Navigating through the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020 caused organisations to work remotely and find ways to cut spending. However, companies significantly increased their spending on digital technologies for employees. Over 50% of midsized companies increased their spending in this area, and 69% plan to increase their digital tools in 2022. Yet, many of these investments will not generate substantial business impact because they lack a sustained and successful focus on improving digital dexterity.

Increased spending on digital technologies

<ul><li>Show employees the value of digital dexterity. Employees are more inspired to develop a skill when they see how it will serve them.</li><li>Foster digital dexterity by connecting employees to people or projects that can help them build new skills in practice.</li><li>Organisations can identify employees to act as "digital translators" to help guide leaders and employees.</li><li>Encourage employees to coach others in key digital skills on the job.</li></ul>

Building digital dexterity in the workforce

Digital dexterity is the mindset and behaviours that accelerate digital business transformation. The pandemic showed the importance of digital dexterity for company success. Face-to-face interactions, paper-based processes and analogue tasks vanished and were replaced with digital constructs. A 2018 survey found an open mindset and agile ways of working are vital for optimised digital dexterity. However, only 16% of leaders and 9% of employees have high digital dexterity.

Digital dexterity

<ul><li>Leaders need to communicate the organisations need for digital dexterity.</li><li>They should ensure that workflows, incentives, budgets, and policies promote digital dexterity.</li><li>Organisations should build digital capabilities such as collaboration, data literacy, workflows, and information creation and retrieval.</li></ul> The goal is complete transparency with employees about the right tools to use and the expected digital skills.

Laying the groundwork for digital dexterity

The hybrid era means employees need to be more comfortable than ever with tech. Here’s how to help them develop the skills they need.

Laying the groundwork for digital dexterity

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