What is workforce transformation?

Workforce transformation includes the processes behind empowering employees and motivating them to adapt to new requirements posed by changes to your business strategy. It therefore broadly encompasses identifying skill gaps, training employees in new technology, budgeting for changes to the office environment, developing new policies (such as for flexible working) and gathering data on areas such as productivity and turnover. 

Why is a workforce transformation useful?

As many businesses adopt remote or hybrid working practices, they will need to update the workplace environment so that it’s better suited to employees working from home. This could be ensuring that employees have the technical know-how to record a team meeting online, or how to use cloud software in order to upload files. As AI becomes a more popular solution for organising recruitment data – including unstructured data – HR teams will need to be able to understand how to use these tools most effectively.

As well as helping employees to adapt to changes in the working environment, a workforce transformation can be crucial in helping businesses to remain competitive in a digital-first landscape. It means that businesses can simply upskill their employees rather than search for new candidates who have the skills they need. This can help you to save money as well as time spent on sourcing candidates with new skills that might be hard to come by in the job market.

While you still may need to hire for specific roles that require a certain educational background and extensive training, upskilling can be a helpful way to improve the pre-existing skill sets of your employees. 

This article, therefore, will examine how you can make useful decisions that can help prepare you for transforming the workforce.

Workforce transformation as digital transformation

Workforce transformation is becoming more of an imperative as businesses adapt to a more digitalised landscape. This means that the core of your workforce transformation is likely to be a digital transformation. One of the key benefits of a digital transformation is that it can help you to develop your products for customers and clients in a more streamlined manner, as well as help improve your employee experience. 

When adopted well, a digital transformation can help make rote tasks easier to perform with the help of automation, as well as helping your employees stay organised with project management apps. What’s more, digital transformation can also extend to HR processes, such as automating your business payroll. 

Successfully undergoing digital transformation can be stressful to employees, and often requires a strong commitment from a business’s leaders in order for it to work. Tips for a successful digital transformation include:

• ensuring that employees understand the technology they’re adopting with the help of training
• providing employees with guides and support for new technology
• empowering employees to ask questions about the adopting of new technology
• communicating regularly and in advance about any changes to day-to-day technology
• maintaining conversation throughout the company hierarchy about new technology adoption

Identifying skills gaps

When developing a workforce transformation strategy, identifying skills gaps in your current team is one of the most important steps to take. A skills gap is essentially the skills that your employee has as opposed to the skills they need to do their job successfully. 

As your workforce experiences huge changes, such as in the case of a digital workforce transformation, employees will likely have skills that are now redundant and will have to learn new ones that help them to navigate a modernised working environment. This could range from basic digital literacy to the ability to read data. In order to find out what skills they are lacking, you can conduct a skills gap analysis. Some skills that your employees might need to train in include:

• learning to use digital communication tools such as project management tools, cloud-based communication platforms, and video conferencing tools
• understanding the importance of data protection and compliance with data privacy regulations
• being able to understand and interpret data
• being able to create digital content such as e-brochures, e-books, presentations, videos, podcasts and social media reels

Developing digital hard skills

Sometimes you might need to go one step further when training employees and help them to develop digital hard skills that require specialist knowledge. This could include the following:

• knowledge of programming languages
• data analytics skills
• search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) skills
• social media management skills.

Overall, when it comes to training your employees in new useful skills, it’s important to work out a list of key priorities, ensuring that the skills you train them in are the most valuable to your business. This can involve considering the long-term usefulness of these skills, as well as what they might benefit from brushing up on in the short term.

Budgeting for workforce transformation

Workforce transformation can be costly, particularly when it comes to training or providing employees with new equipment. Therefore, planning a budget effectively is often another key ingredient to making it a success. Below, we will look at some considerations it might be useful to make before creating a workforce transformation budget.

Creating a needs assessment and identifying pain points

Firstly, it may be a good idea to get an overview of your business needs, particularly problem areas and how you plan to address them. You might also look at the strengths and weaknesses of your workforce’s current workflows and how they deliver products to your customers. This can also involve identifying key priorities and how you plan to manage them. 

During this stage, it can be useful to ask for feedback from your employees. You might choose to gather this information through employee satisfaction surveys or similar questionnaires. This can help build a bigger picture than the one you currently have regarding the needs of both your customers and employees, as well as what they might be looking for from you in the future.

However, consider combining qualitative data-gathering methods with quantitative data-gathering methods, so that you can identify how long it might take to achieve a certain workforce transformation goal, as well as the productivity levels required over some time, to do so.

Using SMART objectives to set goals

Once you’ve identified your key targets and what changes your business needs to make over a specific period of time, you can use the SMART method in order to develop objectives. For example, if you’re looking to engage your employees more in AI technology, or to upskill them in data analytics, that would become your specific goal. By using SMART objectives, you can define your objectives according to:

• Specific goals;
• Measurable progress and outcomes;
• Achievability within your given timeframe;
• Relevancy to your overall business goals;
• Time-based projects that are both ambitious yet achievable.

Taking inspiration from other businesses regarding best practices

Once you’ve successfully completed your budget assessment, you can look at other businesses who have completed a workforce transformation well for inspiration. This could involve gathering information on how long it took, as well as the budget they used. In order to get the best possible picture, consider comparing your goals and desired outcomes to similar businesses of your size in the industry of your choice. Ways to gather this type of information include networking with business owners at events, as well as getting a consultant on board to help guide you during this process.

Creating your budget

Finally, you can use the information you’ve gathered in order to create your budget. This often involves working out an estimate budget based on the costs of new workplace equipment, software, training, risk assessment, or other types of evaluation. Once you’ve created a budget, you’ll likely need to secure finances from a source such as sponsors or a loan. Then, you’ll need to constantly evaluate the allocation to your budget to ensure that it is being spent most effectively and is helping you to achieve workforce transformation outcomes that meet your expectations.

Workforce transformation often takes a huge effort from your entire team to get right. It also usually takes smart budgeting, extensive research, risk assessments, and skills training. While it can be tempting to move quickly into digital transformation, your team may benefit from skills gap assessments and training which means that they are better prepared for the future of work, particularly as workplaces become increasingly digitalised. By adapting your workforce to the future of business, you can help secure a future for them in a rapidly changing corporate landscape.