Digital EmployeeHow digital is changing the workplace

© 2015 CGI IT UK Ltd.

3

ContentsModern digital working

Who is the digital employee?

Benefits of a digital workforce

Strengthening the front line to create an amazing customer experience

Connecting the front line

Zero moment of truth

Innovating at the edge

Delighting by default

Smarter working – rethinking how and where work is done

How flexible working benefits business

The virtual organisation

Rethinking ways of working

Flexible culture

The future of the digital workplace

4

6

7

8

10

12

14

16

18

20

21

22

24

26

4

Modern digital workingPeople – whether they’re customers or employees – expect a simple, fast and streamlined experience from the organisations they interact with.

It’s often said that people are increasingly looking for ‘instant gratification’, whether that’s instant service or an instant response. This trend is accelerating through technology adoption such as social media.

But it’s much more than that: customers and employees increasingly expect to access services and information via digital channels any time and anywhere. With the blurring of the online and offline worlds, they are looking for a seamless experience – but one which is also reliable and secure. And they still want to be seen as a person throughout the whole experience.

For organisations, the key to succeeding in the digital age is not just about technology. As well as developing clear digital strategies, it’s about understanding how

the workplace is changing and becoming increasingly mobile. Organisations need to design and embrace a new way of working that gets the best out of the 21st century workforce. In the right hands, digital trends can help employees work more efficiently and effectively.

Businesses need to be more agile and responsive to changes in their market and the emergence of disruptive competitors. A close understanding of the technology landscape is important, but a culture of entrepreneurship and an adaptable and motivated workforce are more so.

All this has profound implications for the role that employees play in an organisation’s success.

5

The three areas of focus

Creating a modern digital workforce requires an organisation-wide integrated digital workplace. Within this, some of the key areas are:

� Information sharing Digital transformation can help give people good data to make better decisions and collaborate more effectively with colleagues. It also means that employees can have access to the right information quickly to share with customers and colleagues, which can be vital in difficult situations. Improving information sharing between organisations can also help employees and customers, as well as improve efficiency.

� Customer centricity Thanks to smart devices, tasks that touch the customer don’t have to be performed in an anonymous back office – front-line employees can take care of them right in front of the customer.

� Talent management Digital transformation can help make a company more attractive to work for, and empower an effective workforce.

To succeed, organisations will need to better enable their front-line employees. To serve customers and attract the best talent, organisations will need to become flexible workplaces – and make sure they are up to date with what employees want.

Tomorrow’s winning companies will strengthen and empower their front-line employees, providing them with the tools, context and boundaries to collaborate easily and resolve operational problems quickly, and empowering them to provide customers with the best possible service.

By 2018, Gartner believes most organisations will be forced to employ something like a digital workplace to co-ordinate a response to workplace trends.

Source: Gartner Report “What to Do When Every Employee Is a Digital Employee,” May 2015

6

Who is the digital employee?It’s not just customers whose needs are evolving. Today’s employees have emerging needs that successful organisations will need to keep pace with:

� Employees increasingly want the same digital experience they’re used to as consumers.

� They’re impatient for progress, expecting all aspects of work and life to have the quick speed of the internet.

� Increasingly, employees belong to the ‘internet generation’. They don’t know a world without the web or indeed a mobile – and they seamlessly integrate their offline and online lives.

� Employees often feel comfortable in pushing the boundaries of technology in their personal lives, experimenting with things such as wearables, health monitoring apps, and smart TVs.

� Employees expect their experience to be reliable and secure, perhaps even more so than their customers.

Examples of digital employees could be:

Nursing staff who are able to access patient records securely and quickly via multiple devices, meaning more time with patients, reduced time spent searching for information and improved patient outcomes and safety.

Customer-facing employees of a retailer who use their downtime to respond to customer queries on social media. It gives employees better insight into what customers are asking. Plus, by linking each response to an individual, they feel a sense of pride in their participation. It helps ground the commitment to serve customers, whether in-store or online.

7

Benefits of a digital workforceMore organisations are realising the wealth of business benefits that appear once their workforce is enabled by digital technology.

� Attract the best talent Today’s workforce carefully evaluates the working environment of the companies they’re considering joining.

� Retain talent Employees will leave if they feel that companies aren’t keeping up with them.

� Get the most value out of employees Better use of digital technology will lead to improved efficiency and effectiveness.

� Stop missing opportunities Better knowledge management means more joined-up collaboration.

Strengthening the front line to create an amazing customer experience

To a customer, the service they get via an online portal or through speaking to someone on the phone or face-to-face shapes how they perceive an organisation.

Organisations have long known that the best customers are loyal customers – people who trust their products and services enough to keep coming back for more, despite the choice available to them.

Growing and digitally enabling the front-line workforce sets it free to play a bigger part in the organisation’s success.

10

Connecting the front lineCustomer loyalty largely correlates with customer experience – in other words, how the customer experiences the brand at each point of interaction. The challenge that organisations have today is making sure that this customer experience remains true to the organisation’s vision, no matter which channel the customer chooses to engage with.

What’s important is that customers expect a seamless experience whether they’re using an app or talking to an employee. Customers also expect to be able to easily switch between the physical and digital world to get a response to a query or complete a transaction. So it is key that employees have ready access to all the channels that the customer does, and can provide added value and information.

However, many organisations today have large swathes of their workforce working without technology. This creates an ‘air gap’, preventing customers from accessing everything that an organisation has to offer. It often hampers growth and stops a great experience from being offered.

Digital plays a vital role in ensuring that the brand delivers a first-class experience, by placing the customer at the heart of the business.

It’s causing entire industries and sectors to shape their future – and reconsider the role that front-line employees play.

Companies have always said that people are their most important asset. The reality is that today, customers have a wide choice of digital channels available to them. It means that when they do interact with an employee, it’s because they’ve chosen to do so or because they haven’t found what they are looking for via other channels.

Increasingly, people expect a better service from a person than they do online. Whereas online customers are happy to search and ‘help themselves’, they expect front-line employees to be more knowledgeable.

What do customers want from front-line employees?

They expect the person who helps them to provide added value and information compared to a website or app.

Employees need to have access to the same personalised information, and probably more.

They also expect the interaction to be reliable and secure.

11

All this means that front-line employees have never been more important to an organisation’s success.

This is a particular challenge for companies with remote networks of sales staff – like retailers, banks and transport providers, for example.Just as the Internet of Things is about doing more with your existing infrastructure, more firms are realising that to win they need to fully enable their people. It’s about recognising that those closest to customers often understand their needs the best.

Meanwhile, the price of computing, connectivity and devices is falling all the time, creating opportunities to use technology in new ways.

Digital Customer Experience

12

Zero moment of truthFor many successful companies, customer retention is a key focus. It is recognised that the cost of keeping a customer tends to be far lower than acquiring new ones.Interactions between customers and front-line employees are a key way to earn trust and loyalty. Seemingly ordinary interactions – a broken shoe, a missing order, the wrong product bought by mistake – often mean a great deal to customers, and they invest a lot of emotional energy in the outcome. Handling these ‘moments of truth’ well is critical for keeping a customer over the long term, because they can transform wary or sceptical people into strong and committed customers.

Changing employee expectations

Knowledge capture

More and more employees now cannot remember a time before mobile devices, but many companies are failing to take advantage of this.

More than three quarters (78%) of retail staff aged 16-24 – an age group which makes up almost a third of the UK’s entire retail industry workforce – said the introduction of iPads and tablets would change the way they feel about work, according to research by Red Ant.(1)

Sixty per cent were happy to use technology to assist customers, as they are used to using mobile devices and apps in their day-to-day life.

Front-line employees are the eyes and the ears of the organisation. They are ideally placed to contribute to, learn about and improve the customer experience. Problems identified that are within the team’s control can be actioned by the team. Those beyond the team’s control can be actioned by the manager to another part of the service delivery chain.

13

Key driversSeveral factors have combined to elevate the potential of a connected front-line workforce.

Lower device costs Now, for the cost of a smartphone, organisations can enable the majority of their workforce.

Automation Back-office roles can be automated, freeing up more resources to populate front-line roles. Automation of the back office is key to bolstering the front line with digitally enabled employees.

Increasing customer service expectation Online retailers have created a customer service culture that’s spread across and beyond the retail and service sectors. It means that organisations can no longer ignore the demand for knowledgeable, empowered employees.

(1) Source: Red Ant UK Shopper Survey 2014

14

Innovating at the edgeWhat does strengthening the front line mean for your organisation’s culture? Front-line employees need to be trusted to act in the moment, and they need the authority to make decisions without approval. This doesn’t mean that front-line staff have a free rein. Instead, management must set clear boundaries within which they can innovate. But doing this raises a number of key questions:

� How will your organisation have to change culturally to support digital working?

� What responsibilities does HR have in communicating the changes needed to ensure a smooth journey?

� What are the security risks of the digital workplace, and how can they be mitigated?

Digital Employee Experience

15

16

Delighting by default

Customer service tasks that were once carried out by back-office functions can now be brought to the surface and performed in real time in front of the customer. It’s helping to create a seamless, personalised and immediate experience for today’s customers. For exceptional customer service, businesses need to pre-empt customer complaints. By monitoring a customer’s level of service or delivery, action can often be taken by front-line employees to address the issue before the customer even notices.

However, to do this, front-line employees need the right information in real time. For example, several airlines now equip on-board customer service managers with tablets, which hold valuable customer data and insights – helping to improve the customer experience.

The tablet gives customer service managers real-time information about customers during the flight. They can congratulate customers who have just achieved the airline’s top tier loyalty programme, or proactively make amends when customers have suffered a delay or encountered a problem.

The tablet also streamlines the collection of feedback and helps the airline act quickly to address problems that arise.

Ultimately, it’s about giving people good data to make better decisions.

17

What does this mean for you?

� Organisations will need to reimagine the role of front-line employees. Which customer service processes that are currently performed centrally could be moved to the front line and performed in front of the customer?

� How will it change your culture when employees are asked to make decisions themselves based on customer insight, rather than relying on rules and procedures?

� How can technology help your employees serve customers better? Technology enables employees to access the right information when it’s needed, treating customers as they would want to be treated themselves – enabling the employee to change the customer’s transaction to a value-added experience.

� How can your organisation manage the threat that employees may perceive from new technology? Fear of the consequences of new technology can often get in the way of innovation if employees worry that they might be made redundant by it – so re-training and alternative career paths need to be explored alongside technology to encourage participation in innovation programmes.

Payments

18

Smarter working – rethinkinghow and wherework is done

19

Empowering employees and creating a more digital workforce goes hand in hand with flexible working. Digital transformation can help employees work flexibly and collaborate to make better decisions.

It’s important because flexible working is steadily becoming the expectation rather than the exception, and many UK businesses are already embracing this. Today, the benefits are clear: employers who introduce flexible working achieve measurable improvement to their recruitment, staff retention and overall employee engagement.

How flexible working benefits business

2020

In the UK, there are about 8 million part-time workers and 4 million people who work full-time roles flexibly.(1) Of the people working full-time without any flexibility, 8.7 million (two in five) would like some form of flexibility, according to a 2014 report, which polled 1,161 workers and interviewed 500 managers with hiring responsibility.(2)

Flexible working can widen the talent pool. It can help older workers to extend their careers – perhaps by reducing their core hours. And it can help young people enter the workplace, combining their studies with work. It can also enable families to maintain active employment

whilst their families grow up by enabling flexible working around school hours. Flexible working can also help reduce work-related stress and cut employee turnover.

More importantly, flexible working is a powerful business asset – a 2014 study by Regus found 81% of managers reported an increase in productivity after a shift to flexi-working.(3)

With customers and citizens increasingly expecting 24/7 service, flexible working enables organisations to respond – while still meeting employee expectations. It also means that companies can flex their workforce or the hours their people work to take into account peaks in customer demand. In terms of future growth in jobs, 62% (which equals 1.1 million jobs) will

be provided by this services sector, which already accounts for just over 30% of UK jobs and 35% of UK Gross Value Added.(4)

This is a large and broad sector of the economy, which includes Media, IT, Finance, Insurance and Professional Services – sub-sectors which are dominated by knowledge workers. This sector is disproportionately affected by a number of trends which will profoundly affect organisational design over the coming years.

Flexible working is becoming more and more common in the UK, supported by changes in government regulation which extended people’s rights in this important area. In fact, the UK labour market has one of the most diverse range of working patterns in Europe.

(1) Source: ONS UK Labour Market Projections 2012-2022(2) Source: Timewise Report A Flexible Future for Britain, June 2014(3) Source: Flexibility Drives Productivity, Regus 2014(4) Source: ONS UK Labour Market Projections 2012-2022

The virtual organisationMost FTSE businesses now draw their talent from a range of different sources – not just permanent employees.Organisations are becoming more virtual and less vertically integrated than before. They enjoy greater efficiency and flexibility through the use of outsourced services, partners and freelancers. A 2014 report found that 36% of British workers have worked as a contractor, freelancer or agency worker at some point in their career, and 41% are considering working that way in the future.(1)

In response, the workforce is becoming multi-dimensional. It includes a combination of permanent employees, outsourced employees, freelancers, independent professionals (‘iPros’), business partners and other individuals contributing through crowdsourcing arrangements. Some of these professionals will also be working for multiple organisations at the same time, just as any supplier would. If business leaders are to get the best out of this multi-dimensional workforce, they need to design and embrace a new way of working.

If business leaders are to get the best out of this multi-dimensional workforce, they need to design and embrace a new way of working.

21

(1) Source: “Flex Appeal,” Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) 2014

Rethinking ways of workingWhile new technologies have been well adopted and embraced in our personal lives, the workplace has not kept up. Technology provides the opportunity to rethink how we work and do business – and it’s essential to make flexible working a success.So far, organisations have focused on productivity, and have standardised and automated their processes accordingly. The problem with this is the fixation on the process rather than the outcome, meaning that innovation and creativity are stifled – a serious problem in markets that are changing.

Although there is a host of tools available today – email, instant messenger, intranets and social collaboration tools – these are not yet being used to their full potential. Most corporate users still default to email as their primary communication tool – and the average British worker spends 48% of their working week answering work emails.(1)

Email is an extremely useful and powerful tool, but is limited when it comes to sharing ideas and content across communities. It can also promote superfluous communication that is time-consuming to deal with and undermines efficiency.

22

(1) Source: Calculated based on figure of average British worker spending 36 days a year answering work emails. BBC magazine viewpoint, “Why do people waste so much time at the office?” Peter Fleming, May 2015

23

Changing the way that colleagues interact – for example, by using more social collaboration tools instead of email – could make us significantly more productive. The problem is that people still tend to communicate one-to-one or to closed groups. This means that other groups miss out on the information they need, and knowledge becomes embedded in silos, limiting discovery by others who need it.

One solution may be to make communications open, and public by default (whereas email is private by default), and to use more collaborative forms of information like notes, wikis or digital conversations, rather than standalone Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents that can exist in multiple versions.

Artificial intelligence can play a part in helping users to collaborate more effectively. Delve, Microsoft’s machine learning application, learns how users work with Office 365 and with whom they collaborate. Based on this, Delve will then proactively offer and display more prominently the employees, documents, files, emails, notes and other elements of Office 365 it considers most relevant and important for each user at any given time.

2424

Flexible cultureOf course, new technology on its own will not result in a successful transformation of working practices.

Some managers worry about setting precedents – fearing that flexible working could be awkward to manage if many team members request it at the same time. In some organisations, a culture exists to keep flexible working arrangements ‘under wraps’. This is why flexible working needs a joined- up approach – tackling the technology and the cultural implications in one co-ordinated programme.

Organisational structure and culture play key roles. Blue chip corporates tend to organise around national entities and business functions. Although this helps deliver operational efficiencies within existing organisational units, it can constrain the

development of new ideas that don’t fit within the existing structure. Some corporates are therefore starting to focus their re-engineering efforts around customer-facing processes.

This customer-centricity focuses teams on business outcomes, and harnesses the diversity and creativity of a global team. Corporate culture also needs to be adapted to encourage an experimental mindset, which embraces a spirit of inclusion and collaboration across the whole workforce, whether they are permanent, freelance or from business partners. Senior executives need to lead by example, acting as ambassadors for the change programme, quickly addressing any blockers that arise.

Arguably one of the greatest challenges for UK businesses is security. Cyber crime is already a major issue and can cause financial loss, reputational damage, theft of business-critical information or regulatory fines. Successfully introducing flexible working often relies on ensuring that robust security processes and procedures are in place.

Securing the business

Cyber Security

25

What does this mean for you?

� Is your organisation ready to respond to increased transparency? Online forums and websites like Glassdoor.com, which let employees anonymously rate their companies, are driving growing demand for transparency.

� How will your tools and working practices need to change to enable flexible working? UK legislation now gives all employees the right to request flexible working, and organisations have to give reasonable consideration to such requests.

� How will your organisation tackle the cultural challenges that can stymie flexible working? In some organisations, it may be necessary to tackle stigma attached to flexible working before it can flourish.

� Is poor performance management the elephant in the room that’s obstructing flexible working? Some organisations continue to focus on face-to-face time because they want to make sure that employees are achieving maximum output – not just at the point of sale.

...you should consider that the challenges may be largely cultural – it may be necessary to tackle stigma attached to flexible working.

26

The future of the digital workplaceOver the next ten years, the interaction and dependency between employees and digital will continue to accelerate:

� Employee wellness will grow in its significance, with employees comparing their health and well-being with other employees. Employers will start to take an active interest in the well-being of their employees.

� The interaction between employees and automated systems will also be commonplace as employees make subjective decisions around customers, and automation software completes the rest of the logic-based processes.

� Many businesses will move from product-based businesses to service businesses, resulting in front-line employees needing to interact with customers over a longer period of time.

© 2015 CGI IT UK Ltd.

Email: digitaltransformation.uk@cgi.com Web: www.cgi-group.co.uk/digitaltransformation

About CGIFounded in 1976, CGI is the fifthlargest independent informationtechnology and business processservices firm in the world.Approximately 68,000 professionalsserve thousands of global clients fromoffices and delivery centres across theAmericas, Europe and Asia Pacific,leveraging a comprehensive portfolioof services, including high-endbusiness and IT consulting, systemsintegration, application developmentand maintenance, infrastructuremanagement, as well as a wide rangeof proprietary solutions.