There are a plethora of successful examples that demonstrate the positive impact of digitalization on business performance nowadays. However, lack of adequate digital skills of employees is the main barrier for businesses that aim to use digitalization as a leverage to get ahead in competition. With the effects of Covid-19, while even the businesses that resisted the digital transformation had to adapt to this new era to some degree, this transformation means more than replacing the meeting rooms with zoom calls. Digitalization presents opportunities for businesses in various fields such as communication, decision making, product development, supply chain management, risk management and so forth. That is why businesses that could not implement digitalization in their work processes face a competitive gap that is ever increasing against competitors who reshaped their operations from work flows to customer experience.
At this point, it would be unjust for businesses to expect their employees to gain and/or develop these digital skills on their own, without any initiative from the employer side. Research shows that many businesses that could not manage the digital transformation make the same mistake of thinking it is all about investing in technological infrastructure and overlooking the crucial “human” element. As an example, “Global Risk Reports” published by World Economic Forum in 2021 shows that 60% of adults lacked the ability that is required to work online, learn online, and access essential digital services. This striking statistic shows how important it is for employees to have digital skills in order to establish job satisfaction, at the same time how lack of it can result in ineffectiveness for the business as whole.
Naturally, the digital skills needed can vary depending on the needs of specific industries that businesses operate in. However, considering that digital technologies have a transforming effect even in industries that are not directly related with digitalization, there is no doubt that there is a certain requirement of having basic digital skills and that brings about a bunch of responsibilities for businesses to develop said skills through encouragement, education and training.
Digital skills can be defined as content search, evaluation, usage, sharing, and creation through digital devices. This definition covers an infinite number of digital operations from googling a digital report and downloading it on your computer, to coding a website. While it is not required for every level of employee in a business to possess the skill set of a software engineer, we can not overlook the fact that in today’s business scene, an employee should possess a specific set of basic digital skills.
While having a grasp on MS Office suits, e-mail, instant messaging, video conference tools, intranet, and social media is almost a must in every office, knowing when and how to effectively use them is another issue. According to research conducted by Radicate in 2019, the average employee sends/receives 121 e-mails daily. McKinsey’s report states that employees spend 28% of their work week processing e-mails. This goes to show you that deciding whether something is “e-mail worthy” or not is actually an important decision that can seriously impact the performance and effectiveness of an employee. The bombardment of e-mails can result in employees being overwhelmed by seemingly less important stuff, making it easier for them to miss actual important work related details in those mountain of e-mails. Therefore businesses should train their employees on which digital communication tool is best suited for various tasks, as well as how each of these channels can be used most effectively. For instance, when it comes to efficient e-mail account management, creating labels, folders, and categories, or asking for “read notification” on important mails can be life-saving little helpers.
With their introduction to our lives in the last decade, instant messaging apps first conquered our personal lives, and quickly moved up into the business scene. While there are a lot of pros of incorporating instant messaging into the working process such as reducing the burden of overwhelming e-mail flow, encouraging collaboration, and providing time-saving opportunities, there are also certain cons that are prone to misuse. As an instance, due to the nature of instant messaging, employees are seen as available at all times, sometimes even after work hours. Likewise, it also runs the risk of creating a blurred line between personal and professional lives of employees. Another issue is the distracting nature of instant messaging, which might be off-putting or even disruptive to certain employees, especially when they are in the middle of a task.
The latest introduction to our personal and business lives is the video conference tools. Due to the pandemic and it resulting in working remotely, video conference tools such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google meet, Skype and etc. have become a pillar in a day of an employee. You have probably seen someone leaving their microphone on when they are not supposed to, having an embarrassing background, asking “can you hear me” or wasting everyone's time trying to share a presentation on these calls. It would be harsh to blame them for these, since this is actually something that can be a subject for a training and many of the companies did not even have the time to schedule due to the immediate requirement brought about by the pandemic. Nevertheless, the reality is what it is and today not knowing these video conferencing skills seems unprofessional.
The rise in the usage and popularity of cloud technologies, paved the way to a whole new way of collaboration. These tools that come in handy especially in remote working, enables users to simultaneously work on all types of documents without the need of uploading, downloading, or even manually saving a document. It also lets users see who made a change, what they have changed and when. Google Docs is one of the most popular of said digital collaboration tools. The internet is full of these collaborative tools that are tailored for a vast collection of needs, and it is up to you to identify what you and your team needs. Check out the list below and see whether any of these digital collaboration tools can boost your teams’ performance especially when the team members are working remote:
The internet is overflowing with great resources that you can use to educate yourself without even spending any money. However, in order to make use of these resources, you have to know how to effectively search what you are looking for. Take a marketing specialist as an example, they would need to know about their specific market trends, consumer wants and needs, competitors’ offerings, and customer feedback. Most, if not all of this information can be found online, it is just the matter of looking at the right place. At the very least, an employee should be well versed in carrying out a decent google search. However, today’s required digital research skills are more than reaching the data, but it includes skills to use the data as a support for the decision making process. Google Analytics is one of the most prominent services that provide insight to researchers. It is very useful to understand consumer behavior as it tracks the digital footprint of them. There are similar services that help businesses with their online presence such as SEMRush which provides search engine optimization (SEO), Hotjar shows you what people look at and for how long, in your content with the help of a heat map, and BuzzSumo allows you to search for keywords, how often and how frequently they are mentioned in your target areas, as well as your own mentions and their frequency.
According to the Cyber Security Intelligence Index (CSII) of IBM published in 2014, 95% of cyber security breaches involve human errors. Apart from the common practice of phishing, which more often than not gets stuck to spam filters, social engineering is also a method of manipulation that employees must be aware of. In this technique, which is sometimes called “human hacking”, unsuspecting users are manipulated through various acts such as impersonation or believable lies, to give up sensitive information. A recent example from the United Kingdom shows the severity of the situation. In this case, an employee was led to believe they were on a phone call with the CEO of their parent company located in Germany, while actually it was a scammer using a voice altering AI to impersonate the actual CEO. Scammer convinced the employee to transfer 243.000 USD to a Hungarian supplier, which was actually their accomplice. While this is an extreme case, knowing how to prevent themselves and the company from malicious phishing attempts, ransomware, adware, and other types of malwares, Ddos attacks, and any type of digital threats is essential in today’s workplace. In order to be proactive and prevent any form of damage from such attacks, employees should be trained on cyber security and be reminded of the importance of backing up important data, not clicking on suspicious links and being aware of modern cyber criminal tactics.