that they can use to accelerate change and growth beyond typical incremental advancements. These transformations help organizations compete more effectively, become more efficient, or make a complete shift in direction.
At GP Strategies, business transformation is our core capability. Our business transformation consultants and change management experts draw from decades of L&D experience. We use these insights to help organizations define their ideal culture, ensure that culture is aligned with the future of the company, develop agile learning opportunities that empower employees to confidently adapt to change, and implement technology solutions that reinforce strategic objectives. Partner with us to drive successful business transformations that will create a culture of high performance within your organization.
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