Every leadership team on the planet is talking about digital transformation – but the workplace is strangely missing from most of these conversations. One without the other is a recipe for disaster.

Digital transformation has become a mainstay of buzzword bingo – a phrase people throw around with little or no meaning. If you stop to ask around the office, I'm sure you'll get a bunch of different and conflicting definitions.

It's why many leaders think that investing in a shiny, new IT system is enough to transform them into a digital business. But that's just automation, not transformation.

The truth is that, despite the name, digital transformation is primarily about the people within your business.

We're living through the fourth industrial revolution. But history tells us that technology alone is never enough to deliver meaningful change. It requires a shift in processes and behaviour.

As digital turns products and services into commodities, people are your most critical asset. They'll be the drivers of change, or barriers to it, depending on how well you've brought them along on the journey.

HR owns your employee relationships. As your business goes through significant change, HR's role is more critical than ever to ensure your people buy into the process.

Not the Process Police

Most companies used to look at staff as a necessary cost of doing business, and HR was the process police, working to minimise the damage people could do. But, in a digital world, where you need to get the best out of your people, HR needs to see them as a critical business asset.

Your people are at the frontline of digital transformation. If they don't understand what it is and why it's happening, they're not going to support it. You only need to look at the panic around artificial intelligence, and the fear about robots taking jobs, to see what happens when people aren't bought into change.

Design thinking is one way to put people at the centre of changing processes. If a new digital tool will take 40 per cent of the workload from a staff member, HR needs to think about how that extra time is best used to enhance their selling ability, provide a better customer experience or produce a better product. On the topic of thinking outside of the box, my recent article, Innovative companies think differently about people, explores this in more detail.

People want to know the ‘why' of their work. They want to understand the purpose behind your business and, if you don't get the human factor right, they won't help drive towards your business goals.

The Family Dinner Table

So how do you get your people across digital transformation? It's not rocket science – you just need to communicate with them.

This is a conversation HR should own and it needs to be treated like a family conversation around the dinner table.  You need to treat them like you would a customer. Barking orders at your staff won't deliver the changes you're hoping to achieve.

This isn't really hard but it is brave. It means letting go of rigorous controls that have been in place for many years and really opening up your business.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said it best: “It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.â€' Your people are there to do the right thing – you need to give them the freedom to do their jobs well.

This also means giving them the right tools to manage their careers too. It's why our software is designed to give autonomy and power to your workers, not your HR department.

If you want to attract the right people and get the most from them, you need to be a coach, not a dictator. And this has never been more important than with digital transformation. But to do this well, HR needs to stop being the police department and start treating employees like valued customers.

About the Author

Marc Havercroft is COO & Vice President Strategy, SAP SuccessFactors. He brings more than 20 years' experience within the future workforce strategy and transformation helping clients adapt their HR strategy to meet the opportunity of the new digital world and the future workforce needed. He has worked across industries from financial services, telco, energy, media, digital social, to public sector, with many of his solutions honored with industry awards.