In most organizations, digitalization skills are viewed critically. A Bitkom study shows that the majority of professionals do not consider their skills in the area of digitalization to be sufficient. This assessment is understandable against the backdrop of the sometimes excessive hype. What is somewhat worrying, however, is that in the same study, seven out of ten employees stated that they did not have time for further training at work. While in the past, digitalization was primarily focused on the areas of communication and offerings, in the future it will be even more about the entire business model. Those who don’t learn here or don’t have time for it will usually have to repeat the exam. We therefore take a very critical view of the postulate of simply learning in day-to-day work. You don’t have to repeat all the mistakes that others have made before you. We are all required to continue learning. Bill Gates, for example, apparently takes a month a year just to read and integrate the latest findings into his own thoughts and decisions. Improving skills is a high priority.
Agile Transformation
We offer comprehensive support on the topic of skills improvement as part of our Agile Transformation practice.
In the customer orientation model, customer insights are an organization’s most important resource and are closely linked to employee and partner insights.
Competencies are repeatable, knowledge-based, rule-governed and therefore non-random action potentials of an organization that enable target-oriented processes both in the context of planning future performance readiness as well as specific market supply and market processes. They serve to maintain the competitiveness that is considered necessary and, if necessary, to realize specific potential for success.
Competencies need to be managed and systematically improved at the individual, departmental, organizational and network levels. In the past, specific competencies were assigned to a certain department in the organization. From the development of marketing, the customer was assigned to the marketing department. The same applies to customer insights, which, if used at all, were the responsibility of the market research department or the online analytics, CRM etc. department. As customer insights are the basis for a customer-oriented organization, it is important to establish the acquisition and use of customer insights throughout the entire organization. Individual organizations such as Zalando have already taken this step. However, this requires continuous learning on the part of employees and the acquisition of central constructs of customer orientation. For example, we recommend involving employees from the logistics, IT or finance departments in co-creation workshops. This should help to directly mirror the requirements of logistics or IT with the needs of customers. The challenge is that important constructs of consumer behavior, such as the halo effect and latent needs, are often unknown. Statements from participating customers are then interpreted differently and can easily have a negative impact on further cooperation within the organization. I also experience time and again that survey results are not understood by many members of an organization. Important statistical methods, such as significance tests or regression analyses, which usually allow well-founded statements to be made about customer statements in the first place, are not known.
Improving skills
The improvement of skills is presented in detail in the book Kundenorientierung starting on page 320.
The endeavor of introducing the statistical basics while simultaneously interpreting survey results is usually doomed to failure. This challenge is confirmed by market research companies. As brands and offers are becoming increasingly similar, the differences are becoming smaller and smaller, making it more and more challenging to uncover significant differences between competitors. This means that much more training is required and employees’ knowledge of customer orientation needs to be kept up to date. Many organizations shy away from this path and have taken a shortcut in the past by introducing a key figure in the organization and presenting it to all employees as a central target figure. This can be a first step towards improving customer orientation and raising awareness. In addition to the pure key figure, however, the question immediately arises as to how this can be improved. This requires in-depth analysis. Without a common competence base in the area of customer insights, it will be very challenging to establish a shared understanding.
Competencies and their continuous expansion are important for improving customer orientation. It should be noted that the development and maintenance of competencies requires a sequence of different development steps. It is often not possible to abbreviate these development steps. Empirical studies show that continuous investment in skills leads to better results than doubling expenditure while halving the investment period. This is another reason why customer orientation requires time and systematic transformation. Competencies can be divided into four basic dimensions:
- Personal skills are the ability to be intelligent and critical towards oneself, to develop productive attitudes, values and ideals (self-management).
- Activity and action-oriented competencies are the ability to apply all knowledge, the results of social communication and personal values and ideals in a strong-willed and active manner, while integrating all other competencies.
- Technical and methodological skills include the ability to creatively master even difficult problems with technical and methodological knowledge
. - Social-communicative competencies refer to the ability to work together and engage with others on one’s own initiative, to cooperate creatively and to communicate
. Against the backdrop of co-creation and the increasing relevance of inter-organizational value creation, this competence is becoming increasingly important.
Against the background of self-management, each individual employee is called upon to tackle the improvement of competencies. Those responsible in the organization are required to set the direction and support the acquisition of additional skills. The organization is required to develop a competency model that is as specific as possible for each employee.
