How
do you encourage and enable distributed groups of people to get the
most out of new digital technologies? Let’s consider a case study of how
DBS Bank in Singapore managed the transition to more distributed,
remote work over the past two years. [Disclosure: Scott’s firm,
Innosight, has provided advisory services to DBS in the past. And Paul
is currently an Advisor to DBS.] This case suggests three key tactics to
enable successful digital transformation: use technology to make
technology disappear, actively shape day-to-day behavior, and
systematically reinforce desired behavior changes.
1) Use technology to make technology disappear.
Paul
served as the Chief Data and Transformation Officer for DBS Bank in
Singapore for more than a decade. He led a team called “Future of Work”
that helps to accelerate innovation and drive technology adoption across
the workforce.
The
team seeks to use technology to create friction-free, human
experiences, where the technology itself disappears into the background.
Like most banks, DBS is very security-conscious. The rise of people
working from home in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic has brought new
security risks, such as the possibility of bad actors more easily taking
photos of screens, to use one example. Due to these concerns, DBS did
not allow most employees to access sensitive systems from home prior to
the pandemic. But with the increased need for remote work, DBS now uses
new techniques — some of which were originally created to combat credit
card fraud — to enhance the security of remote work, without
compromising the user experience. For example, DBS now places a “digital
watermark,” or a unique pattern, on each user’s screen. It uses
sophisticated artificial intelligence to detect unusual employee
behavior and has dramatically simplified the two-factor authentication
experience required to access internal systems. These largely invisible
background technologies allow employees to enjoy the same access to
enabling tools and sensitive information, wherever they happen to be.
Another
challenge brought about by the increase in remote work is getting a
handle on employee sentiment without as much face-to-face interaction.
To address this issue, the Future of Work team has built a model using
natural language processing algorithms to spot weak signals of employee
dissatisfaction in qualitative comments in regular experience surveys.
The model assesses employee sentiment and categorizes and highlights
patterns in qualitative comments. It features a dashboard so that any
department or team can view sentiment analysis and trends across
categories or drill down into word-for-word comments. This approach
enables leaders to have a fine-grain view on what needs the most
attention.
A
final example involves using technology to pinpoint internal tools that
aren’t delivering against employee expectations. As employees work in a
more hybrid fashion, they need a wider range of digital tools to help
do basic work tasks. DBS has more than 200 applications that employees
can use to do common tasks ranging from processing credit card
applications to completing online performance reviews. Just as consumers
rate games and productivity tools in Apple’s popular App Store, DBS
employees rate their internal applications. For any application that has
more than 100 users and less than a four-star rating (out of five
stars), the app owner must address the identified challenges. For
example, one app tracks the number of times employees open official
corporate communications to measure their effectiveness. A low app store
rating surfaced significant usability issues, such as frequent crashes
and a confusing interface. The team upgraded the app and introduced
training, boosting the score well above 4 stars.
2) Actively shape day-to-day behavior.
In our book Eat, Sleep, Innovate
(also co-authored by Scott’s Innosight colleagues Natalie Painchaud and
Andy Parker), we noted that a significant barrier to behavior change in
organizations is the inertia of old ways of doing things. Past
processes designed for an analog world can conflict with digital
technologies, leading to duplication of effort and significant employee
frustration.
DBS has a mechanism to deal with this problem called the Kiasu Committee.
Kiasu is local slang in Singapore, akin to the idea of the fear of
missing out (when people stormed supermarkets early on in the pandemic
to hoard toiler papers, locals would say, “Why so kiasu?”). The head of
Legal and Compliance chairs the Kiasu Committee, which takes the form of
a mock courtroom where any employee can “sue” the owner of a policy or
process that they feel is getting in the way of getting work done. A mix
of employees from a range of levels serve as the “jury,” collectively
deliberating over whether a change should be made. One of the first
decisions was to remove the need for physical signatures to approve a
proposal. The approach caused quite a ripple through the company and
gave DBS employees confidence that their issues would be heard and
addressed.
The
Future of Work team has also focused on addressing new problems that
arose with the rise in remote work, such as the “cultural decay” that
comes when connectivity and community fray due to factors ranging from
obvious ones (the lack of the ability to hold informal gatherings) to
more subtle ones (the lack of buffers between meetings inhibiting
informal human connection).
Digital
dislocation can drive cultural decay by limiting opportunities to teach
norms to new members formally, or, even more importantly, to reinforce
shared beliefs and assumptions in subtle ways. For example, newcomers
can’t watch longstanding, unstated rituals, like how people array around
tables during meetings, or observe which topics of conversation flow
naturally in the hallway, and which are avoided.
DBS
has developed specific rituals to address cultural decay. For example,
it now offers a formal multimedia onboarding experience for new
employees. The idea is to be very intentional about how DBS teaches key
elements of its cultural transformation to new employees. The ritual
builds off of a physical “wall of transformation” that DBS had in its
headquarters providing a visual overview with year-by-year highlights of
its transformation. The onboarding journey combines a digital version
of this story with a set of curated discussions with DBS leaders. Not
only does that provide a more complete picture of DBS’s transformation,
it lets new employees quickly “meet” a range of leaders in the bank.
Another
example is “meeting check-in.” Borrowing from agile development
principles, at the start of meetings, DBS asks people to pick a number
from 1 to 10 describing their state of mind. Anyone who doesn’t give a 7
or 8 has to explain why. Another approach is to ask people at the start
of meetings what percent present they are in the meeting or to ask, “Is
there anything that will prevent you being fully present at this
meeting?” creating opportunities for people to share humanizing factors
that build team empathy. Some departments augment the in-meeting ritual
with simple apps to regularly track and calibrate data.
The Kiasu Committee, the virtual onboarding ceremony, and the meeting check-in are all examples of what we call BEANs, shorthand
for behavior enablers, artifacts, and nudges. They combine a formal
behavior enabler (like a checklist or a ritual) and informal artifacts
and nudges (like a visual reminder) to drive behavior change. Our article “Breaking the Barriers to Innovation” provides a step-by-step guide for how to create BEANs.
3) Systematically reinforce desired behavior change.
Like
any data-driven improvement program, the Future of Work team has faced
its challenge. For example, it was natural for app owners to respond to
low ratings by getting defensive, challenging the validity of the data,
trying to hide bad news, or even gaming the system by submitting
anonymous positive reviews.
Approaches
that have the potential to give a louder voice to broader groups of
employees only work if there are reinforcing mechanisms to hear those
voices clearly and act based on what they are saying. More broadly,
managing the human side of digital transformation requires work to
systematically reinforce desired behavior change.
For
the Future of Work effort, that starts with connecting to an overall
effort at DBS to have a balanced scorecard that measures and manages its
transformation efforts. DBS also modified incentives to support its
overall digital transformation efforts. For example, the usage and
rating of a particular digital app directly impacts the performance
rating and bonus of the DBS leader responsible for that app.
Additionally,
DBS created a new governance system specifically related to the
employee experience. The “Employee Journey Council,” chaired by key
senior executives, discusses issues identified by employees such as the
responsiveness of the internal IT team and the burden of remote working.
The council then intervenes to improve the employee experience. For
applications that are missing their target threshold, for example, the
council scrutinizes progress against an identified improvement plan. DBS
plans to drive this governance mechanism lower in the organization to
further increase accountability.
DBS
carefully tracks and measures progress in its digital transformations.
The percentage of employees who said that they strongly agreed with the
statement that digital tools enhanced their productivity increased from
78% in 2019 to 84% in 2021. Positive sentiment measured with the
dashboard mentioned above has increased by 35%. And, specific to hybrid
work, a September 2021 dipstick survey found that 92% of employees said
they were satisfied with the technology that helps them work remotely.
While
the journey hasn’t been easy for DBS, rapid advances in artificial
intelligence and the availability of open-source solutions have
significantly simplified the ability to create models and back-end tools
to reduce the barriers to digital transformation. Following the tactics
in this article have smoothed DBS’s transition to hybrid work and
helped DBS continue to win regular accolades. Leaders at other
organizations can similarly accelerate their own digital transformation
efforts by using technology to make technology disappear, actively
shaping day-to-day behavior, and systematically reinforcing behavior
change. The payoff in the forms of higher engagement and improved
productivity is well worth it.
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