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

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 dir = "auto">Leaders need to communicate the organisations need for digital dexterity.</li><li dir = "auto">They should ensure that workflows, incentives, budgets, and policies promote digital dexterity.</li><li dir = "auto">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

<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

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.

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How to Build Digital Dexterity Into Your Workforce

Don’t gossip or tattletale about your colleagues or immediately approach leadership. Have an honest talk with your coworker that adheres to business etiquette rules. Most importantly ask questions to save yourself a lot of embarrassment.

Follow Business Etiquette

Getting asked for help by coworkers can be difficult if it’s in your nature to be kind and helpful. There may also be times when you find it rewarding to help others — even if it means putting your own duty on hold. And, for some, it may just be easier to help them than to hold everyone else up.However, if a pattern emerges, determine whether that colleague is slacking off or taking a genuine interest in learning.

Establish Boundaries

More often than not, you give the benefit of the doubt to people you know and like. Well, you may come to like your coworker more if you actually get to know them and what motivates them.Let’s say that you have an unpleasant coworker. Instead of assuming that that’s just who they are, you find out that they’re going through a nasty divorce or recently passed over for a promotion. Obviously, this would put anyone in a foul mood.

Learn More About Them

Track instances where people aren’t doing their jobs over the course of a few weeks. Remember to account for it if, as a result, your own workload has to increase. These details will help strengthen your argument if you decide to take further action.

Keep a Record

Avoid focusing all of your day’s energy on the fact that your co-worker is daydreaming, scrolling their social accounts, or aimlessly wandering around. Remember,&nbsp;you only have so much energy for the day. So, when it’s depleted, your productivity suffers.Focus on your work and tune them out. If this is a challenge, try to work somewhere else where you can’t notice their laziness. If that’s not an option, you could put on a pair of headphones and listen to music that gets you in the zone.

Don’t Let Them Become a Distraction

If all else fails, you can directly ask your coworker for assistance. Most people can ignore a task. But, it’s much to ignore a person asking for help.Also, this puts lazy coworkers at a disadvantage. They are either forced to say “No,” or to lend a hand. It’s important to remember, though, that laziness doesn’t always imply discourtesy. However, the favor will test their sense of decency towards their colleagues. Also, this is another way to see what they’re good at and passionate about.

Ask Them for a Favor

Let’s say that you’ve decided to try and motivate your lazy coworker. While no easy feat, it is possible. And, it’s if you know their personality types.Why? Because this lets you know how they respond to authority. And, more importantly, how you can motivate them going forward.

Be an Inspiration

There’s a lot of negative association with venting. And, there is some truth to that. I mean do you really feel better after complaining? Even worse, venting can be addictive.However, there are times when getting something off your chest can be a positive. It’s just all how you use venting to your advantage.

Vent — if you must — Productively

In the event you have discussed the matter and nothing has been resolved, you may consider seeking outside counsel before taking any further action. In this case, no lawyer is needed. But, maybe you could ask a friend or family for advice.Or, even better? Speak with a mentor or leader who has been shared a similar experience. It might be possible to learn from their past experiences on how to handle this situation.

Seek Counsel

It’s frustrating to have a coworker who seems to get away with not pulling their own weight. But, ultimately, that’s not your problem. Instead, focus on what you need to get done and how you can be the best you can be. After all, obsessing over fairness, or the lack thereof only leads to negative feelings like anger and resentment — and those feelings are the ones that really slow you down.

Remember, Life Isn’t Fair

Almost every workplace has a lazy coworker. Those people arrive late, take a long lunch, and dip out before everyone Their behavior is always explained by an excuse, and good...

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What to Do When Your Co-Workers Don’t Work

Using the employees already within your business and investing in employee development will be crucial for businesses looking to build their workforces for tomorrow. It also allows leaders to understand which skills are most in-demand across the business and identify where any areas need intervention. Over time, and as projects progress, trends in these gaps will likely occur meaning HR and leadership teams are able to understand exactly when and where internal talent needs to be developed in good time in order to fill those gaps that come up most often.

Using existing talent

<ul><li>Once a skills gap has been identified within your business, the decision has to made whether to train an existing member of staff or recruit a new one.&nbsp;</li><li>Now, for many businesses struggling with the same challenge of staff shortages and budget cuts, training internal staff up to fill these gaps is the wise option in order to maintain business continuity.&nbsp;</li><li>While the usual knee-jerk reaction to a skills gap is to loo to recruitment, many businesses simply can’t find the talent they need right now.</li></ul>

Tackling the skills gap

Employers can now, within reason, appoint talent from anywhere and employees can work from wherever they choose. What’s more, the number of companies that have no physical location with employees based in different parts of the country (or world!), is on the rise too.The ongoing pandemic has seen a general increase in remote HR practices, recruitment and talent management included. As competition for the best talent has led companies to look further afield, many companies have had to find ways to attract, interview and manage new talent remotely.

Driven by technology

The talent management strategies of tomorrow will focus less on process and automation instead of promoting collaboration, feedback and engagement.From ensuring a safe working environment and promoting wellbeing initiatives to encouraging cross-department collaboration, development and retaining talent; what constitutes a great employee experience today is probably very different in many businesses from what it looked like a few years ago.

Heightened focus on employee experience

In this article, we look at some of the key considerations for HR looking to to produce their talent management strategies of tomorrow.

workforceofthefuture

Increased spending on digital technologies

How to Build Digital Dexterity Into Your Workforce

Follow Business Etiquette

What to Do When Your Co-Workers Don’t Work