Are your teams ready for digital transformation?

Are those teams appropriately enabled with the right communication technologies? Are those teams digitally fluent? Are your “teams” really teams?

Digital transformation will radically change how those businesses actually do business. But what about the teams that run and support those businesses?

Many organizations talk about “teams”, but are mistakenly using the term to describe “workgroups”. Just because people work together or happen to be in the same organizational structure doesn’t make those people a “team”. A team is people that work and rely on each other in order to achieve success. Teams are characterized as having common commitment and purpose, shared performance goals, complementary skills, and mutual accountability. This distinction is important to understand as a company enters the digital era.

The Basics Don’t Change

What won’t change in the digital era are the basics of building a team. Teams must be inclusive and diverse, yet have a shared vision, a clear strategy for achieving objectives, and trust among its members. Teams must recognize and embrace a sense of purpose and operating principles. Effective teams have a defined and shared set of ground rules, as well has defined team roles, responsibilities, and boundaries. The more that the members of a team help define the roles, boundaries, ground rules, and purpose of the team, the more successful the team.

The Digital Transformation of Teambuilding

The digital era team is much more than just people “working from home”. Team members can and will be virtually anywhere. As digital transformation changes the way businesses do business, it will also change many aspects of how teams work and are managed. While the basics won’t change, everything about team building will be amplified, magnified, and hyper-transparent. Getting the basics right enables collaboration – the key factor for team success in the digital era.

According to a recent CIO magazine article1, collaboration is the factor that will make-or-break the digital team. The odds against successfully developing a digital business without a highly collaborative process are staggering; up to 70 percent of software projects fail, 17 percent fail so badly the organization’s existence is threatened. The reasons for failure are often obscured, however a lack of collaboration is nearly always a contributing factor. Creating a digital business requires design and input from business and technology professionals who have a complete understanding of the business goals and vision to come together to plan, develop, implement and manage the digital business. These two cultures — technology and business — are often at odds and generate friction. This must be addressed and overcome in order for a digital business to be successful.

Digital teams must be managed differently. The first difference is that the managers of digital teams must cede control of the team. The manager role will shift to that of coach, enabler, and facilitator; teams must take control of planning processes, including identifying features, reviewing specifications, and defining success measures. Secondly, new strategies for managing human capital will emerge, beginning with new job descriptions, work-hours flexibility, planning and staffing, compensation models, and performance management standards.

With new business models resulting from digital transformation comes new threats and risks. As digital teams are built, specific training must be provided so that team members understand, anticipate, and manage digital era risks. With the digital age comes new threats to organizational brand and reputation, as well as a heightened need to protect intellectual property and trade secrets. But there are internal threats as well, as employee harassment and retaliation take on a new levels of awareness.

What about the impact to traditional team-building exercises? In the digital era, those traditional weekend retreats and team-building exercises will evolve to become gamified. In fact, gamification will allow those team-building exercises to become highly customized to an organization to reinforce the sense of purpose, understand the impact of the team’s contribution, and instill a sense of pride in the work being done.

How Does Communication Change?

In my earlier blog “How Mobile and Social Technologies are Changing in the Digital Age”, I discussed that in the digital era, communication is more than just email, instant messaging, and chat. Technology is evolving that improves how we communicate. Better communication will have a direct impact on the customer experience as well as the quality of products, making digitally-literate employees so important for business.

“Digital dexterity” is a requirement for the digital era team; team members must be trained to ensure that they are fluent in the use of the digital communication and social media. But digital dexterity is more than just the communication aspects. Team members must understand that communication will be both amplified and hyper-transparent in the digital era. Team members must recognize that situation and exercise good judgement and the appropriate use of communication methods.

But what about informal communications in the digital era? Informal communication within a team is critical for building trust and rapport among team members. Traditionally, this rapport and trust is built through “water cooler” conversations, at lunch, or social events. In the digital era, the break room must go “virtual”. Managers must create and encourage informal modes of communication, especially with video capabilities, such as Facebook, Skype, or Google Hangouts to permit team members to build this trust and rapport. As a result, managers must be much more flexible in regards to team members’ time management; corporate firewalls will have to relax rules that block these communication methods.

Build Your Digital Era Team

Here are three things to do to begin to build your digital era team.

  • Redefine “team” – Align people into teams that align with the customer-provider value chain. Work with teams to clearly define purpose and boundaries. This may mean updates of job descriptions, organizational charts, and work schedules to meet the demands of the digital age.
  • Invest in enabling technologies – Does your company have the communications technology needed to support your teams’ moves into the digital era? IM, chat, and email are not sufficient for effective digital team communication. Create and promote the ‘virtual breakroom room’ (including video!) in the form of a Facebook page or Google hangout to encourage the informal communications needed to build trust and rapport within teams. Enable collaboration with cloud-based file-sharing and productivity tools.
  • And don’t skimp on training – Not only do team members need to become fluent in the use of communication technologies, they also need to be aware that everyone is watching what is being communicated using these technologies. The old saying “think before you speak” becomes paramount – training your teams to “think first” and use communication technologies appropriately and responsibly is key.

 

Sources:

1Crosland, Cory. “Digital Business Success Requires Collaboration.” CIO. IDG, 29 Mar. 2016. Web. 12 July 2016. http://www.cio.com/article/3046758/leadership-management/digital-business-success-requires-collaboration.html

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