The human factor is usually the last thing companies think about when undergoing digital transformation, and it should be the first. Insurance Innovation Reporter published this article by John Rodgers and Rajeev Aggarwal outlining ways companies can accelerate employee adoption of digital transformation initiatives.

Digital Transformation involves using technology to drive a range of improvements. As a term, it can quickly become a buzzword overused by organizations hoping to increase efficiency and their attractiveness to the next generation of customers. But over 70 percent of these transformations fail to deliver results, often due to missing one critical factor: the importance of people. When thousands of employees need to be brought into the vision, transformations are a confusing time, and the bottom line is that they only deliver if you focus on the people adoption. Transformation can obviate countless tedious processes and make the customer experience a joy, but nothing can happen without bringing your people along with you in this process.

Therefore, amid the myriad tech implementations it takes to arrive at digitizing processes, companies should be extremely wary of simply overlaying legacy systems without being attentive to the critical human elements. Technology is not a fix-all—it must be supplemental to people within the organization understanding the changes that are happening therein, and the purpose behind them. It’s up to leadership to instill this into the culture. Digitizing a company cannot be done on autopilot, it requires savvy communication as well as decision making, an understanding of people, and a huge measure of guiding them. In fact, when it comes to it, we’ve found over and again that the people element is the make-or-break factor in terms of whether a digital transformation works.

While companies see creating an interconnected, holistic enterprise as today’s imperative, the lesser touted imperative is the need to make the vision understood by those who’ll actually be leveraging the technology. The vision must get implemented top down and across the organization. No matter how advanced a company’s tech platforms are, they don’t come to life or get properly used without leadership making sure that both the higher purpose and the day-to-day hands-on usage of that technology are understood.

Read the full article here