Business transformations are planned and executed to improve the overall performance of a company through lower operating expenses, increased revenue, as well as higher customer satisfaction and workforce productivity. Earlier, Anand Jayapalan had spoken about how companies typically try to deliver improved financial performance and organizational effectiveness with business transformations, while focusing on higher growth, new strategies, and tech-enabled solutions.
In the modern, rapidly evolving, dynamic business environment, putting emphasis on brand new capabilities, ways of working and technologies has become extremely crucial. A large number of businesses turn to transformations as their leaders seek to capture untapped potential or to realize gains in efficiencies. Businesses may undertake transformation in pursuit of a number of goals, starting from tackling urgent external challenges and industry discontinuities to dealing with macroeconomic pressures like supply chain woes.
The majority of successful business transformations tend to address various value creation opportunities of a company. Some of them, however, tend to focus on a particular theme, for instance, workforce transformation are done to adopt agile working methods. In today’s age, just about all business transformations involve “digital transformations” as they commonly require investments in new technologies and tech-enabled processes. Certain digital-transformation initiatives can also be so significant that they require large, stand-alone efforts.
There are certain important aspects important to making a business transformation successful and ensuring that they capture the most value. Here are a few of them:
- Use an objective fact base to identify opportunities for improvement: Business leaders need to make use of facts to assess the maximum financial benefit from a transformation. This shall provide them with the confidence and knowledge needed to pursue realistic yet ambitious targets that reflect the full potential of the business transformation.
- Communicate a compelling reason for why a transformation is needed: Just protecting the bottom line is not enough. Business leaders have to take the initiative to explain why employees must do things differently. Unless the employees orderly understand what the transformation may mean for their daily work and overall business goals, their mindset won’t align with the organizational objectives. Focusing on developing talent and skills, as well as fostering understanding is important to make sure employees are effectively brought on board and stay there. Specific and lucrative financial benefits are known to be among the most effective tools to motivate employees and achieve widespread results across the business. A well crafted program with nonfinancial incentives might also be effective in generating a high level of excitement across the company, and elevate the discretionary efforts of the employees.
- Match the best talent of the company to its most crucial initiatives: This action puts emphasis on the importance of effectively linking business and talent priorities by developing a clear view of where value is generated in the firm, and who has the ability to deliver that value.
Earlier, Anand Jayapalan had spoken about how embedding transformation disciplines into business-as-usual systems, processes and structures are needed to generate value. Companies that undergo successful business transformations often make considerable changes to their annual business planning processes and review cycles, right from executive-level briefings to individual performance dialogues.
