Dell Technologies advised businesses to build a culture with empathetic leaders and prioritizing its employees
Last November 23, during the 2nd day of the CXO Innovation Summit 2022 organized by VSTECS Phils. Inc. together with its leading ICT vendors. Dell Technologies, one of the largest tech companies in the world, shared its findings of their latest Dell Technologies Breakthrough 2022 survey of Philippine respondents.
The Dell Technologies Breakthrough 2022 survey was conducted last year in 2021 garnered 10,500 respondents from 40+ locations across the globe and for the Asia-Pacific-Japan region we are one of the privileged country to be part of the survey.
The keynote presenter for the event was Mr. Ronnie Latinazo, country general manager of Dell Technologies who discussed the result of Dell’s Breakthrough 2022 survey.
“Most organizations around the world – including Philippines – realize the need to digitally transform, but they find digital transformation hard, and their people don’t always embrace change. This human-technology friction is only compounded by the pandemic; and what we end up with is businesses that are more digitally resilient, but many of their people are exhausted,” said Mr. Latinazo.
Businesses achieved a lot in short amount of time, but the effort has taken its toll as 73% say they don’t always have the motivation or energy to act on digital transformation in the workplace while 50% believe that its staff are wrestling with burnout and/or poor mental health that’s impacting project deliverables.
Next to STEM skills gap, a shortage of innovation-ready skills is holding organizations back as 75.5% said their teams lack either: people with a love of learning/curiosity, future looking people and people that learn from mistake.
Measuring readiness for digital change
To understand people’s readiness for digital change, Dell technologies grouped respondents into four benchmark groups: sprint, steady, slow and still. Where people are on the benchmark correlates with how confident they are to advance in this hyper-digital world. Just 10% of respondents are chasing innovation and trailblazing technological change and nearly half are generally resistant to change. Here are the results:
- 8% Sprint – Will chase innovation and trailblaze technological change.
- 55% Steady – Prepared to adopt technological change, selected by others.
- 36% Slow – Inclined to hold back and observe/deliberate.
- 2% Still – Tend to anticipate problems and resist proposed technology?innovations based on perceived risk.
Recognize that work is an outcome
Companies and organizations must provide employees with seamless and secure work experiences focused on better connectivity, collaboration and location equality for all, anywhere and anytime.
- 55% of all respondents are not yet experiencing a better life-work-balance.
- 91% of all respondents envisage the shift to distributed work would create a more inclusive working environment.
Meanwhile, employees would like their leaders to do more of the following:
- 52% would like their leaders to better empower them to choose their preferred working pattern and provide the necessary tools/infrastructure.
- 51% would like their leaders to provide greater clarity regarding an ongoing commitment to flexible working and the practicalities of making it work
- 48% would like to see their leaders better equipped to effectively and equitable manage remote teams.
As for secure connectivity, 31% of workers admit they have not substantially improved their security awareness/behavior after hearing about high profile/expensive cyber/ransomware attacks.
Build Your Breakthrough
The study also suggest how to move forward and shows opportunities for businesses to focus and keep pace with transformation, with breakthrough happening at the intersection of people and technology along three frontiers: Connectivity, Productivity and Empathy.
Connectivity
Businesses performed tremendous feats to connect, collaborate, and conduct business online during the pandemic. But they are not finished.
Around 82% of Philippine respondents (APJ: 78%; Global: 72%) say they need their organizations to provide the necessary tools and infrastructure to work anywhere (along with the autonomy to choose their preferred working pattern). In fact, they worry their people might be left behind because they do not have the right technology to shift to a highly distributed model (where work and compute are not tied to a central place but occur everywhere).
Productivity
People’s time is limited and there are now too few qualified candidates for open roles. To address these strains, businesses can delegate repetitive tasks to automated processes and free-up people to focus on enriching, higher-value work.
At present, 36% of Philippine respondents (APJ: 32%; Global: 37%) say their work is stimulating and not repetitive. With the opportunity to automate more repetitive tasks, 71% of respondents in the Philippines (APJ: 74%; Global: 69%) would look forward to learning new, sought-after skills and technologies, like leadership skills, courses in machine learning, or focusing on more strategic opportunities to elevate their role.
However, businesses with limited budgets are concerned they will not be able to advance their workforce and compete.
Empathy
At their heart, businesses must build a culture, modelled by empathetic leaders, that treats people as their greatest source of creativity and value.
Principles of empathetic leadership:
- Digital transformation should happen with them, not to them. Just 41% of employees believe their leaders tailor implementation of individual skills/aptitude for change.
- Putting the user-experience first. Half (49%) are overwhelmed by complex technologies and/or too much choice–too many solutions/too many settings to navigate
- Acknowledge learning differences. 43% say they need more time/support/incentives to change habits and learn new skills.
To end his keynote presentation, Mr. Latinazo points out to all the attendees that Dell Technologies is their end-to end technology partner in helping build its breakthrough. Dell Technologies can support companies/organizations to modernize work experiences, simplify its IT with a responsive and trusted technology designs applying empathy that put the end-user experience first.
To learn more about Dell Technologies visit their website: https://www.dell.com/en-ph
