Your current employee experience determines future customer loyalty
How you treat both employees and customers right now will ultimately be what folks remember. It will drive loyalty, or it will drive churn.
In 1969, there was an era of unprecedented development in technology, science and research — it was the year that humans successfully landed on the moon. With the grand computing power of a pocket calculator. As humans, it’s in our very nature to stay curious and question — what is our purpose? Why are we here? Are we alone?
Questions around time, space, and life itself have gleaned much scientific, philosophical, and metaphysical debate.
As the human race evolves and hyper-modernization takes place, projects that are created to study these areas reflect the human ingenuity. We’re driven by some intrinsic, internal need to use our creativity to help future generations. Technology has been a perfect aid in enabling this.
What is human ingenuity: HI defined
Human ingenuity is how humans, as a collective, consider, invent, and test innovative ideas to solve challenges and answer questions. It’s the manner in which we both create and transform society. Human ingenuity also includes considering the consequences of our collective actions, and how our decisions today will impact future generations.
Innovation enabled by technology is redefining our lives; our capabilities and expectations are being reset in every walk of life. While we all agree that evolving high-tech has created new potential for everyone, it’s human ingenuity (HI) on which true transformation rests. An organization’s quest to lead and innovate, nurturing its human creativity, and human ingenuity will be its greatest strength in the future.
In 1965, Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuit boards had doubled each year since their inception. His hypothesis — that this rate of expansion would continue into the foreseeable future — is popularly referred to as ‘Moore’s Law’. It’s a great example of human ingenuity, and encapsulates the break-neck pace of evolution in processing power.
In every new generation of technology, machines with processing power can do significantly more than what they did previously. Each advance in processing power has generated entirely new products, applications, solutions, and interfaces. But, despite these advances, the truly transformative force in our world has been human ingenuity. Technology is simply the enabler.
Similarly, while technology enables more leeway for innovation, transformation itself is ultimately driven by human application.
The challenges in harnessing HI
Although most agree that we need to value expertise, experience, and innovative thinking, there are challenges in doing this successfully.
While technological breakthroughs in the form of AI and machine learning are multiplying in scope every day, human up-skilling largely remains a comparatively slower process.
To truly innovate and lead, organizations need to emphasize empowered creativity among their employees. The effects of an engaged and innovation-focused workforce will be felt not only in internal efficiencies, but also in the solutions and services delivered to market.
Looking inwards beyond traditional models
Structure creates form in an organism — but flexibility allows it to exploit its environment. This is equally true of organizations.
Emerging technologies, processes and approaches are allowing workforces to collaborate as never before and a far more agile, proactive, and collaborative association between employees and functions has become possible in a modern organization.
Connectivity and processing power are enabling human insights and creative inputs to converge into a sum greater than their parts.
It’s important to remember that innovation is often inherently disruptive. Finding a balance between structure (enabled by technology), and creative disruption (driven by human innovation) — is critical to an organization achieving its optimal potential. A good first step would be to look inwards to enable creative processes to function effectively.
Organizations can achieve this by looking at the following:
- Leveraging Creativity: identify and engage the problem-solving and innovative potential of your workforce.
- Enabling Collaborative Processes and Feedback: Individual brilliance is great but you can get even more from creative collaboration. Creation of platforms and processes that allow innovation and ingenuity to thrive is central to the success of organizations.
- Identifying Expertise: Identify and empower apparent as well as unconventional expertise. No source of innovation should be left untapped. The non-expert can often generate a transformative idea missed by the experts and it’s important to give avenues of expression to all creative input.
Enabling external synergies
So, how do you put this into action? A great example here, is when you’re considering how you can leverage path-breaking technologies — such as AI — to enhance your business. A few steps to take would be:
· Infusing human thinking: How will you humanize your solution or offering to make lives more meaningful?
· Making purpose a human endeavor: Technology itself is agnostic in ethics, vision and purpose. But proactive human engagement is the basis and lifeblood of path-breaking innovation.
· Transfer of capabilities: What are the core strengths of your workforce? Are you able to think through and see how these capabilities will be reflected in your external business?
· Platform scalability: Are you supported by a technology backbone that can scale with your creativity? Can it help you reach out and achieve?
The defining feature in our quest for greater efficiencies, higher profitability and unique market presence will be human creativity. At the end of the day, every human is a creator and explorer — and as technology leaders, it’s an intriguing time for us to embrace and celebrate this.
