Create appealing conditions

The Bankinter Innovation Foundation experts discussed the need to create appealing conditions that drive a competitive, effective future of work for all profiles involved. Their recommendations in this regard include:

 3.1.- Adapt to a new generation of workers

Drive key differentiators for a new generation of employees: 

• True leadership that leads by example. 
• Being part of a corporate culture that supports universal, demanded values. 
• Working in a trusted environment
• Having flexibility to choose among projects.
• Learning and growing constantly, working in projects and peer-to-peer learning and mentoring.
• Rotating or participating in projects across several countries (international locations) to learn to adapt, flexibility, empathy, cultural awareness and knowing customers.
• Developing soft skills through teamwork and building trust.

 3.2.- Digital connectivity commitment

Culture: The entire organization, including top management, must be tech-savvy: the possibilities, challenges and difficulties of Blockchain, Cloud Computing, IoT, etc. must be broadly understood. 

In addition to that, all employees must be equally committed to the values and the purpose of the organization. 

The journey towards better digitalization: 

1. Supporting open innovation across departments and with stakeholders: suppliers, clients, ecosystems, clusters, community, etc.
2. With organizational flexibility, working per projects.
3. Enabling teams to choose the digital platforms that best suit their projects.
4. Efficiently transferring knowledge in a technology-driven process.
5. Dedicating quality time to learning and collaborative learning.
6. Defining the metrics to measure all of the above, to support follow-up and optimization.

Grounds for the proposal: Inspired by the Founder Friendly Labs (FFL) way of working, a startup accelerator for seasoned tech professionals, created by startup founders from Stanford and the MIT. 

 3.3.- Digital Intelligence companies

Digitalization is not about applying technology to do the same things; it is about transforming the way we do things enabled by technology:

• The intelligent digital transformation goes beyond a superficial digital transformation: one must understand the complexity, the ambiguity, the available tools and the cultural and mindset shift needed. 
• An environment that encourages digital transformation, rather than imposes it, drafting a clear road map with resources, infrastructure, knowledge-transfer, priorities, and a clear incentive system. 
• The objective is to reduce friction, creating an agile, flexible organization that leverages data analytics and AI-driven decision-making. 
• It is important to create an inventory of non-digital practices and locate “blackholes” of digital transformation. 
• Being digital means doing things at any point in time and anywhere: at the best moment and in the best place, internally and externally. 
• And after the digital transformation? Reducing friction, converging digital and physical until they are undistinguishable. 
• After the digital transformation, we get to a phygital organization, one where physical and digital interweave through its operations and customer facing, in its customer experience. 

Grounds for the proposal: Stripe is an example of a digitally intelligent company, a Fintech that offers Software as a Service (SaaS) to process payments and application programming interfaces (APIs) for e-commerce websites and mobile apps. 

“Being digitally intelligent does not equal being a cutting-edge digital company, rather, it means applying digitalization to fulfil our purpose and goals.” 

Future Trends Forum expert

 3.4.- Being the choicest organization for professionals

We must have a meaningful purpose. 

If a company wants to be the organization of choice for employees, it must make it explicit in its purpose, not just to employees, but also freelancers, experts and collaborators in general. 

High quality leadership is the second pillar. Leaders must be perceived as good people. Millennialsand the Z generation want to choose the company and their boss. 

Freedom of opportunity must be offered.

Innovative ways of working must consider creating age-diverse groups, fighting ageism and any other type of discrimination. 

The Future Trends Forum experts propose Blockchain to conveniently assess task and project evaluation, contributions from professionals and make financial compensations through Smart Contracts. 

Grounds for the proposal: The ecosystem of freelancers, suppliers, outside teams and coordination tools created by Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an interesting reference. Another interesting example is Founder Friendly Labs (FFL) way of collaborating and connecting talent with tools and resources. 

 “We must apply the same user experience (UX) design principles to design the employee experience, making their lives easier, healthier, safer, more productive and fulfilling“.

Future Trends Forum expert

 3.5.- Attract with Trust and Openness to appeal talent

The key is to generate mutual trust: from the organization to professionals and back. 

Diversity is key to boost talent. In order to hire more diversely, new types of questions must be asked, and the most unusual points of view must be noticed. 

We must be aware of the fact that the nature of work has changed and has new attributes. We need to apply technology at the service of the best professionals, enabling them to develop their creativity to the fullest, work in teams in new, more flexible, agile and productive ways. For example, the use of data science and artificial intelligence in digital, collaborative platforms enables the automation of less valuable tasks. 

Grounds for the proposal: Regarding the generation of mutual trust, the report Trust in the digital age offers some interesting ideas. It is the outcome of our previous think tank at the Bankinter Innovation Foundation.