Mobility transforming workplaces, big or small
View(s):From the large enterprise to the small-to-medium business, mobility is transforming the workplace. Until recently, rising demands of the millennial workforce’s use of personal mobile devices to access company data encouraged widespread BYOD policies. A new state of mind is trending across today’s workforce and will influence those that follow. By 2020, millennials will represent over 50 per cent of the workforce, and they want to work wherever, whenever, and with connected mobile devices that are fun and easy to use, according to HR Director for Microsoft APAC, Kathy Tingate.
By the same token, she says, employers around the globe now recognise mobility as a strategic tool to recruit top talent, automate processes and improve operational efficiency. But how does one envision a workspace that is collaborative, flexible, project-oriented, and unbounded by time or geography?
Workspaces-that people access from anywhere on any device-must extend from unified communications and enterprise social media to business workflow applications, chatbots, document management and file sharing tools, she said in a keynote speech on February 20 to over 400 HR professionals and business leaders from the IT/ BPM industry at the SLASSCOM People Summit 2018 in Colombo. Excerpts were released to the media by SLASSCOM.
Hinting at Microsoft’s own HR transformation journey, Ms. Tingate said she believes that organisations need to encourage their employees to adopt a learn-it-all mindset and focus on building an inclusive work culture to nurture creativity, innovation and productivity.
“For the first time in history, five generations will soon be working side by side. But whether this multi-generational workplace feels creative and productive or challenging and stressful is, in large part, up to their organizations. That’s why Microsoft nurtures a culture that encourages learning it all as opposed to knowing it all,” she said.
A key area of Microsoft’s culture transformation was reviewing the systems and processes that drive behaviour including its employee performance review system.
All line managers would rate their subordinates’ performances on a scale from top to bottom based on a bell curve (stack ranking). “This meant that some employees would always be classified as ‘poor’ regardless of their impact as per the nature of a bell curve,” Ms.Tingate said.
This approach led Microsoft to implement a system that would focus on employee impact and contribution through a process called Connects. It allows line managers to focus on the impact a particular employee is making instead of forced ranking peers against each other. “Whilst differentiation is still important, Managers now have the flexibility to allocate rewards in the manner that would best reflect the performance of their teams and individuals,” she revealed.
Equally important is creating an inclusive workforce. But unconscious bias-the stereotypes that shape our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner-can work against this in inadvertent ways. “Building an inclusive organisation is very much about the actions and behaviour of our employees and leaders. It’s why we have all our employees complete training on unconscious bias,” she said.
Artificial Intelligence is another avenue reaped with endless possibilities.
In January, Colombo-based Microimage launched a multi-channel virtual assistant (or chatbot) built on top of the Microsoft Bot Framework, LUIS API and Azure Cognitive Services, allowing HR professionals to engage with peers, mentors and resources in real time.
The solution allows employees to consult with the chatbot and request a range of services from leave management to company policy inquiries at any time and location. The chatbot can also be integrated into third-party HCM platforms.
Today, 80 per cent of business leaders in Asia agree that every organisation needs to transform to enable future growth. But just 29 per cent of Asia’s organisations have a full digital transformation in place.
A people-centric approach to a digital workplace strategy allows for productivity and creativity to co-exist. But with only 15 percent of employees saying that they are engaged at work, organisations must re-examine their workspaces for improvements, she said.