Time and technology have both taught us that inclusive change is a popular idea for a reason – it’s key to the success of transformational initiatives, especially if driven by the right IT insights.
As we’ve seen over the last two years, change is both more rapid and more frequent than ever before. Businesses are welcoming new technologies, changing ways of working, and transforming long-standing processes seemingly in the blink of an eye.
Taking root at the heart of transformation is the idea of inclusive change, which seeks to address removing barriers to accessibility and diversity to the benefit of all involved. Its presence makes for an interesting discussion around the overlap between people, IT, and a business’ evolution. As such, there’s no doubt that, as our working world continuing to evolve, inclusion will only become more important as time goes on.
The Role of Inclusive Change
Digital transformation is nothing without inclusion: from the Microsoft solutions that make the workplace accessible to employees living with disabilities, to the technology underpinning our hybrid world, it fuels some of the most important change discussions.
Considering the benefits of inclusive change, this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Back in 2015, McKinsey reported that businesses considered to be ‘diverse’ outperformed their contemporaries by up to 15%, due to better employee satisfaction, more creative and varied innovations, and the ability to encourage organisation-wide change through open forums.
Elsewhere, the removal of barriers to accessibility allows businesses to hire more widely, improve engagement, and meet the working expectations of both customers and employees alike. People are, after all, at the heart of any business – and inclusive change management puts them at the heart of transformation too.
Scaling the Mountain with Insights
Achieving truly inclusive change is a big hill to climb, however, and businesses rely on insights to help them stay on track. With that information to hand, they can better understand the impact, success, and uptake of change management initiatives, as well as empowering their teams within an inclusive, hybrid context.
To do that, they need to access some key analytics:
- Where people are working: Understanding the success and impact of hybrid working
- How they’re working: Measuring collaboration, adoption, and usage
- What tools they’re using: Can they identify areas of reinvestment? Are there resources to be unlocked?
- How effective those tools are: Do they need to optimise tooling for a better experience? Can they?
Unfortunately, this information is typically disparate and deeply embedded, requiring a significant investment of time and resources to surface it manually. Suddenly, the hill becomes a mountain – but it’s not unscalable just yet.
Using Insights to Unlock Resources
Using a tool such as Surveil – whose AI-driven deep analytics can pull together key information from across the Microsoft environment, quickly and easily – businesses can simplify their hunt for insights, saving significant time and energy in the process.
Once extracted and visible, the insights can influence inclusive change management initiatives on multiple fronts, including identifying areas of improvement across security, identity, and adoption, or supporting the cultural initiatives that remove accessibility barriers by unlocking resources and offering reinvestment opportunities.
The result is simple: rather than being an intangible, aspirational aspect to transformation, businesses can confidently realise inclusive change across all departments. Both employees and employers can then reap the benefits of greater accessibility and diversity, confident that they’re seeing the full picture of how their change initiatives are unfolding.
There’s Still More to Say
The conversation around inclusive change management is ongoing. Already though, organisations can choose to make a productive contribution simply by better understanding their own business, its technological estate, the data within it, and how it relates to inclusion and people. How easy that is depends on the tools at your disposal, which will make all the difference.
Interested in supporting change management with insights and resource unlocking? Get in touch to speak to a member of our team about all things Surveil and digital transformation.
