Digitalization helps to bring work teams closer and deepen their bonds
Luca Giovannini, Global Chief Digital, Innovation and Analyitics Officer at Gi Group Holding
Over the past couple of years, businesses have found that the benefits of advanced technologies are a double-edged sword. On one hand, the economy’s global connectivity allowed a big chunk of the world’s workforce to work remotely and continue in their jobs during a period when the global pandemic had cut off traditional “on premises” office operations. At the same, those same technologies deprived workers of traditional, tangible, face-to-face connections and bonding that office spaces and work sites generally allow. That said, the past year in particular has given businesses chances to explore and also define what their next office or workspace normal will be and how technology will continue to impact office and teamwork evolution.
At Gi Group Holding, this is an issue we continue to explore. For us, adoption of a corporate digitalization strategy has two main aspects. The first part is basic: putting the technologies the business needs in place. The second, and perhaps more important element, is leveraging technologies to create an Innovation Mindset. This means technology helps us push for faster execution of work processes, data-driven decision-making, and the full unleashing of our teams’ potential thanks to working with AI. Our digital tools and technologies look to ensure that our sales and recruitment teams have the best tools available to do their jobs,
The fact of the matter is that digitalization or digital transformation impacts multiple aspects of business operations. This ranges from the team cohesiveness and capacity for collaboration mentioned above on to automation of workflows and timely delivery of services and products. However, for many companies the human capital impacts remain the most important, i.e., they allow company teams to gather inputs and insights from branches and production facilities all over the globe: this with the aim of sharing the best experiential know-how and skills the company has to offer.
“We have several initiatives at Gi Group Holding that allow all country branch offices to be aware of our global strategies. We generally run what we call Innovation Roadshow with the purpose of increasing staff engagement in individual countries, on the one hand, and then helping with the system’s adoption on the other. Our collaborative tools also offer employees a digital ecosystem where innovation is supported and encouraged. We have what we call Innovation Box, where employees can submit their creative, forward-thinking ideas to our management teams for review and potential discussion,” adds Luca Giovannini.
Strategies for digitalization vary though depending on the nature of individual businesses. For global manufacturers, the most-sought-after benefits are process improvements and better business efficiency. Companies like Rockwell Automation report that businesses mainly seek streamlined supply chain operations, greater business efficiency and improved customer experience. Service industries, on the other hand, will see (in addition to greater efficiency) changes in how customer-facing processes play out. Key changes will occur for front and middle office teams. Businesses like Gi Group Holding have seen this happening already. And even though they too want greater operational efficiencies, simplicity of process takes precedence for them as a recruitment services provider. “We are currently looking to use technology to simplify and unify processes. We hope to achieve a unified work methodology based on a single tool, where the process and product are aligned. This helps us gather more complete, accurate data, which in turn will allow us to build a global data lake that delivers all the insights necessary to guide the business in a better, more meaningful way. Essentially, we seek three things: better business management through technology; a global data lake that eases management of our results assessments, e.g. evaluating global KPIs and delivering predictive analytics; and investment in AI. The latter helps us map and understand future office and/or client scenarios where we can deliver improved candidate-matching and accelerated interview processes,” adds Luca Giovannini.
He continues, “With regard to candidate placement, sales and recruiter team roles are the two that will change the most as part of our company’s digital transformation. Technology will inform how those teams adapt and change their way of work as part of a human-tech collaboration. Manual processes like CV screenings will be done through tech and AI-led systems that quickly deliver candidate short lists. Meanwhile, recruiters and sales reps will re-focus their energies on improved consultant-candidate or consultant-client relationships that lead to securing job placements. On top of that, recruiters will be able to redirect time to working on candidate career path development, while sales teams will shift to increasingly data-driven operations based on market intelligence, automated marketing support, etc. Sales reps will move into more consultant-style roles, delivering service proposals instead of mere price offers.”
In studies across various industries, global businesses report having faced a number of challenges implementing digitalization or digital transformation processes. In some cases this involved employees’ and teams’ willingness to adopt new tools. However, many companies agree that the most critical issues are planning and securing employee involvement from inception. “At Gi Group Holding, like at every corporation that is running important digital transformation programmes, our biggest challenge has been change management. This doesn’t mean employee interest in working with new technologies or adopting AI-driven solutions. Instead, it’s more of a mindset issue. We have to convince our teams to work in a different way: right from the start. We need to have our people involved from the very beginning; collecting their inputs on what a product or service needs to look like and getting inputs based on their own user experience. The change has to be progressive or incremental so that, ideally, it happens without employees even noticing,” concludes Luca Giovannini.
