Challenges

I am a member of human resources department, facing the challenges for the upskilling the workforce  to meet the future of work for digital transformation. Our Clients have more demanding, they mostly in  the digital age and they would like the insurer to change into digital as well. We have the clear vision  and mission for digital transformation, and we need to upskilling the current workforce to start aware,  then trained to meet the future work requirement, as it is less costly than hiring all the talents we need  externally.

Selections

I have used the tool of Storytelling to put our employee and their experience front and center, and  listen to them along their learning journey. Employees are busy with their current schedule and  sometimes need to prioritize the learning to close the skill gaps for the current role, so they are under  pressure and struggle to have time for upskilling. So they need to have the awareness and then being  empowered to have the intentional learning skill. I have spent a lot of time speaking with them and  finding ways to inspire them to start learning. I use their feedback against the context of my story to  better understand their interest and thought processes. I use these information to develop different  strategies to try and find a way that works for them so that they start learning to well-prepared them for  the future works.

Application

I have a story about using Storytelling. In discussing the new digital transformation strategy and what  changes in the work and the way we work, I was trying to let the employees recognized that there were  a lot of new concepts/ terminologies, but the time for being ready to implement new way of working  will come very soon as other countries in the Asia regions had started, and it will be few months our  country would be the next country to implement digital projects. I have tried to divide the employees  into several groups and having the appropriate learning targets for each of the groups. For the seniors  leaders, they need to embrace the changes toward digital transformation and just need-to-know about  new ways of working so that they can support and empower the team. For the employees who will be  involve in digital projects, they will need to be trained so that they can work in agile team. For the rest of  the organization, we need them to be aware of the changes, so their learning should be simple so that  they can be inspired.  We have the Town Hall to share the stories to the mass, and workshops to share  the stories to leaders.

Insight

During a workshop, there is a leader who said that he is too busy to learn. I have asked him to share his  opinions and recognize that there are too many new concepts/ terminologies so that he can’t  understand and link to the goals for digital transformation objectives that we are aiming to. I have  thanked him and recognize that learning speed and capability will be different by each person, and we  need to give them the right timeline for completing the learning. In addition, I realize that our company  need to give employees time for upskilling, so I have taken note and plan to discuss the idea of learning  hour with our CEO.

Approach

This tool is helpful for me to prepare the communication plan. Previously I used to focus on what to do  but not think ahead of stories to get audiences more buy-in on the projects/ changes.

I am planning to apply this tool for further projects of transformation the workplace, where people not  work full time in office, people in work in an open space, meeting room with digital board so that people  can send information written on the board to their email…

