The Critical Skill Organizations Need, But Many Are Overlooking
By: Steven Hopper
Tags: Leadership, Motivation, Work, Business, Data

The Critical Skill Organizations Need, But Many Are Overlooking

And three ways to develop it

Photo by Mike Kononov on Unsplash

The next industrial revolution is upon us as robotics, automation, and artificial intelligence disrupt every industry of the economy. We’re already seeing glimpses of the future—wearable technology, autonomous vehicles, drone delivery, connected supply chain, and smart farming. With these tools, companies are transforming into digital businesses powered by ever-growing amounts of data.

COVID-19 has accelerated these digital transformation efforts as companies have had to adopt new tools and processes to stay relevant while also protecting their employees and customers.

Even before this acceleration, however, many companies were struggling to fully achieve their digital transformation goals and of course many face even more challenges as their teams work remotely.

Why?

While there are many reasons to explain this gap, one of the biggest reasons is clear: digital transformation is not about the technology; rather, it’s all about the people.

After all, what good are these new technologies or customer experiences if the organization doesn’t have the people to implement and leverage them to their full potential?

That’s why one of the biggest organizational skill gaps and therefore a key barrier to any digital transformation success is data literacy.

“Data literacy” as a concept means understanding the fundamental aspects of data — from creation to transformation to application in a business context — and being able to communicate with others using data.

“Learning to ‘speak data’ is like learning any language. It starts with understanding the basic terms and describing key concepts.” — Gartner, 2018

Unfortunately, most businesses still believe that data literacy is only a necessary skillset for data and analytics roles. But poor data literacy across other roles in business and IT will manifest into miscommunications, lost productivity, and unrealized business value.

If people all across the organization can’t speak data, it’s going to make it difficult to successfully implement any technology solution or drive business decisions through insights and analytics.

In fact, a recent report on the Human Impact of Data Literacy shows that data-literate organizations are more likely to convert leads into customers, more likely to retain customers, and more likely to grow profits.

Calculating the average return on investment in data literacy for the companies in the study, this equates to an increase of approximately $500 million in enterprise value.

So how can organizations create a more data-literate workforce and ultimately achieve their digital transformation goals?

1. Infuse data into daily work

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One of the best ways that people can start learning data right away is by using it as often as possible.

Promoting a data-driven culture starts at the top. Leaders should talk about the company’s goals by using metrics and dashboards to show the actual performance by the facts and figures. They should also reinforce these in their communications, whether written or in meetings and presentations.

“Speaking data during everyday interactions, from board meetings to team calls, begins to set the tone for the new mode of communication,” said Valerie Logan, Research Director, Gartner.

It’s important that senior leaders set this tone, because they communicate their organization’s priorities through their behavior. Only after senior leaders are aligned and model how to use data in their daily work can the data-driven culture permeate all other levels of the organization.

In order to go beyond communication, the next way to use data every day is for leaders to support the growth of their teams and individual employees through data-driven goal setting.

While goal setting frameworks always sound simple enough, most companies still fail to successfully drive or measure the right outcomes.

The biggest reason? Leaders simply try to do too many things, too quickly.

A simple, yet powerful formula to overcome this problem is by using OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results. OKRs are a framework to set quarterly performance targets (objectives) and define the few important metrics that will demonstrate success toward achieving these targets (key results).

When done well, one quarterly objective with three key results can help ground a team’s or an employee’s day-to-day work in data, which produces actionable insight and instant feedback.

For example, perhaps a company has the objective to “grow sales by 2% this quarter”. The key results of this could look different by role, but for a sales rep might be something like 1) gain 5 new customers 2) grow sales in one specific product by 5% and 3) create a targeted cross-selling plan as a sales teams. With these key results in mind, the sales rep can come up with daily tasks to accomplish these goals and track progress toward achieving them by reviewing the data on a regular basis.

In practice, the challenge for organizations is how they hold each other accountable to these goals and incorporate data in ways that are motivating and fun, rather than threatening and stress-inducing.

Using data for the purposes of growing employees makes learning data more personal and rewarding while at the same time benefits the organization as a whole as people start to shape their work every day using the power of data.

2. Offer and incentivize data training courses

In order to reinforce a data-driven culture, it’s important that leaders emphasize the value of data skills by offering free and easily accessible learning opportunities so employees can increase their data literacy.

Major tech organizations like Salesforce and Amazon are already spending hundreds of millions of dollars to provide technical training programs as well as e-learning certifications to their employees.

Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of worldwide HR, recently commented, “The most consistent thing we see that’s changing is the need for some level of technical skills in any job.”

According to the Human Impact on Data Literacy report,

“Organizations need to recognize that the exponential growth in data usage has accelerated far beyond the skills and confidence of the employees required to use it. Only 25% of employees felt fully prepared to use data effectively when entering their current role.”

As technology continues to shift the way people work, data literacy will become more and more important across all areas of the business.

Since this shift is a continual journey, employee training should integrate learning into everyday work and reinforce a growth mindset to evolve and adapt as technology changes. For this reason, training should be quick, relevant to the employee’s task at hand, and fun to complete.

Most important to driving adoption and reinforcing the data-driven culture, leaders must offer incentives and reward people who increase their data literacy. These rewards further highlight data as a priority and keep people motivated to continue with their personal growth.

People are any organization’s biggest asset, so ensuring that the people have the right skills is critical for any business to be successful. For this reason, organizations must provide both training and incentives that promote data literacy, as these are sound investments for staying competitive in a quickly changing business landscape.

3. Drive change with data as the guide

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Due to rapidly-changing technologies, it’s also critical for all roles within an organization to develop “digital dexterity,” or the ability to make business decisions and take action based on data.

Large, well-established businesses must now think and act like startups.

This means breaking down traditional silos across the organization, democratizing data for wider use and application, creating cross-functional teams to solve new business challenges, and running data-driven experiments to test new solutions.

“People are finally realizing that the ability to analyze information is no longer just the role of the IT or data scientists.” — Jordan Morrow, Global Head of Data Literacy at Qlik

Leaders should encourage hackathons or proof-of-concept workshops to promote curiosity, agility, collaboration, and innovation — all characteristics of a data-driven organization. These kinds of exercises allow people to look to data for answers, but also become open to new ideas and solutions.

And these concepts aren’t just for customer-facing products. Leaders should also promote these tools for improving the internal employee experience. The only condition to implementing permanent changes? They must be supported by data.

This is how leaders can align the culture to the expected outcomes of their digital transformation initiatives and become a truly data-driven organization.