It’s (still) the people, stupid

Technology will take your business into the future, but make sure you get the people piece right.

The smartest, most nimble and innovative enterprises will be people-led aided by technology

The world is changing in rapid ways but one thing remains certain: As businesses look to embed lessons learned in recent months and to build enterprise resilience for the future, they are due for even more transformation.

Many are evaluating existing and future technologies to see if they’ll be able to deliver the innovation at scale that they’ll need to thrive. However, technology should not be central to these transformation efforts; people should.

If the coronavirus pandemic has shown us one thing, it’s that people aren’t anonymous elements of a large organisation’s many layers. People are the organisation — its most important and powerful asset.

The pandemic, while undoubtedly a global crisis, also serves as a live demonstration of how human ingenuity, resourcefulness and diversity of experience — combined with the technological tools of the day — can create solutions, ideas and business models for the future, solving problems at scale and changing industries overnight.

The smartest, most nimble and most innovative enterprises will be human enterprises in which “business transformation” is in fact people-led transformation aided by technology: where humans sit at the centre, ensuring that technology and innovation meet genuine needs. In this way, a human enterprise drives both short-term and long-term value for the organisation and individuals within it, as well as across the wider business ecosystem for all stakeholders along the company’s value chain.

As the front line of any organisation, humans must be the ones driving the technology, assessing the value of the technologies being introduced and deployed to ensure long-term success and effective change.

Companies that place humans at the centre — while leveraging technology at speed and enabling innovation at scale — accelerate the value they create in the long-term, while making strides to reframe and thrive in the future. So, how do you build a human enterprise? There are four critical approaches.

Increase the humanity

Put the needs of people at the centre of strategy and decision-making. Organisations must ask questions that focus on the human implications of every decision, whether it concerns customers, employees or the wider communities within which the organisation operates. Research we conducted with Harvard Business Review found that companies operating with a clear sense of purpose, beyond just making money, outperformed the S&P 500 index by a factor of 10. CEOs are well aware of this: 73 per cent of the almost 1500 CEOs we surveyed across a dozen countries and 10 industries said they believe that having a well-integrated purpose helps their company navigate disruption, while 66 per cent were rethinking their organisation’s purpose because of the current disruptive environment.

Remove friction

Technology should remove friction and allow people to do their jobs, while enabling speed and agility. This means ensuring a culture of connectivity where there is trust, free-flowing ideation and the ability to collaborate seamlessly. Technology can also remove interpersonal friction, by helping to build trust and transparency — for example, blockchain and analytics can help make corporate records more trustworthy, permitting easy access for regulators and auditors that may enhance trust inside and outside the organisation. This is important; one study found that management transparency is directly proportional to employee happiness. And happy employees are more productive employees. Technology should also save employees time, freeing them to take advantage of opportunities for human engagement, as well as allowing people to focus on higher-value tasks.

Value inclusion

It is vital that businesses recognise diversity and inclusion as a moral and a business imperative, and act on it. Diversity can boost creativity and innovation, improve brand reputation, increase employee morale and retention and lead to greater innovation and financial performance. For instance, research from the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that going from no women in corporate leadership to a 30 per cent share could lead to a 15 per cent increase in profitability. A Cloverpop survey found that while teams made better decisions than individuals 66 per cent of the time, diverse teams outperformed individuals 87 per cent of the time. There are many other studies with similar results.

Deliver at speed

A human enterprise is organised around impact, not processes, and values agility over hierarchy — thus facilitating fluid, diverse teams that bring in the best creative thinking and can work effectively with technology to deliver faster innovation at scale. Ultimately, the benchmark for successful technology comes down to whether it’s helping the humans in an organisation do what they need to do. Businesses that want to continue to deliver value and help ensure enterprise resiliency in this time of rapid change should aim to become human enterprises — putting humans and their needs at the centre of their strategies, values, processes and operations, with technology serving as an enabler rather than a driver of change. Both the COVID-19 crisis and the global response to societal inequities and injustice have shown that focusing on people and their needs — both inside and outside organisations — can help ensure that companies consider the potential impact of business decisions on all stakeholders. A human enterprise recognises that transformation is a constant evolution, not a fixed destination.

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Dan Higgins is EY’s global technology consulting leader. Nicola Morini Bianzino is EY’s global chief technology officer. Copyright 2002 Harvard Business Review/Distributed by NYT Syndicate