Digital Fluency: Your Team’s Edge

For departments outside of tech, digital fluency is becoming a key complementary skill to the standard role-specific skills your team needs. It’s the ability to effectively access, interpret, manage and share information in a digitally connected environment. It is also leveraging technology to uncover missed opportunities, identify problems, create new processes and address findings with critical thinking, complex problem solving and social intelligence.

If you’re struggling to innovate within your team, it might be because when you have invested in technology and innovation, you overlooked the strategic aspects of cultivating digital fluency. That’s where ‘Our Workforce’ from the above comes in. Purchasing new technology and having employees adopt it is not analogous to creating a collaborative, digitally aware culture where the Operations or Accounting team, for example, is invested in the full end-to-end process.

Ideally your team is introducing department specific technologies, and therefore your team should be involved throughout the technology lifecycle:

You’re likely already on your way to building a digital fluent team—you have first adopters, superusers, and digitally curious minds. But not everyone learns at the same pace and some people might be resistant to change, so you’ll need to evaluate person by person and team by team to determine the gaps to create learning pathways. It is important to offer the direction, tools and support they need to learn new concepts and apply the technology to their roles and the future career path they’re envisioning.

Ways to help build digital fluency among your team include:

When you incorporate more advanced digital processes into your business, you spark the larger effects of transformation. For team- or company-wide transformation to fully take root, management and leaders must support the shift in culture and align those shifts to business cases and outcomes.

While developing digital competencies introduces new challenges for workers and organizations, it also solves many pain points. According to a survey by Accenture, “digitally fluent organizations capture strong returns in innovation, people experience, and customer value.” By prioritizing digital fluency as an organizational objective, you’ll help enable your team to develop the right skills to innovate, grow and bring your business into the future.