Technology is changing almost every aspect of our lives – and with such a dramatic pace of change, it can sometimes feel hard to keep up. But when it comes to your business, can you risk falling behind?
The opportunities that technology offers are vast – particularly when it comes to the role it can play in employee motivation. At the most basic level, this can often relate to perception. People are increasingly aware that technology has the power to disrupt age-old business models and it is a growing threat to brands that fail to respond – think Blockbuster, a once vast video and DVD rental company that underestimated the enormous shift in how we consume media. In swooped Netflix, and Blockbuster vanished from our high streets. Similar disruption has occurred in almost every industry: Uber has put enormous pressure on traditional London black cabs for example, which had been slow to introduce payment by card – something we all now take for granted; and you only have to walk down one depleted high street to see the impact that online retail giants such as Amazon have had on traditional stores. The lesson here is clear – remain stuck in your ways, and you risk becoming obsolete. Importantly, your existing and future employees will know this too. Given the choice of working for a company that embraces technology, or one that seems to operate as if in the dark ages, and the increasingly digital-savvy pool of talent is only going to go one way.
So, it can help ensure your survival, and support your ability to recruit and retain talent, but in what other ways is technology changing how we motivate our workforce?