Why Businesses Need Digital Savviness, Adoption, & Training

Digital savviness, adoption, and training are key areas that every organization should focus on in the modern age. 

They are even more valuable in today’s turbulent business world, which has been dramatically disrupted by the COVID-19 outbreak and its ensuing financial crisis.

Below, we’ll explore:

• Why digital savviness is mandatory for the modern business
• What digital adoption is and how it fuels innovation, growth, and digital transformation
• How to create digital training programs that can keep up with the demands of today’s fast-paced economy

First and foremost, it is important to understand the importance of digital skills in the contemporary workplace.

How an Unskilled Workforce Limits Innovation, Agility

Forward-thinking businesses can no longer afford to put digital skills on the back burner – today, the digital skills gap threatens the organization on a number of fronts.

A lack of digital skills can limit:

• Employee productivity
• Organizational performance
• Agility and flexibility
• A business’s ability to innovate
• Digital transformation efforts

The more digital the economy becomes, the more important it is for employees to have the appropriate digital skill set. 

Yet since the digital workplace is continually evolving, so too must that skill set, and organizations often bear the responsibility of training their workers.

Ineffective training, as we have just seen, can cap organizational performance.

On the other hand, a well-designed and well-executed training program can have the opposite effect:

The Benefits of Digital Savviness, Adoption, and Training

There are a number of reasons why organizations should rethink their training efforts.

Digital adoption and training that builds digital savviness offers a number of key benefits:

• Employees can learn new software more quickly and easily, lowering software-related frustration
• Organizations, as a result, can adopt new tools more efficiently, improving business agility, digital transformation outcomes, and more
• Software investments yield greater returns in less time
• Digitally savvy workers have a better digital workplace experience and are more engaged, satisfied, and productive
• An organization will have a better chance of keeping up with today’s competitive, digitally-driven market

These are a few of the direct benefits of implementing proper training in the workplace, but there are a number of indirect benefits as well.

For instance, when employees are more proficient and engaged, they will be less bored and more likely to stick with a company for the long term. In other words, effective digital training can improve talent management and employer branding, among other areas.

How to Maintain a Digitally Skilled, Savvy Workforce

Traditional approaches to training, such as classroom-based training, simply cannot keep up with the demands of the modern work environment.

These types of training programs are ineffective because they are…

• Inefficient. Scalability is a major concern for large organizations that regularly hire new workers. Classroom training and its online equivalents are far too costly to scale effectively, and they are much less efficient than other digital training methods (see below).
• Too broad. Courses, either online or offline, are geared towards a generalized audience and often deliver comprehensive information about a topic or tool. The modern worker, however, often uses a unique mix of tools in their day-to-day routines. Such comprehensive courses, therefore, often contain a great deal of irrelevant information, which ends up wasting employees’ time and employers’ training dollars.
• Too slow. Creating courses takes time, but since the digital work world is continually changing, course material often lags behind software updates. Time is also a factor when actually undergoing training: generalized courses and training take far longer than contextualized digital training solutions.

Overcoming obstacles such as these requires a different approach to training and workplace education – one that focuses more on efficiency, effectiveness, practical job skills, and the employee experience.

When it comes to on-the-job workflow training, traditional approaches and their online equivalents, such as video courses, should be replaced with automated training platforms that focus on workflows.

Digital adoption solutions, for instance, are ideally suited to this task, because they focus on:

• Contextualized, just-in-time training. Digital adoption platforms (DAPs) are a tool that provide automated, in-app walkthroughs and guidance. By delivering context-based information in the moment of need, employees can learn as they work, maintain focus, and stay productive. 
• The overall employee experience. Employee frustration can destroy job satisfaction and engagement, as well as productivity. A positive experience, on the other hand, can improve knowledge retention, performance, and their willingness to learn new tools. Digital adoption platforms simplify software experiences, which dramatically improves performance in today’s complex digital work environment.
• Integrated workflows. Proficiency in a single tool can certainly improve employees’ productivity, but the modern workplace consists of dozens of tools. In many cases, a single workflow will require the use of several tools, which means that cross-platform training should be prioritized. Also, since every business and business unit utilizes its own digital toolbox, training must also be customized to suit that organization’s unique needs.
• The entire digital workplace. Training often limits its scope to particular performance metrics, but digital adoption strategies focus on improving the efficiency of the digital workplace as a whole. That performance depends on multiple factors, including the IT infrastructure, the digital technologies being implemented, employees’ mindset, and the workforce’s digital skills. 

With a modern digital adoption platform and the right strategy, organizations can maintain a skilled workforce and keep up with today’s fast-paced digital business environment.

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