If you cut through the jargon, what we’re really saying is that we’re giving people the ability to work and be productive anytime, anywhere and from any device. Employees are no longer tied to the computer in the office.

The changing world of work and digitalisation has fundamentally changed the landscape and this has driven the need to adapt across many businesses and markets. An interesting statistic I read recently claims that 75% of the workforce will be millennials by 2025 – that’s only seven years away*. (Millennials are those born, roughly, between 1980 and 2000).

As Generation Z starts to enter the world of work (those born after 2000), there is going to be even further disruption. They’re the most connected generation of all, having grown up only knowing the technological world. They have an insatiable hunger to keep up with information and trends, to set the rules and use technology to get things done.

The revolution gives rise to a new breed of organisation

The industrial revolution provided mass production on a grand scale by creating the ability to produce through giant physical infrastructures, supported by equally large workforces. The work carried out by the workforce was integrated into the manufacturing process and so manual work was enhanced by machine and automation. At this time, because machine intelligence and supporting technology didn’t exist, people filled in these gaps.

Today we are seeing a new breed of organisation born with technology, that’s more dynamic and fast paced and has the agility to change at an unprecedented rate when compared to traditional business processes.

“When I sat down to write The World is Flat: Facebook didn’t exist, Twitter was still a sound, the cloud was still in the sky, 4G was a parking place, LinkedIn was a prison, applications were what you sent to college, and Skype was a typo.” Thomas Friedman, American Journalist and Editor

Have office environments kept up with the change?

We talk of how people and technology have changed, but how much has office space changed to offer employees what they are looking for? If we look at the workplace of the future [LINK to Driving Innovation Article 1], we predict holograms, robots and wearable devices. There is a drive for more remote and flexible working, that enables employees around the world to collaborate, work in a shared digital workspace and seamlessly communicate virtually.

But what do I see? I see that new internet businesses are overtaking large corporates, disrupting decades of predictable growth and comfortable trading. This is forcing organisations to change and to re-evaluate whether their workplace is fit for the future. We are at a critical time where organisations need to radically change to compete transparently in a marketplace with is not just supported by technology, but fundamentally driven by technology.

The advantage of agility

The disruption is driving huge change in culture, systems, processes and, fundamentally, in the way of working across so many large businesses. The fear of changing has now been replaced by the fear of not changing.

There is a distinct advantage for businesses created in the post-IT revolutionised world. Their internal processes, the systems and methods by which they trade have been designed to be more automated and efficient, with technology at the very core of their infrastructure. Typically, they grow faster than traditional ones because agility is inherent in the systems they create.

Now, compare this to the traditional business that have been trading for decades in the same marketplace. These traditional businesses have grown slowly, organically into huge businesses. During the growth, they typically run on the same processes and infrastructure they have always done, introducing new technology in isolated. Often the fundamental method by which they do business hasn’t changed because it hasn’t needed to – ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’.

Large corporates are now fundamentally challenging themselves to change and adapt to the new world. Does your working environment match what your employees are looking for or are you trying make the best of an old office environment? 

If you want to learn more about workplace transformation, fill out the form to the right to download our Decision Maker’s Guide to Workplace Transformation.

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Once we had identified the main challenges we faced, we followed 6 key steps to ensure that business transformation was embedded fully across our culture and laid the foundations for a completely new way of working.

1. Getting real buy in

The first, and most important stage of transformation, is right at the start: buy in.

Getting real buy in from your organisation requires honest and open discussion. We made sure that everyone in our organisation understood the journey we were embarking on through regular communication. You can’t just sell change to managers and employees, you need to involve them in the process and give them an opportunity to ask questions.

It’s about recognising that you are going to change the culture and the hard work this entails. It’s about understanding the overall vision and the prize if you get this right. Fundamentally, it’s about recognising that something that needs to change and bringing people on board and helping them to accept the change.

Set the scene, be honest, don’t over commit or over sell. Paint the vision and be clear on the benefits of getting it right.

2. Selecting a core team to lead change

One of our first steps was to create a new core team to drive change across the organisation. This was a group of people who could influence, engage and excite the wider business. We looked for individuals who possess resilience, dedication and passion for what we do. You also need a team who can work together to provide their own support structure but also keep themselves motivated when times are difficult.

This team are effectively the champions of change. They can convince and guide others and provide a healthy amount of challenge in a non-confrontational way, like a river’s unending energy that smooths away the ragged edges.

3. Disrupted and dispersed change

We created a disruptive (but accepted) team of individuals dispersed across our organisation. They worked together as a virtual team to challenge the norm and change some fundamental, embedded processes across our business. The results of this were seen and resulted in tangible change and created a continuous improvement culture.

We asked this team to actively go out into the business and evaluate the processes and look at ways of making things better. But they couldn’t implement the changes alone: they needed to work with the IT department to change the systems that drove the process.

Finally, we asked them to lead people to adopt the new ways of working.

4. Tools and methodologies

There are many different approaches for driving change. At Ricoh we used Lean Six Sigma, which supported structured process improvement. It also ran hand in hand with change management and project management practices we were already using.

As the approach matured and it was embedded within Ricoh, we wanted to expand the tool set to enable our people to address more issues.

Our approach consisted of:

• Structured problem solving
• Designing new processes
• Designing new products and services
• Creating agility

Some tools fixed cultural issues, some practical. When combined together they empowered our workforce to drive transformation by themselves. It gave them new skills and an immediate opportunity to put these into practice.

When the tool set was distributed throughout the organisation, the group mindset changed. Once you’ve reached the point of being able to build new skills within the organisation as a whole, then you begin to tip the balance between sceptics and advocates.

5. Leadership development and training

The development of leaders is the route to sustaining and embedding change on a long-term basis. We developed a new four-layered leadership programme, from spotting talent through to senior managers.

At each layer of leadership development we encouraged participants to ask “why” and “how” so we could get sustained behavioural change.

In addition, we recognised that change needed to stop being an initiative. To transform in the way that we envisaged, the things we were asking people to do as part of the change programme needed to become the way we do things.

By embedding this into the Leadership development programme, bringing elements into the induction process, recording achievements in the HR systems and writing it into job descriptions, it starts to become “the way we do things” and fundamentally the culture of the organisation. The leadership team is critical to sustaining the change. By hard wiring this into the future leadership development programme, you ensure it becomes part of your organisation’s DNA.

6. Integration and future development

What does the future hold for organisations and more specifically for organisation capability?

You only need to look at the news or the latest articles on technology, future of the workplace and the future of commerce to realise there are many conflicting opinions.

I believe it’s possible to build capability despite this new uncertain world.

As the nature of work changes, this capability needs to be woven into the fabric of an organisation. If you successfully combine the other five points in this article and integrate them into the roles of all of your teams, this is where I believe you can flourish in a new world.

If you want to learn more about workplace transformation, fill out the form to the right to download our Decision Maker’s Guide to Workplace Transformation.

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