Too often, digital transformation is defined in terms of technological change. But real digital transformation begins with the mindset and culture of the people driving the change.
People, not technology, drive change
In order to create lasting change, innovation and value, it all starts with the people and the need to instill a digital mindset. Business transformation executives will want to know, how to do that? How to create a culture and employee mindset that favours innovation, when humans are generally resistant towards change?
As a practical guide to successful digital transformation, KPMG defines four key digital mindset aspects as follows:
- Courage to act/challenge: this encourages the notion that everyone is a leader
- Connecting end to end: this mindset leaps across silos, leading to cross-organizational synergies and new solutions that can add value
- Growth mindset: welcoming flexibility, agility, and rapid change
- Everyone is an innovator: anyone should be empowered to generate ideas that shape the organization’s outcomes
An organization that truly embraces these principles is likely to see a vast leap in productivity, and even its business model. By nurturing a digital mindset, over the past couple of years Telin has moved from focusing on relatively generic connectivity solutions to offering a range of industry-leading solutions that are digitalizing and transforming our customers’ businesses. How did we build the right digital culture at Telin?
Creating Digital Champions
At Telin, we start with the premise that everyone can be a digital champion. Everyone has the potential to come up with ground-breaking innovations. To ensure fertile ground for ideas, we first make sure that everyone has a chance to have their ideas heard.
Create non-hierarchical working systems
Telin has adopted an Agile Working System, instead of a Waterfall System, which is common in many tech companies. Why? This system gives Teliners more ownership and encourages engagement.
Unlike Waterfall’s linear model, Agile breaks down projects into many small phases (sprints), allowing for fine tuning and testing of each phase as it is done instead of having to wait until the entire project is finished to test it. This means that Teliners working on Agile projects are empowered to refine, test and improve in each sprint. As a result, each member is challenged to come up with problem-solving ideas, which can be discussed and escalated in daily scrum or weekly squad updates.
Supportive leadership
All Telin leaders are expected to support and push their team to explore, come up with out-of-the-box ideas for execution and output, and encourage their teams to casually speak their mind and brainstorm ideas. In addition, top leadership actively recognizes contributions and good ideas from employees, some of which have turned into flagship products.
The right working environment
Telin has actively broken down barriers and silos, to create a fun, engaging and challenging agile working environment. Seemingly silly activities like the CEO serving a surprise lunch to employees have helped get the message across that everyone is important and has a say.
More structured activities include the creation of cross-functional squads to encourage communication and new ideas, and employee competitions to come up with great business ideas for Telin.
The result?
Well, over the past few years Telin was able successfully evolve into a digital solution provider for many of our customers. In 2020 alone, Telin’s digital customer-based segment grew by over 4x while Telin's Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) reached 81.4%, 6% above the industry average. This growth was fueled by employee-driven innovations such as NeuTrafiX, a groundbreaking Pay-As-You-Go public exchange platform that enables digital trading of Voice, SMS and Virtual Number interconnects.
The secret sauce? An agile digital mindset and agile work environment, that has enabled Telin to share the benefits of digital transformation with our customers.
Learn more
We hope you enjoyed this glimpse into Telin’s culture! Visit https://telin.me/AgileWorkingSystem or email us at marketing@telin.net and we can chat about how best to move your business forward. Stay safe, stay healthy, stay productive and connected!