Digital business transformation across most departments in the enterprise has been well underway for several years. Now more than ever, people management processes are undergoing digital transformation when considering what’s most important to CEOs.
A recent survey by Gartner, Inc. focused on 2018 priorities, forty-seven percent of CEOs said they are being challenged by the board of directors to make progress in digital business, with fifty-three percent of CEOs saying “growth” is their top priority.
[bctt tweet=”53% of CEOs say “growth” is their top priority.” username=”@reflektive”]
Digital HR transformation is a huge opportunity to enable managers and employees to work better together for driving growth and business performance. We recommend three areas to focus on:
- Create more people management process agility and responsiveness given changing employee and customer experience expectations
- Become a real-time culture with in-the-moment coaching, development and recognition rather than rear-view mirror performance reviews delivered with bias
- Scale diversity and inclusion (D&I) strategies and results with data-driven decision-making across core people management processes
Let’s Focus on Diversity and Inclusion (D&I)
D&I is becoming more of a CEO and HR mandate given its compliance roots and because there is evidence of organizations that embrace D&I perform better than those who don’t make it a priority. In their Trailhead training resources on the “Business Value of Equality” – Salesforce provides a good definition of D&I in the workplace with this excerpt:
Diversity is the full range of ways a person can identify. When we say diversity in the workplace, we mean the idea that our companies reflect the communities we serve. Diversity has many facets including race, ethnicity, gender or gender identity, age, religious affiliation, and sexual orientation. But diversity isn’t always something we can measure or see. Diversity also includes people with differing educational backgrounds, personality types, cultural references, experiences, or physical abilities. Inclusion is when every single person in the community is valued, heard, respected, empowered, and feels a true sense of belonging. It goes beyond tolerance to actually celebrating and elevating every person in the room.
In terms of how D&I helps companies grow and succeed, let’s use the example of product and service innovation in the workplace which requires new and creative ideas from different perspectives. Teams including people with similar backgrounds who think the same way will rarely challenge each other. Whereas, meaningful innovation requires a variety of ideas, creative conflicts and feedback loops to help foster breakthroughs and adoption. Innovation is even more powerful in terms of business impact when managers, employees and executives are aligned around corporate goals and key performance indicators.
In this recent blog by John Kostoulas, research director at Gartner Inc., he said that “Gartner has been consistently highlighting to business leaders the positive effect diversity can bring towards better decision making, appreciation of customer needs and innovation, all these magnified when an organization achieves a culture of inclusion. The end result is better business performance.”
Further, Kostoulas shares the importance of technology to enable and scale D&I – this new Gartner report including Reflektive provides more insights. And our recent Growth Divide study sheds some light on the emphasis of D&I for today’s real-time, digital business world. Not surprisingly, 46% of executives say they would like to incorporate better diversity initiatives into their people management strategies, and 48% of executives want to create more opportunities for employee mobility with horizontal and vertical moves within their business.
D&I Success with Reflektive
Increasingly we’re seeing our customers apply D&I thinking to help their organizations transform people management processes including performance reviews, real-time coaching and development, goal alignment, and people insights. C-level executives, HR leaders, people managers, and IT champions are collaborating in agile teams to design, implement and iterate systems of innovation and systems of differentiation for their digital business environments with established HR systems of record that support – for example – applicant tracking, payroll, and compliance activities.
Interested in learning more about how to successfully drive your digital HR transformation? Rachel Ernst, VP of Employee Success at Reflektive, shares how to manage successful change in this brief blog and video interview.