What is Digital Disruption, and how will it affect your business?

What is Digital Disruption, and how will it affect your business?

Digital Disruption is a phrase coined to describe the impact that technology has on the way we do business. Think Uber. Twelve months ago not many of us had heard of Uber – by April 2015 Uber is having such an impact on the established taxi companies that 300 Perth taxi drivers blockaded Parliament House to protest at the unregulated Uber Service.

A Deloitte White Paper – Short Fuse, Big Bang states that the Australian internet economy is due to grow at twice the rate of GDP. Companies that don’t embrace new technology will find that competitors that are off the radar one minute, can overtake and swallow up their business the next.

What is the impact on managing the employees in your business?
• Recruitment tools such as Seek and Linked-in are changing the way you find new staff. Use of social media such as Facebook means that you can find out a lot about a potential recruit before you even interview them.
• Providing information to employees, including their performance, tool-box talks and training can all take place on line, often using smart phone and tablet technology.
• With the prevalence of cloud based systems, employees no longer need to gather together in one office space. Remote working, working from home and even off-shore working all become possibilities with cloud technology.
• HR processes such as timesheets, rosters and leave requests can all be managed on line, making the process quicker and more efficient.

This can have significant financial benefits for your business including reduced office space, better retention of staff through flexible working, and productivity gains.
But, it needs a new mind set to make it work. These are my three tips for managing your workforce in the digital age:

• Set clear expectations. With teams working remotely/flexibly it is easy for individual employees to lose sight of what is expected of them, and informal mentoring/peer pressure is harder to achieve.
• Encourage connectivity. Remote working staff don’t have a natural opportunity to catch up about their family, what’s on TV, and how their team did at the weekend. This is the stuff that team spirit is built on, so you need to find different opportunities for staff to connect with each other, whether by Skype, company intranet or Yammer, or regular social events.
• Encourage collaboration. Online collaboration tools such as Google Docs are a great way of encouraging teams to work on initiatives in real time.

All businesses need to embrace technology, both in the way they interact with their customers and their employees. But when getting excited about what technology can bring to your business, you also need to consider how human beings are going to function in the brave new world.