People are the foundation for digital transformation
February 7, 2022
Digital transformation without people and culture at the heart is nothing more than another tech deployment. People are your core asset, and an agile, future-ready workforce is just as foundational to transformation as technology. Even so, we found that despite organizations investing US$1.2T globally on digital transformation, far too many have overlooked the people-related investments necessary for long-term, scalable digital adoption.
Organizations that focus on this key combination, investing in both people and technology, are those we consider to be at the highest level of operational maturity—future ready. Reaching this level, however, requires leaders with a clear view on what it takes to advance their people.
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HR leaders hold the keys
CHROs are increasingly important for any company undergoing digital transformation. They have a foot in both the C-suite and HR operations, making them uniquely positioned to drive the culture and people-related change needed to achieve future-readiness.
Leading CHROs are embracing the cloud, rapidly replacing traditional HR operations with automation and advanced analytics to remove mundane tasks from team workflows. This creates more meaningful, strategic work for HR teams and, in doing so, shifts their focus to high-value people and culture tasks like talent management, digital training and reskilling.
Of course, a digitally transformed HR workflow doesn’t happen overnight. Technology enables it and people enact it, but organizations also need intelligent operating models to make it a success.
Future-ready HR, delivered
UPS, a global logistics company, is currently establishing its own intelligent operating model that will act as the backbone of its HR digital transformation. The end goal of this deployment is to move HR employees off tasks that don’t drive value and onto activities where their skills can support greater people initiatives and the organization’s talent agenda.
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"As business leaders, we can invest in all types of assets and product innovation. But without the talent and the right people, the right skills and capability and development to help us leverage those assets, we are not going to reach our full potential for customers or shareholders”- Justine Turpin, Human Resource GPS Transformation Lead at UPS
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But deployment is just the beginning. UPS has taken merely the first, formative step toward becoming a future-ready organization with strategic investments in HR technology. In doing so, UPS has learned three key lessons along the way:
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Align with the executive team
It’s critical that the C-suite fully understands the scope of transformation, especially during a multiyear rollout wherein business dynamics are prone to change, sometimes drastically. Teams must be ready to pivot or reset with the C-suite in terms of timing, funding and scope.
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Enable agility with a data-driven culture
Healthy data is integral to digital transformation. Before deploying new solutions, HR leaders need to consider what information they need to do their job, as well as what data the business values, how they use it and present it—and how this rich data is going to empower teams to do their jobs better. Only after answering those questions and taking time to scrub the data clean is it time to deploy.
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Put employee experience at the core
UPS has more than 450,000 employees globally and digital transformation is going to touch every one of them. This means it’s important to keep the employee experience at the core of decision making. How will HR technology affect the experience in terms of attracting and retaining the right talent? How will it affect the day-to-day experience for people managers?
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HR leaders at UPS are asking and answering these questions as they accelerate toward becoming a future-ready organization. It’s a paradigm other companies, larger and smaller, would be wise to emulate.
With a focus on leadership buy-in, data-driven decision making and people at the core, HR leaders can begin considering their own digital transformations and whether they’re ready to begin the journey to future-readiness. Intelligent HR operations unleashes employee potential, allowing for the training and development necessary to create better business and better people outcomes in an increasingly digital world.
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