Skills Needed For Tomorrow's Workplace
The skills needed for tomorrow’s workforce are unknown. Therefore, taking a reactive approach to learning and development is vital for an employer, in order to ensure that you create a productive and rewarding workplace culture, and to ensure that your business is successful. In order to stay on top of emerging trends and skills, employers need to stay in touch with the future. This is why research and development into your company culture is vital to ensuring the success of your business. In this guide, we will help you by outlining the key skills and insights into nurturing a productive culture and managing your business for success. Here is In Professional Development’s Guide to Grow your Business and Culture.
A Good Workplace Culture is Vital for Success
Attracting top talent to your company is very important, and retaining that talent is even more important. The best way to do this is to build a good workplace culture. The business culture creates the environment that dictates how the business is managed, and this is what ensures the failure or the success of the business.
Make Learning and Development a Priority For Your Business
In order to ensure that your business and working culture remains relevant and successful in an ever changing business climate, investment in learning and development is no longer treated like an optional add-on for a business. Learning and development is a necessity in the modern business climate, and as a result, it is becoming an increasing focus for many businesses who wish to be successful. In Professional Development’s Guide to Grow Your Business and Culture outlines some other reasons why learning and development is an important aspect for all modern businesses:
- Learning and development is directly linked to job satisfaction. Employees who feel that there are no opportunities for training in their role are much more likely to look for another role.
- According to a recent study by LinkedIn, the biggest influence on improving a workplace culture is by having opportunities to learn and to develop, and for all staff to have the chance to develop their careers within the business and to grow into more senior roles based on their skills.
- The same LinkedIn study states that employees who feel that their skills are not being put to good use in their current job are 10x more likely to be looking for a new job.
- By improving your workplace culture, you are ensuring the success of your workplace. Employee job satisfaction is not to be overlooked. In order for your business to be successful, you need to rely on staff that are motivated and satisfied within their roles. This will also ensure employee retention and less time and money spent on recruiting short term staff members.
- Progress your staff to benefit the culture of the organisation.
Don’t Underestimate the Power of Digital Transformation
Understanding digital transformation is important for business leaders in order to grow their business and to develop their cultures. Integrating digital technology can revolutionise a workplace culture, allowing technology to streamline processes, and to instill a culture of efficiency within the workplace. It encourages employees to try new approaches, to pioneer new systems and technologies, and to keep an eye on emerging trends. It is especially important for small to medium sized businesses and startups, by adopting a modern, forward thinking approach from the onset of a business, you ensure that you are managing your business for success from the first day. In the case of startups, time is crucial. Therefore, by saving time by adopting digital processes, you are maximising your success by carefully and strategically expending your employee’s time.
For larger companies, digital transformation is also important. Larger companies have usually been established for longer, and are set in their ways of operating. The view, ‘if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it’ tends to apply in these situations. However, by not undergoing a digital transformation they are standing still. If large organisations want to stay relevant in the modern world of agile small and medium sized businesses, they must adopt the same mindset and same approach to digital transformation.
Digital Leadership Programme - CMI Level 7
Our Digital Leadership Programme - CMI Level 7 is designed to help current and future leaders adapt to the challenges of a fast-paced digital environment. It will equip leaders with the skills needed to lead themselves, then translate that knowledge into leading others and forming effective team collaboration.
For organisations to successfully undergo Digital Transformation, it is important that the leadership team have the skills and confidence to make the right decisions.
Digital Transformation is the number one challenge facing organisations today. Staying relevant in a digital world is the number one personal challenge we all currently face. The Digital Leadership Programme will provide the tools, concepts and perspectives required to help you develop strategic responses to new digital opportunities and align your organisation for effective strategy execution.
Through attendance on this course you will become a digitally informed, empowered leader and know how to prepare and help your organisation respond more effectively to technology driven change.
Accreditation
The Digital Leadership Programme is a Level 7 accredited course aimed toward aspiring, newly appointed and long serving leaders.
The sessions are designed to support the delegates to achieve a recognised leadership qualification (accredited by CMI) should they wish to and will incorporate the assessment criteria to meet Level 7.
Session One: Day 1: Digital Transformation – Understanding the Digital Environment
- What is digital transformation?
- Why does it matter
- What does success look like?
- Barriers to success
- Digital Transformation Roadmap
- Disruption or Transformation?
- Understanding the business risks
- Types of digital transformation projects
- Key business drivers for digital transformation
- Emerging technologies and how they are used
- Gartner’s Hype Cycle
- Stages of transformation
- Where digital transformation fits within your organisation
Session Two: Digital Leadership – Becoming a Digital Leader
- Understanding your own business readiness
- Create a digitally ready culture
- Barriers to change
- Influencing stakeholders
- Stakeholder engagement
- Areas ripe for transformation
- Collaborative working
- Getting buy-in across the organisation
- Building teams for transformation
Session Three: Digital Strategy & Implementation
- Developing your digital transformation strategy
- Innovation & digitally disruptive business models
- Challenging existing business models
- Planning your digital transformation
- Running a digital project
- Executing your transformation
- Tools & methodologies for implementing digital transformation
- Review and measuring results
- Build your action plan
Why Equality, Diversity and Inclusion is Important for Modern Workplace Culture
Embracing and encouraging equality, diversity and inclusion in a workplace culture is important in order to be successful in modern business. This creates an inclusive culture within the workplace, and the ability to listen to and take on board every employees ideas. It also helps the business’ products appeal to a wide audience, as the insights of a diverse workforce will be key.
Here are the key benefits of an inclusive workplace culture:
- Increased ideas and innovation
- Different views and different perspectives
- Increased staff retention
- Higher creativity
- Increased productivity
- Better internal and external reputation
Strategic Approaches to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion - CMI Level 7
There is a moral, financial and legal business case for excellent practice in equality, diversity and inclusion in an organisational context. Ensuring it is led effectively at a strategic level requires knowledge, understanding, skills, behaviours and tenacity to keep pace with the momentum of change. Strategically, equality, diversity and inclusion matters.In our In Professional Development’s Guide to Grow Your Business and Culture, we explain why an understanding of the topic not only impacts on the success of strategic objectives but it mitigates risk and enables a culture of support and wellbeing to thrive. Our Strategic Approaches to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Programme - CMI Level 7 goes into these concepts in detail.
The aim of this 3-day equality and diversity training course is to enable senior leaders to develop an in-depth understanding of equality, diversity, and inclusion at a strategic level, and identify how to best integrate key objectives into the organisation. Leaders will have the opportunity to critically assess structural inequality within an organisational and societal context, discuss approaches to comply with legal and good practice requirements, and to appraise the influence of equality, diversity, and inclusion on strategic objectives.
In a consultative and collaborative environment, the diversity and inclusion course will enable leaders to develop strategic priorities for equality, diversity, and inclusion, develop change plans to integrate strategy into the culture of the organisation, and evaluate the outcomes financially and socially.
Accreditation
This Equality and Diversity course is supported by CMI Unit 715: Strategic Approaches to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. Participants will need to complete one 3000 – 4000 word assignment to achieve the CMI Level 7 Award in Strategic Leadership and Management. When taken in conjunction with other units, the qualification may be developed into a full Diploma.
Day 1 – Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Within an Organisational Context
- An introduction to understanding and promoting equality, diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
- Consider your own organisational context, and undertake a SWOT analysis of your own workplace, and identify opportunities to enhance awareness of equality, diversity and inclusion.
- Critically assess structural inequality within an organisational and societal context.
- Consider the strategic priorities for your own organisation, and how these relate to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.
- Discuss approaches to legal and good practice requirements for equality, diversity, and inclusion in an organisational context.
- Develop key strategic priorities for the implementation of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion within your organisation.
Day 2 – Delivering Real and Lasting Change with Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
- Identify barriers to facilitate change. Consider the role of structural inequality, unconscious bias and the societal context.
- Collaboratively develop strategies to overcome resistance to change, supported by legal, moral and financial factors.
- Identify key stakeholder groups, and assess their position on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.
- Consider the process of change, and how to engage with key stakeholders throughout this process.
- Identify methods to evaluate progress on the implementation of the strategy.
Day 3 – The Business Case for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
- In a consultative session, you will develop a business case for good practice equality, diversity and inclusion.
- Consider moral, financial and legal components of the business case.
- Present the case in an action learning environment, discuss and develop the strategy and the approach for implementation with peers.
- Identify approaches to embed the plan, supported by learning and development initiatives, coaching, et cetera.
- Identify metrics to support an impact assessment and communicate results.
Factors That Influence Company Culture
Business culture does form naturally and organically, and it will evolve gradually over time, to suit the evolution of the business. Every business has a culture, but not every business leader knows how they can influence the culture of their business. Many factors will influence the business culture, such as:
- New employees starting at the business
- Changes in management structure
- Internal promotions
- Staff leaving the business
- Increased financial success of the business
- Growth of the business
- Changes in the industry of the business
How to Implement Effective Change Within the Culture
In order to influence effective company change, a company needs to undertake a culture change initiative. For this to be successful, employees need to be rewarded and incentivised for fitting the new ideals of the business. In order to implement effective change within the company culture, employees should be offered training and guidelines, and in taking this on board the reward will be rewarded with incentives such as flexible working, employee benefits, bonuses and increased chances of promotion.
A culture change initiative should be introduced gradually, and the change needs to be coordinated company wide, and not on a departmental basis. The first step of introducing a company culture change is by introducing the clear vision for the direction of your business culture early on, and allowing it to be discussed within the workplace. Brief managers on how they can play their individual roles in influencing the culture change within the business.
Changing an organisation’s culture is a difficult leadership and management challenge. Outlining the business’ vision for the culture, persuading employees and engaging in storytelling to encourage the culture change is an important factor in culture change. Other useful factors to enable culture change involve:
Role Modelling:
This is an effective teaching tool that enables knowledge to be passed onto learners through demonstration, dialogue, communication and reflection between mentors and students.
Conversations:
This is important in order to facilitate culture change, as communication allows for the desired culture of the company to be promoted and encouraged through conversations.
Negotiation:
While establishing the desired culture of the business, negotiation with staff can be a useful tool to use. By requesting changes in behaviour from them, it is worth rewarding them as a result in order to continue to positively influence the culture of the organisation.
Strategic Planning:
Strategic planning is an important aspect to establish a culture. In order to establish a culture, strategic planning needs to be used to plan how this culture change will be implemented.
Decision-Making:
Decision making is an important aspect of applying a change to company culture. It is important to make strategic and informed decisions on what sort of culture the company desires, and how they will implement changes in order to achieve this.
Learning:
Promoting learning and development within the culture of the company will have an effective role in transforming the company culture. By promoting learning and development, the culture of the company becomes more productive and motivated to develop and improve.
Hiring:
Hiring is another one of the most important aspects of changing a company’s culture. Hiring new employees has a direct and almost immediate effect on the culture. Therefore, it is important that the business has an effective and rigorous hiring process, in order to ensure that new starters will have a positive effect on the culture of the organisation, and not a negative effect.
In Conclusion
In Professional Development’s Guide to Grow your Business and Culture has outlined a guide to the training that is available to you to assist you in growing your business and it’s culture, ensuring you create a positive working culture. We have offered you important strategies to implement effective change within the culture of your business, in order to grow the best possible company culture. We empower you to take the next step:
- Take a look at our Courses page to find a course that fits your goals.
- Learn more about the qualifications we offer and the ways they can benefit your career.
- Read through our blog for the latest updates on thought leadership content
- Get in touch with us on our Contact page to find out how we can enable you to achieve your professional goals.