Steps to Financial Resilience and Growth Through Digital Transformation

Steps to Financial Resilience and Growth Through Digital Transformation

According to The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA), financial resilience is “the ability, from a financial perspective, to respond to changes in delivery or demand without placing the organisation at risk of financial failure.” (CIPFA.org The Importance of Financial Resilience).

Financial resilience is part of almost all conversations I’m having at the moment, whether that’s with local councils facing increased pressure from inflation or private enterprises planning for the future.

The current economic climate presents significant challenges for organisations across all sectors, particularly the public sector. Rising costs, budget cuts, and increased demand for services put immense pressure on organisations to find innovative ways to operate more efficiently and effectively.

At times like this, discussions around digital transformation or productivity improvement can be dismissed with concerns about financial investment. However, workspace optimisation may offer your organisation significant opportunities. You can unlock significant cost savings, boost productivity, and enhance employee satisfaction by rethinking and redesigning workspaces. 

In this post, we’ll explore how a framework supporting three steps of workspace optimisation can help you create a financially resilient workspace that is better positioned to weather economic storms, adapt to changing circumstances, and emerge stronger than ever.

The Benefits of a Financially Resilient Workspace

As well as the security gained through financial resilience, which allows for better financial management and budgeting. With financial resilience, you’ll experience other benefits, including: 

• Reduced Operational Costs: Through optimised space utilisation, reduced energy consumption, streamlined processes, and reduced waste.

• Increased Productivity: Optimised workspaces will ensure efficient workflows with reduced distractions and interruptions, empowering employees to work smarter, not harder.

• Improved Employee Experience: This will be achieved through enhanced well-being and morale and increased job satisfaction, which in turn leads to reduced turnover.

Continuous Improvement Through Workspace Optimisation

So, how will you benefit from digital transformation and the corresponding workspace optimisation without the traditionally hefty financial investment? We’ve developed a framework with three steps to consider.

• Stabilising: Initially, the focus is to minimise costs, reduce technical debt and eliminate efficiencies.

• Standardising: The next step is to streamline systems and processes while optimising your core operational efficiency.

• Optimising: Here, we want to enhance capabilities, elevate experiences and invest in innovation.

So, how will this help you as you develop your area?

Workspace Experience Leaders

• Stabilising: Reducing HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) costs and waste by 20-40% will make a huge impact. Integrating software with your building management system (BMS) will allow you to control the system predictively using data and forecasts. Something we explored in the post: Empowering Facilities Managers: A Roadmap to Intelligent Automation Success. 

• Standardising: Optimising your space utilisation through audits and implementing flexible workspace strategies will reduce costs. In our previous post, Plan Your Space Effectively With The Right Data, we looked at routes to achieve this. 

• Optimising: Prioritising employee wellbeing is essential. This may mean investing in ergonomic furniture, lighting, and acoustics to create a healthy and comfortable workspace, but it doesn’t have to. Maybe you’ll look to redevelop your physical workspaces to enhance opportunities for collaboration and community - as we’ve explored here in The Best Office Spaces: Great for Your People and Great for You. Or develop your hybrid working strategy - a subject we looked at here: Employee Experience: Who Benefits From An Employee-Centred Environment? Either way, the focus is on creating employee-centred workspaces. 

Digital Experience Leaders

• Stabilising: Reducing unnecessary spending on software is essential, and ensuring optimal device performance will also contribute to overall cost savings. In our previous post, we looked at how you can ensure you understand your digital costs and ensure employees have access to the right tools and training for their role: How Data Will Strengthen Your Digital Workspace Strategy. 

• Standardising: Low code will cut development costs by 45%, improving efficiency and increasing productivity; this allows development where costs and time investments might otherwise be prohibitive. Consider the (all-too-familiar) example of an Excel-based risk register, which is unsupported. This inefficient solution has limits on scaleability, but developing a new solution will never be the top priority. This post, The Truth About Digital Agility, looks at the benefits of developing new solutions with your existing infrastructure behind it.

• Optimising: Leveraging technology to streamline processes, reduce costs, and enhance employee productivity might include using AI to empower your people and improve your processes. We recently looked at this in the post Beyond Automation: The Strategic Use of AI to Boost Employee Experience, remembering that “Your AI solutions shouldn’t be designed to replace employees but to empower them.” 

Learning and Development Leaders

• Stabilising: Ensuring application adoption will drive standardisation, improve collaboration, reduce support needs for legacy systems, and maximise your ROI. Identifying digital champions and those who need additional support will accelerate this from the start. We looked at this process in the post: Strengthen Your Workspace Strategy. 

  
  

  This will enable collaboration with Digital Experience leaders to reclaim unused licences and reduce maintenance costs by approximately 50%. 

• Standardising: In the post Revolutionising HR: The Benefits of AI Automation for HR Technology, we looked at how AI can help teams by automating simple repetitive tasks, improving system integration, and ensuring better data capture. Streamlining systems and processes through the use of AI should not only improve productivity and employee engagement but encourage creativity and a focus on organisational culture. 

• Optimising: By leveraging technology to enhance learning and development through online learning platforms and virtual training, you can reduce costs and improve accessibility. Learning in the Flow of Work (LitFow), for example, not only improves productivity and engagement for users but also reduces the time they spend away from their traditional work tasks. This is something we looked at in this post, Learning in the Flow of Work: How to Support Your People Development Effectively.  

Driving Continuous Improvement With Financial Resilience

By applying the Stabilise, Standardise, Optimise framework across different areas of your operation, your organisation can achieve significant efficiencies while enhancing the workplace experience. 

Whether your particular concern is Workplace Experience, Digital Experience, or Learning and Development, you can adopt this approach in ways that cater to your own unique challenges and objectives.

Through targeted efforts to stabilise costs, standardise processes, and optimise capabilities, your organisation can build a more adaptable, efficient, and productive workplace with financial resilience. An organisation that is positioned for sustainable success.

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About the Author

I'm Terry Chana. I am an innovation strategist that connects customer, employee and brand experiences. My passion lies in building ecosystems to solve business problems by combining creativity and technology.