IDC says Asia/Pacific organisations continue to refine hybrid working practices and organisational culture to accommodate new ways of working that enhance productivity, security, employee retention and customer satisfaction.
Automated learning and low-no code tools will catalyse employees’ skills training and development and keep businesses to stay relevant in the digital-first economy. At the same time, frontline workers are expected to have more access to technology that allows them to design and implement automated processes.
In the book, Strategy That Works, authors Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi, noted that successful companies narrow the strategy-execution gap by committing to what they do best instead of chasing multiple opportunities. They also build their unique winning capabilities instead of copying others. In addition, they put their culture to work instead of struggling to change it and invest where it matters instead of going lean across the board. Successful companies also shape the future instead of reacting to it.
A gap exists when expectations are not met.
Setting the scene
Arvid Wang, the co-founder, Chairman and CEO at Laiye, describes the work execution gap as the divide between the work experience employees want and what employers can offer.
One of the outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic is the almost institutionalization of hybrid work arrangements, and in Wang’s opinion – the necessity of a digital workforce.
He posited that technology is struggling to provide for the needs and wants of organisations and their employees. “We believe it's imperative to help organisations close this work execution gap,” said Wang.
Priorities for 2023
According to a Gartner survey of CEOs, growth is the top priority in 2023. Asked how he sees the work execution gap impacting the ability of organisations to achieve growth, Wang says a strong workforce is needed to drive revenue growth and profitability.
He opined that many employees do not want to go back to work to the old way of work where the norm of the job is a menu of activities characterised as repetitive and boring.
“Work is the centrepiece of the problem here,” he added. “Nowadays, many organisations’ budgets are tied up in wages connected to repetitive tasks. These need to be automated using technologies like robotic process automation, intelligent document processing, conversation, AI, chatbots, etc.”
Arvid Wang
“At the same time, workers need to be upskilled with such digital tools to help them perform better, and more productively. They need to convert themselves to be managers and creators of the bots so that they can perform more engaging and productive morale-boosting activities,” said Wang.
He posited that the combination of the correct use of automation tools and the narrowing of the work execution gap, will mean lower budgets, and consequently profitability will start to surface again.
How to narrow this work execution gap
Wang believes that narrowing the work execution gap requires a new framework with both human workers and digital workers at the core.
The approach of implementing tools like customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning as well as office automation systems, he argues, has not delivered on the promise of a digital organisation – that of increased employee productivity.
“These implementations are just the beginning of the digital transformation. Now, if you want to drive productivity gains, you need to create a new form of a workforce that combines digital with the human workforce,” he proposed.
Having accepted this digital-human work approach to working, the next step is to operationalise this hybrid workforce.
“You need to upscale your employees with new tools, automation, and AI tools so that they can create and manage automation projects by themselves. They become the owners of the digital workers they created,” he added.
The third step in the process, he continued, is finding a provider that can provide ‘easy-to-use and powerful tools’ – a platform that allows developers, engineers, and business users to create strong digital workers to do those jobs in place of humans.
Introducing the work execution system
Wang says the work execution system (WES) has four elements that work as the ‘flywheel’ to allow better collaboration between human and digital workers.
It starts with an integrated platform or unified platform that companies like Laiye provide. He explained that the platform allows for the creation of tools and AI projects.
“We are already seeing a lot of standalone technologies like robotic process automation, intelligent document processing, conversation, AI, and even process mining. The platform we are offering combines all these capabilities into one single integrated platform to allow users to create an end-to-end automation experience,” said Wang.
He added that the other dimension is the work-related data which he calls the work metadata. He argues that organisations are sitting on goldmines of data. He believes that organisations have yet to tap into this data.
“For example, customer service department, you have all the conversations and interactions with customers. These can tell you the changing customer demand, tell you the imperfection of your product and service. You need to mine those conversation data to improve your customer experience and improve your product.
“You have a lot of documents internally. If you have a way to extract useful information from the documents, obviously you will be able to improve operational efficiency and customer satisfaction,” he elaborated.
He alluded to these different types of data as work metadata – the second dimension that the WES can leverage.
“The third dimension is about enabling workers with digital tools like automation and AI because, in the future, artificial intelligence will be democratised,” he predicted.
He argues that in the future, employees will automation tools will be driven by employees because they understand the business, they have the industry know-how to close the work execution gap by themselves.
“It's not the software company. It's not even the service companies,” he predicted. “In the ideal case, we give the power back to business uses. The citizen developers or the business users should be upskilled with digital tools. This is what we mean by enabled.”
Wang says the last dimension is an open ecosystem. He believed that the work execution system is not one company but an ecosystem of companies.
He acknowledged that this ecosystem comprises both a partner network and a vibrant, developer community. Laiye is but one company in this ecosystem of software companies and service providers.
“Today, Laiye has over 700,000 developers in our community who have used our product to develop all kinds of bots for all kinds of use cases. This number will only increase, and more people will be exposed to and benefit from it. The benefit of mastering such skills is the work execution framework,’ he concluded.
Click on the PodChat player to hear Wang describe in detail his recommendations for how organisations can narrow the work execution gap.
- What is a Work Execution Gap? Why does it exist?
- What is the impact of work execution gaps on the profitability and growth of a business?
- How does a business narrow the work execution gap? (do not focus on WES here)
- How/Why/When/where does a work execution system fit into the narrowing of the work execution gap?
- Is WES the only way to narrow the gap?
- WES is new. As in many new efforts, there is a high risk of failure. How does an organisation adopt WES while minimising the risk of failure?
- What is your recommendation to business/HR/Ops/IT leaders looking to narrow the work execution gap using WES?
