Digital Dexterity: Hot Topic at Gartner DWS London

Recap from Gartner Digital Workplace Summit, London. In this vast marketplace of ideas, one term continued to crop up in various conversations: Digital Dexterity.

Key takeaways: Gartner Digital Workplace Summit

Last week more than 800 attendees, 18 exhibitors, and 20 experts gathered at the Gartner Digital Workplace Summit in London. Lumapps had the pleasure to be one of the exhibitors, and had the chance to discuss opportunities and methods for maximizing employee engagement with some of the industry’s leading experts like Craig Roth, Helen Poitevin, and Mike Gotta.

In this vast marketplace of ideas, one term continued to crop up in various conversations: Digital Dexterity.

What is Digital Dexterity and Why We Need It?

The future is impossible to predict, and digital dexterity is a top solution to cope with this unavoidable fact. The future holds myriad scenarios, all of which any strong workplace must be able to handle gracefully. Digital Dexterity is the key to future-proofing your workforce.

Simply put, Digital Dexterity is the ambition and ability to apply technology to improve business outcomes.

According to Gartner, Companies with high Digital Dexterity (DD) are 330% more likely to accelerate digital transformation, but only 15% of employees have high Digital Dexterity.

Individuals with high DD:

Views data and technology proficiency as critical to career advancement, and digitization to be critical to company effectiveness
Innovate and take risks in pursuit of digital opportunities, and are willing to take on new roles to support digitization plans
Can work from anywhere, with the right technologies, and adapt to work on initiatives with unclear or changing requirement
Obtain technologies independently to succeed on the job

As the rate of technology introduction continues to explode throughout the workplace, a growing divide is emerging. The Digital Dexterity Gap must be closed if companies want to remain competitive in an endlessly innovating marketplace.

How Do We Achieve Digital Dexterity?

From a leadership perspective, it’s critical to keep in mind that different types of employees require different approaches. Managers must first ask themselves, how ready and able is each employee to take the next step toward adopting new technologies or processes? Managers must then answer 3 questions for each type of employee:

Mastery: To what degree has the employee mastered their current role?
Learning agility: How quickly can employees understand and put new concepts or skills into practice?
Personal drive: Considering life factors both in and out of work, what is the employee’s availability and appetite to take on more? How willing and able are employees to take on more work?

A more grassroots approach must also be taken for real change to occur within the organization. In addition to top-down leadership, encouraging employees to teach each other has a number of benefits.

57% of employees develop new skills from their colleagues, regardless of manager involvement

66% of employees expect most learning and development to occur outside the classroom

Emphasizing knowledge sharing and employee collaboration is a powerful tool for managers to develop the Digital Dexterity of their workforce.

Promoting Digital Dexterity

From an enterprise perspective, there are a few things to keep in mind while promoting Digital Dexterity:

First, there’s no need to plan everything at once — a step by step approach must be taken to avoid overload, and attempts to revolutionize your workplace overnight will likely end in failure.

Second, and perhaps most important: focus on the moments that matter. Moments that matter are emotion-generating, scalable, frequent, and business-aligned.

Take employee onboarding for example. This is a critical time period for any employee. It can generate emotions (stress, excitement, or both). It’s scalable (all employees must be onboarded). It’s frequent, especially for larger companies, where new employees are frequently brought onboard, and it is of course, business-aligned. Identifying these key moments is crucial to optimizing the Digital Dexterity of a company.

What is the lynchpin of implementing new and innovative technologies, and ultimately achieving Digital Dexterity? Consider a digital workplace program anchored by secure and stable business systems, like a robust employee intranet that encourages both top-down communication and employee collaboration.