The best way to mesh technology and talent: Think agility and resilience in your people
By: Jean McClellan, National People and Organization Leader at PwC Canada
Technologies like artificial intelligence and robotic process automation, embedded into work processes and customer interactions, are changing the technology-talent dynamic within organizations.
This dynamic is an increasingly important element of any organization’s people strategy. In speaking with my colleagues Andrea Wan and Karen Forward, we consistently see clients trying to manage this growing issue: how do you best use your talent to interact with your customers as technology continues to disrupt your organizations?
The fact is, 71% of Canadian consumers say a company’s employees have considerable or significant impact on customer experience. And although a lot of weight is put on technology’s role to create better experiences and differentiation, Canadians continue to value human interaction in customer service.
As such, how do you find the balance between your people and technology when creating your customer experience?
From my perspective, the first step is to ready your workforce to be agile and resilient. It’s not an easy task, and efforts like this are often seen as intangible and “soft.” But there are proven mechanics and metrics that are grounded in behavioural science to develop and cultivate a tech-savvy culture that’s ready for change.
Here are two ways to empower your people to deal with digital disruption and better deliver on customer expectations:
1. Identifying skills — and skills gaps
Technology can be a powerful enabler, but investing in technology alone isn’t enough. It’s only as good as your team’s ability to embrace it.
In our experience, people can resist change and are rarely given time to understand the value of new tools and platforms. Skills gaps grow between what they know and do and what they need to know and do as the pace of digital disruption accelerates. Closing the gap can be complex given the different ways people like to learn, the levels of digital maturity and the fact we have a multi-generational workforce.
So in order for teams to succeed and deliver great customer experiences, organizations need to address their people’s differences in skills to help them embrace the new ways of working.
Leaders need to carefully consider how technology implementations fit into the broader end-to-end processes of their organization’s customer-facing operations, as well as the pool of existing talent and their respective skills. Thoroughly understanding their technology and talent allows those leaders to maximize the efficiency of both.
New technologies can be used to automate certain functions while recognizing some employees will be disrupted. Proper planning can mitigate the impact and redirect the skills of employees into more value-added areas of the organization, such as problem solving, which in turn can increase employee engagement.
As technology is ever changing, it’s a collaborative dialogue among team members and managers — sharing with and learning from one another in an atmosphere that engenders trust and empowerment, which ultimately translates into better customer service delivery.
2. Turning fear into curiosity
In our view, the best way to stimulate new technology adoption is to create and continually foster a workplace culture that turns fear into curiosity. That’s because curiosity signals engagement, which in turn drives better use of technology tools.
A good way to go about this is to identify employees who are curious to learn more about new technologies. Those eager team members are empowered to learn all they can and to be internal champions to help others embrace the changes — to spark interests, which leads to more engagement.
The shape of a culture that fosters such behaviours comes from the top, but it should be embodied at every level.
People working with customers need to be and to feel empowered to solve problems themselves, with tools and encouragement provided by their employers. Recognizing excellent customer service, especially in light of automation and the fears sometimes attached to it, is particularly critical.
It’s like muscle memory
Adaptability and resilience are critical skills in and of themselves, which should be fostered in every team member. Think of athletes: the muscle memory they’ve developed through training helps them compete.
It’s the same with talent inside any organization across Canada. Help your people be adaptable and resilient, and the opportunities for them to adapt and thrive are endless.
What are your thoughts on this subject? Please leave me your comments.
Originally published on Linkedin on May 16, 2018.
