CHAPTER 6

ENGAGING THE ORGANIZATION AT SCALE

If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it.

—JESSE JACKSON

Ask any executive who has led an organization through a large transformation, and he or she will tell you that a company’s strategic vision is only as good as the people behind it. This remains true for digital transformation. As we showed with the example of Pages Jaunes in the previous chapter, creating a compelling digital vision is only the beginning of the journey.

Unlike incremental change, which can be achieved by a few people working on their own, transformation can only be achieved through the engagement of many. It is a commitment first made by leaders, then by a few champions, and finally by the critical mass needed to make the radical change happen. But what does it mean to be engaged? In our definition, when employees are energized to make the vision a reality, they are engaged.

Business transformation involves making important, sometimes disruptive, changes in how organizations get things done. Core organizational processes are redesigned, new technology tools replace old ones, new skills are developed, and new ways of working are introduced. Winning people’s hearts and minds through that process isn’t easy. As Sir Richard Branson once said, “Loyal employees in any company create loyal customers, who in turn create happy shareholders. The process sounds easy, but it’s not, and it has defeated some of the biggest organizations of the twentieth century.”¹ Employee engagement matters. And it matters even more to succeed at transformation.

Fortunately, engaging employees in organizational change is not uncharted territory. There is a wide body of research that explains how you can use the power of engagement to successfully transform your organization.² Some of this work puts people’s hopes and fears and other feelings at the center of the engagement strategy.³ Other work focuses on individual and team renewal as a key step in the transformation, or on achieving a psychological alignment and developing a capacity for collective learning.⁴ But all work points to one thing: engagement is foremost a task of leadership.

Digital technology brings another dimension: real-time employee engagement on a global scale. Blogs, Twitter, and digital video are helping leaders connect with their organizations in ways that mass e-mails or town hall meetings cannot. Executive bloggers can share a frequent, candid perspective on the state of the transformation, and digital videos help put a personal face on executive communications. Additionally, enterprise social platforms create a new breed of open, two-way organizational communication, where leaders and employees can discuss, share, and collaborate in real time.⁵ With digital technology, leaders have new powers to engage their employees in making change happen.

CONVIVIALITY GOES DIGITAL AT PERNOD RICARD

Pernod Ricard is a world leader in wines and spirits, with sales exceeding $10 billion in 2012–2013.⁶ It employs some nineteen thousand people in globally decentralized operations organized within six brand companies and eighty market units. The company is home to prestigious global brands such as Absolut Vodka, Chivas Regal Scotch whisky, Jameson Irish whiskey, Perrier-Jouet Champagne, and Ricard Pastis, the anise-flavored liqueur.

Created from the merger of Pernod and Ricard in 1975, the company has grown its brand portfolio with three transformative acquisitions—Seagram, Allied Domecq, and Absolut Vodka. Already leading the premium segment, the company has the ambition to become the global leader in wine and spirits. Pierre Pringuet, Pernod Ricard’s CEO, explained: “We’ve now posted thirty-eight years of growth. Leadership is our goal. We want to be the company that leads industry growth. But we also want to be the one that changes the rules.”⁷

For most companies, the combination of global complexity, a highly decentralized operating model, and rapid growth through multiple large acquisitions, is not generally conducive to building globally cohesive employee engagement. Yet employee engagement and culture at Pernod Ricard goes well beyond the corporate rallying cry. In 2013, an employee survey, carried out by an independent agency, showed that 94 percent of Pernod Ricard’s employees are proud to work for the group, and 87 percent would recommend their company—a full 10 points above industry average.⁸

But employee surveys are lagging indicators. Such employee engagement and sense of belonging does not happen by chance. What really drove such results? In the last few years, Pernod Ricard has invested heavily in its people processes and in engaging the workforce around its strategy and digital vision. Alexandre Ricard, deputy CEO, explained: “Our vision is to use digital as a game-changer for Pernod Ricard. It will provide us with direct access to consumers. It will give us more influence and unleash new dynamics in our relationships with our trade partners. It will also allow the company to empower employees so they can play a full part in this growth journey. And, a data-driven approach will underpin all three pillars of this vision.”⁹

To share this vision, the senior leaders used all available platforms—intranet, management seminars, and the company’s own internal TV channel (PRTV). Digital transformation was part of the challenge, and the solution.

Wiring Pernod Ricard to Face the Digital Tsunami

As a global group with very strong consumer brands and multiple distribution models, Pernod Ricard was facing the impact of digital technology from all angles. Customers were talking about the company’s products on social media and expecting more direct and engaging conversations with the brands. Retailers, wholesalers, and bars were experiencing their own digital transformations and facing new competition. Finally, employees, particularly those of the younger generation, were using more and more of their own digital tools in the workplace and expected the company to be more digital in its ways of working.

Acknowledging that digital technologies were transformative for the industry and the company, Pernod Ricard’s entrepreneurial culture responded. Several units started their own transformation journeys with a wide range of consumer-driven initiatives, from digital advertising to social media to e-commerce. The units hired new digital talent and experimented with new business concepts.

At the group level, however, the first major digital initiative was focused internally: how to get the company to openly communicate at scale. The company decided to implement a companywide enterprise social network. In a company whose culture is as decentralized as Pernod Ricard’s, wiring the organization was a prerequisite to share and scale successful initiatives across brands and markets. In addition, the most advanced digital units were able to support the less advanced ones, creating real “digital traction.” The platform objectives became strongly rooted around entrepreneurship, innovation, and getting the organization to work in different ways. With this, the company’s digital transformation started to accelerate. Alexandre Ricard explained: “Leadership is built on example. It is also built on an organization’s ability to adapt to tomorrow’s world. Digital has profoundly revolutionized … the way we act, live and work.”¹⁰

In light of the historic corporate motto, “Make a friend every day,” the company introduced its enterprise social network with the tagline “Share a new idea every day.” The platform engages nineteen thousand employees in a continuous dialog. The tool enables real-time data sharing, visual communication, mobile collaboration, and instant messaging on a global scale. From the initial decision through to test phase, the network took less than six months to implement. But the tool wasn’t the most important. What mattered was engaging employees to act as a global team.

Key to success was vision, leadership, and business orientation. CEO Pierre Pringuet explained: “In a group that is highly decentralized, it is essential to promote the sharing of best practices, for instance when implementing marketing or sales initiatives. We needed to create new interactions where they did not previously exist. This networking of collective intelligence has been instrumental to speed up the group’s digital transformation at every level of our organization.”¹¹

Pernod Ricard realized that without a strong top-down and bottom-up mobilization, change would not happen fast enough. The company started by engaging executives at the global and local level. After a period of training, more than 150 senior executives, including the senior leaders, became actively engaged on the platform. The project was reviewed regularly at the executive committee. But bottom-up involvement was also needed. To be successful and increase employee engagement, the enterprise network would need to be anchored in real business needs—helping people in their day-to-day work and making an impact on the company’s performance. Alexandre Ricard emphasized: “You don’t do digital because it’s fashionable. You do digital because it has a real impact on business performance.”¹²

To increase business focus, several use cases were defined at the outset—from innovation to brand marketing to business process improvement. The network has also enhanced internal communications and the deployment of new HR practices. Web conferences, or “coffee breaks,” have increased participatory dialogues with employees to refine and improve the introduction of new HR projects or ways of working.

Employees have also found new and unexpected uses for the collaboration platform. As a group of Pernod Ricard employees perused an airport duty-free shop while waiting for a flight, they noticed something odd about the packaging on the store’s Absolut Vodka display. They posted a picture of the display on the social network, tagged the company’s compliance group, and asked if this was the standard packaging for the region. Within hours, the compliance group was able to confirm that the display was counterfeit. And within days, the display was removed and corrective actions were taken.

But to scale employee adoption, Pernod Ricard went further. Governance, communication, and training were deployed across the firm. A digital curriculum was developed with “Pernod Ricard University” to raise the company’s digital IQ. The company leveraged its Millennial employees and identified early seeding-phase “champions” to evangelize other users. New roles, such as community managers, and new processes, such as content moderation, were created. Adoption was monitored through a scorecard with clear key performance indicators (KPIs) that measured both reach (the share of users who log in regularly) and engagement (the activity and contribution of users to the platform).

By 2014, Pernod Ricard’s enterprise social network had connected 84 percent of its worldwide employees. A quarter of this population was actively contributing, with some thirteen thousand connections daily—well above industry benchmarks.

Alexandre Ricard explained: “Communities that are created on the network are free from geographical, functional or hierarchical boundaries. Immediacy and discussion are now at the heart of relations between our employees, and have become essential in our relationship with consumers.”¹³

Accelerating Digital Transformation Through Co-creation

For Pernod Ricard, the implementation of a group-level enterprise social network created real value in itself by connecting employees and communities globally. But it was only a first foundational step to implement the company’s digital vision.

“With the first phase of our digital transformation,” Pringuet said, “we have connected the organization and transformed the way we communicate, work, and innovate. The second phase, the digital acceleration roadmap, will help us to expand and accelerate this process. It will make us go faster [and] further and become stronger in our quest for market leadership. And its success is highly dependent on bringing our people with us on this journey.”¹⁴

To tackle the digital challenges facing its brands and markets—content, commerce, social media, consumer insights, and internal-process digitization—the company needed new digital capabilities, new ways of working, and other new behaviors. To achieve these desired changes and foster buy-in, the senior leaders decided to engage the employees in the co-creation of a digital acceleration roadmap.

The company mobilized a wide network of people called digital champions, who were driving digital change in the company’s brands and market units. The digital champions engaged their teams locally and leveraged their local experience and customer knowledge. Pernod Ricard, through that process, managed to prioritize the initiatives that would have the biggest global impact on its brands and its business performance.

Today, the company is in full-speed implementation of its roadmap. Practices developed in corners of the world are being documented and readied for large-scale rollouts to other units. Individual brand units are developing and running strategic initiatives on behalf of the whole company. Headquarters is also playing its part, identifying synergies and providing the shared capabilities required by the local business units. This is engagement in action.

None of this could have happened without leadership. The digital vision is being driven and sponsored at the highest level in the organization. Nevertheless, transforming day-to-day business practices at scale remains a challenge. Digital-savvy top managers and digital champions at every level must continue being digital change agents to engage their nineteen thousand colleagues on this exciting journey. Pringuet explained: “We have started a ‘digital movement’ that affects all aspects of our company and requires all of our people to be engaged in the program. Digital transformation will continue to be one of our key challenges in the coming years. We will only win together.”¹⁵

ALL HANDS TO THE PUMP

As the Pernod Ricard story shows, and as we described in chapter 5, before you engage employees to make the vision a reality, you first need a compelling vision—one that energizes employees to do more than just show up at work in the morning. Leaders need to do their job of leading—setting clear expectations for what needs to change. But it doesn’t stop there. Digital champions within an organization can have a great influence on showing employees what digital transformation means to the business. By setting clear expectations and engaging digital champions in your efforts to communicate a transformative vision for your company, you can reach a critical mass of believers that can shift the organization to a higher level of performance.

But as a leader, how do you practically engage the organization to take an active part in the larger digital transformation journey? Our research identified three critical managerial levers to engage the organization.

First, connect the organization—using digital technology to wire the organization so that everyone gets a voice and can collaborate. Second, actively encourage open conversations to facilitate strategic dialogue and create the opportunity for everyone to play a role in advancing the vision. Third, rather than design the solution and attempt to get buy-in afterward, crowdsource your own employees to co-create solutions. When done well, the combination of these levers can accelerate digital transformation.

Connecting the Many

Digital Masters understand how new digital channels can drive global employee engagement and transparent conversations to solve business problems. Communication goes beyond blast e-mails. Wikis, micro-blogging tools, and enterprise social networks, also referred to as Enterprise 2.0 tools, have received much attention lately as key collaborative tools to wire up organizations.¹⁶ Enterprise social platforms open strategic conversations to everyone in an organization. They foster cross-functional problem solving at global scale. Through these social platforms, business discussions become visible to everyone in the organization, driving greater transparency and accountability for what needs to be done. They also give leaders the opportunity to publicly recognize contributions and reward engagement. You need to find ways to connect your organization to make this global dialogue possible. Pernod Ricard decided to use an enterprise social network as the glue for a highly decentralized business model. Other companies have chosen different tools, like their existing intranets. The tool is not important. What matters the open dialog and the engaging of the organization to deliver the digital vision.

Consider the case of a large US-based medical technology company. Facing a major strategic shift, the company convened three hundred of its executives and top managers for a three-day workshop to develop its plan of action. Over the course of the session, video teams captured the discussion and the decision making. They also recorded short digital debriefs with executives at the end of each session to explain how the meeting was progressing. These digital clips were then streamed in near real time to the entire company. According to one attendee, the streaming produced a great sense of openness: “You’re broadcasting, ‘Here’s what we’re working on, day one’ back to their organization. So when [executives] walk out of the meeting, people know that they were there and what they were working on. And all of a sudden, the organization has an expectation of follow-up.” Reflecting on the transparency created by the new digital coverage of the event, the president said, “Last year, we walked out of the meeting and told the organization what the strategy was. This year, we’re walking out of the meeting, and they already know.”¹⁷

Engaging the Wider Conversation

To encourage open dialog and increase adoption of new ways of working, executives have to both lead by example and engage a sufficient coalition of employees to get the change under way. Employees who are encouraged to contribute to the digital transformation will have a higher level of engagement and, in turn, will become better employees.

One of the best ways to lead an organization into embracing new technologies and new ways working is to act as a role model. Role models set expectations for the rest of the organization and give employees an opportunity to interact directly with senior leadership. For example, senior executives at Kraft record podcasts (dubbed Kraft casts) and make them available to employees with iPhones and iPads. These messages help keep employees in the loop on the latest corporate strategies and branding initiatives.¹⁸

Executive presence on digital platforms also helps create a pull effect for user adoption. Consider Coca-Cola. The iconic company is one of the top twenty brands on the planet for engaging customers through social media.¹⁹ Coke’s corporate website is now a digital magazine.²⁰ Customers can develop their own personalized blends of Coke products through the company’s smart Freestyle vending machines. From the outside, Coke appears to be a leader in using digital channels to interact with its customers.

But Coca-Cola encountered challenges when it tried to use digital tools internally to improve collaboration among its employees. The company introduced an enterprise social platform in an effort to transform its self-described “secret formula” culture, but struggled to sustain user engagement. In a 2012 interview, global innovation director Anthony Newstead noted, “After an initial surge of activity, [user activity] slowly drifted back down.” Newstead and his team investigated the cause and discovered that weekly posts from executive leaders were enough to attract other employees and sustain an active community. “With executive engagement, you don’t have to mandate activity.”²¹

But not all leaders feel comfortable going online and showing the way. In addition, sometimes the strongest ambassadors for digital transformation may not come from the company’s most senior ranks. Employees on the front lines can be the most effective vehicles of promoting change in an organization. Influential supporters can help recruit others to your cause. Many Digital Masters proactively identify true believers within the organization and position the devotees to share their knowledge and enthusiasm with colleagues.

In some companies, these digital champions assume formal organizational roles. Nestlé, for example, introduced its Digital Acceleration Team (DAT) in 2012. The team, based in Vevey, Switzerland, serves a dual purpose as Nestlé’s “center of excellence” for digital know-how, as well as an incubator for its digital champions. High performers from Nestlé’s many brands around the world join the team for an eight-month assignment, where they work together to deliver targeted digital projects such as developing mobile strategies for emerging markets or developing recruiting strategies for digital talent. At the end of their rotation, the team members return to their home countries and brands to share their knowledge and skills. DAT alumni now form a global network within Nestlé, and individuals know where to go to leverage global practices in their home markets.²²

Other organizations take a less formal—but no less effective—approach. To overcome the digital divide between generations of employees, several companies have established reverse-mentoring programs. L’Oréal, for example, launched its digital reverse-mentoring program as part of a campaign to raise the digital IQ of its employees and brands. The company paired 120 young, digital-savvy workers with more-senior management committee members. Each partner brought a different set of skills to the partnership. Younger workers shared their knowledge of digital channels and shopper behaviors, while senior managers shared insights from their years of experience in the company and industry. Together, the teams worked to identify key trends and understand the behaviors of new customers.²³ Individually, each partner walked away engaged from the experience with new skills and new insights.

Taking Advantage of the Crowd

Engaging the wider organization to chart the path to a company’s digital future is healthy. The value of employees goes beyond their day-to-day jobs. Digitally savvy companies use crowdsourcing techniques to create solutions for their most strategic problems. Crowdsourcing gives employees a voice to actively engage in debates and share their views and ideas. With the rise of a more digitally aware working population, companies that don’t learn how to engage with employees in a collaborative way will lose out.

Pernod Ricard, as we’ve seen earlier, took this step of employee collaboration to co-design and prioritize its entire digital transformation roadmap, to great effect. Other companies have crowdsourced employees to improve aspects of the customer experience, make operations more efficient, or co-create new ways of working. Still others have used crowdsourcing to institute a continuous flow of innovation. The potential applications are endless, as are the benefits when crowdsourcing is done right.

Crowdsourcing your employees can sometimes solve very pragmatic operational issues. French-based telecom provider Orange suffered from a common operational problem for operators: cable theft. The impact on operations was significant and costly, involving line downtime, field-force interventions, and other problems. Through its internal employee crowdsourcing platform, called idClic, Orange identified one employee who had developed a mobile app that enabled a much faster resolution of this problem—fast alarms to the police, clear process steps, and intervention management. The result was one million euros in savings per year for Orange on this idea alone.²⁴

Engaging your employees can also be fruitful for collaborative innovation. Companies have traditionally been very specific about who engages in innovation, assigning responsibility according to an employee’s skill or role. In a digital world, this sort of segregation is no longer desirable.

EMC, for example, harnesses the collective power of its global employee base to drive innovation in its products and operations. The $21 billion company is a leader in enterprise storage, security, virtualization, and cloud technology. But staying on top of digital innovation in the fast-moving high-tech industry is a strategic imperative.

The company began running regional innovation contests in 2007, and their popularity quickly outpaced the small innovation team’s ability to deal with the thousands of submissions received. The team needed a more scalable process for evaluating ideas. And it needed a way to ensure that good runner-up ideas didn’t fall through the cracks.

A year later, the company launched an online platform to help manage the idea submission and review process.²⁵ A contest participant could post an ideas where it was visible to the entire global community. Community members around the world could then comment on each idea, provide feedback, and vote for their favorites. Since participation in the community wasn’t limited to just those who had submitted ideas, anyone in EMC around the world had the opportunity to contribute.

The contest committee presents a People’s Choice award to the idea that gets the highest popular vote each year. Senior EMC experts choose the other awards, but the social input helps the judges see potentially great ideas to consider and helps the innovators improve their idea submissions. In 2010, nearly four thousand EMC employees submitted ideas, commented, or voted in the company’s annual innovation contest.²⁶

Today EMC organizes the global innovation process on a calendar-year basis. But EMC’s innovation process required more than a technology platform. Executive engagement was critical. The corporate chief technology officer (CTO) created a small internal unit to manage the contests, foster sharing across regions, and coach winning innovators in making their ideas a reality. In addition, the heads of major business units can sponsor tracks in the innovation contest. But to do so, they must agree to choose the winner from a list of finalists and provide seed money for winning teams.

Global employee engagement was also critical. EMC announces winners at an internal innovation conference. Each year, on a chosen day, employees in sites around the world gather for a day of activities that include executive speeches, videos, and guest speakers in addition to award announcements. Groups in Ireland, Israel, the United States, and other locations build their own schedules for the day, while attending global sessions remotely. The success of the corporate innovation contest has spawned local contests around the world. For example, people in China conduct their own award programs and share the winning concepts with the rest of the company. This engaging innovation process has now become part of EMC’s ways of working.

The benefits are apparent, too. One winning idea was a consumer product that enables individuals to create a virtualized copy of their desktop that they can carry to any other PC. Another fostered a brand-new architecture for cloud-based and “internet-of-everything” product development. But the benefits extend beyond winning ideas. At a recent innovation conference, several sponsors stated, “I am funding the winner, but I’ll be happy to champion the other finalists if you need me.” And senior executives cite a palpable feeling that the process is creating more innovation, collaboration, and employee engagement across the company’s business units. Employees feel part of a more unified global organization.²⁷

Some companies even go beyond just crowdsourcing their own employees. They engage external partners and customers in an open innovation process.²⁸

Procter & Gamble, for instance, has embraced an open innovation philosophy with strong drive from senior leadership. The aim was to bring a constant flow of outside innovations while internally developing the gating processes to manage ideas from inception to launch. Former CEO Bob McDonald explained: “People will innovate for financial gains or for competitive advantage, but this can be self-limiting. There needs to be an emotional component as well—a source of inspiration that motivates people.”

To support this effort, P&G developed its Connect + Develop portal several years ago. The portal’s aim was to invite everybody—customers, suppliers, competitors, scientists, entrepreneurs, and others—to submit ideas. P&G not only publicizes what it knows and what it can do, but also highlights what it needs. In addition, the company doesn’t restrict itself to product development; it’s looking for new ideas in everything, from trademarks, packaging, and marketing models to engineering, business services, and design. Bruce Brown, P&G’s CTO, said: “Connect + Develop has helped deliver some of P&G’s leading innovations, and is critical in helping us deliver on our renewed growth strategy moving forward.”²⁹

In 2010, P&G extended its program to become the partner of choice for innovative collaboration and to triple the contribution of Connect + Drive to the company’s innovation development. P&G has expanded the program to forge additional connections with government labs, universities, small and medium-sized entrepreneurs, consortia, and venture capital firms.³⁰

Accepting the Sometimes-Rough Waters of Engagement

So are we facing a new engagement holy grail, thanks to digital technology? For all its merits, new technology also has its implementation challenges. Familiarity with digital technology varies widely across employees. Even digital-savvy employees don’t always adopt new tools naturally. New ways of working can become a threat to the conventional way of doing things, for instance, taking responsibility away from middle management. Often, new digital practices create a more open, collaborative, and transparent work environment. But not everyone will be comfortable, especially those who owe their success in the company to the old way of doing things. One executive said, “We have a very tenured organization and an organization that has a whole lot of experience of doing things the way they have always been done. Trying to motivate people around changing that is a real challenge.”³¹

Many companies face some version of these challenges when the conversation around digital transformation, itself, goes digital. We’ve seen many companies overcome these challenges effectively.

A gap is growing between workers who are familiar with digital tools and those who are not. A digital divide is opening up. Millennial employees are avid users of technology in their personal lives and are underwhelmed by the enterprise tools available to them at work. One executive commented, “These people coming into the company, mid-twenties, late twenties, even early thirties, they do everything electronically. They say ‘Come on, I know the company is over a hundred years old, but our IT capabilities don’t have to match the age of the company!’”³² Meanwhile, their more tenured counterparts still face a steep learning curve to adopt digital ways of working. This gap is leaving executives with the dilemma of alienating either group in the communication channels they choose. It needs to be actively managed. Business leaders need to work hard to use the best communication tools they have and encourage both groups to break their habits. For example, younger workers can be encouraged to pick up the telephone—or even walk to a colleague’s office—when a serious misunderstanding is a distinct possibility. Similarly, older workers can be taught the benefits of participating in company blogs or other social media to get themselves out of a creative rut.

Digital tools can increase transparency in an organization. Generally, this is a good thing, but it can also increase resistance to change. Some managers may perceive increased transparency as an affront to their autonomy or a threat to their role in the company. Other managers engage in the conversation proactively. Some will eschew the conversation entirely, and others will openly challenge the use of digital platforms. Because managers are often on the front lines of introducing change into an organization, their level of engagement should be a serious concern for executives.

When a global company we studied implemented a new reporting platform as part of its transformation, many managers balked. Before the new platform, sales managers produced reports that were based on the managers’ own internal systems. They controlled the numbers that were reported and the level of detail provided. The new system collected revenue and profitability data centrally and produced reports in a standard format. According to one executive, “That kind of transparency—they’re not used to it, so there was an initial pushback.”

Executives at the company made it clear that the new platform was reinforcing the idea of operating as a single company and that sales managers retained decision-making authority for their respective units. The leaders also made a conscious effort to frame benefits in terms that mattered to the managers. They showed the sales managers how the new information in the reports could help the managers sell more, minimize inventory holdings, and eliminate the hours spent building spreadsheets each month. Looking back, executives credit the new reporting platform with creating significant cultural change. “It’s no longer a blame game,” said one executive. “We live and we die together. The only way we’re going to survive is if we’re transparent and open to communication with each other.”

ENGAGING TO MAKE YOUR DIGITAL VISION A REALITY

Digital Masters create a compelling vision of the future. They know where they want to go and what success will look like once they get there. But they also understand that digital transformation requires the concerted effort of the whole organization to turn that vision into reality. New processes, new business models, and new ways of working will affect people throughout the organization. Many leaders in these companies walk the talk. They embrace new digital channels not just to set a good example, but because these tools make these executives more effective leaders of change. Employees also use technology to stay more connected to each other. They make active contributions to the conversation around digital transformation and collaborate with their peers to solve its challenges.

Whatever leadership role you play in digital transformation, engaging your employees should be high on your agenda. Experiment with new ways of communicating, collaborating, and connecting with your colleagues, and engage them in a two-way conversation. Lead by example to champion new digital ways of working, and recruit other true believers to join you. Engage the critical mass of employees that is needed to move your organization to a new level. And focus on the conversations that are critical to solve business problems, not the tools themselves.

Some will remain skeptical about new technology and its role in the organization. But engaging the organization is not optional if you want to succeed with your digital transformation—it is necessary. Conversely, when used effectively, digital technology can help you engage employees at scale.