The world saw a shift in work organization and culture when workforces from across the globe irrespective of verticals were brought together by the Industrial Revolution of the 1700s and the renewed policies of globalization in the 1900s. The changing tides such as globalization and technology gave rise to several transnational companies. As far as we were concerned, we were delegating work. Little did we know that we would be creating a community that would serve any entity/ customer/ client apart from its area of the establishment. Today, the entire world is a potential marketplace. To access and establish businesses in various sections of the world is a top priority for companies.
Shift from product focused to customer-focused operations has surged the requirement on global workforces that can cater to various customer demographics. Creation of these global workforces brings in avant-garde perspectives and processes that increased not just the effective productivity, but mobility and agility of service as well. The concept of global workforces began with a large set of operations being decentralized to appropriate knowledge centers. This enabled organizations to make use of tons of local knowledge and understanding to speed up sales, marketing, and other service processes.
Digital era has seen world shrink to the extent possible.Geographical divide, time zone differences, cultural and language differences are reducing. The differences are set to diminish as the workforce in a digital era begin to develop a more inclusive, collaborative and a virtual framework to work together as a team. The tools and technologies also aid in ensuring effective collaboration and standardization are possible.
In the digital era, the important qualities that the workforce should possess are also changing. One of the key areas to focus is how to make the maximum use of data to enhance business value, facilitate customer delight and reduce operational expenses. It also becomes important to use the right set of tools to help and mature the data fabric. As the business scenarios also change, the objectives have to be clearly understood. There is more emphasis on understanding the business rather than technology.
Global digital workforces
The other major concept that is being discussed and focused about is work-life integration. As the global digital workforce gets more collaborative in nature, there is need for overlap among the global teams which may extended work hours and high amount of virtual connects across team members. This leads to taking work to home and home to work concepts which can only be solved by proper work life integration. Personal connects are done to build more rapport across the virtual teams. The team also tend to become self-organizing with respect to work-life integration, for example – flexible working hours, split working hour between office and home for allowing overlap with the rest of the global teams. Organizations are also encouraging employees to have a good work-life integration by providing necessary infrastructure such as noise cancelling headsets, only laptops to ensure proper work-life integration.
Harnessing the right local digital talent becomes an important variable in such a setting. India is the largest playground for sourcing digital talent across industries. RPA, IOT, Animation, data engineering, advanced analytics, product development, AI , agile and defining customer experience are some of the areas where talent availability is high. India is also one of the most sought-after talent hub for any organization who are building digital teams to drive digital transformation.
Digital workforce is a new breed of teams who focus on global workforce as one team. The tools and technology also help in bringing the teams together. There is reduction in cultural, socio-economic, lingual, cultural and geographic divide in a global digital team. The teams also exhibit good diversity in workforce and aim to achieve high results. There is also good focus on work-life integration in such teams.