This article is written by Yvonne Rinkart, UK public servant and Apolitical Insider Fellow, and edited by Andreea Bocaneala, communication advisor for a Romanian MP and Apolitical Insider Fellow.

Covid-19 has fast-tracked digital transformations in a wide range of sectors. In line with these developments, the digitisation of government has been pushed to previously unseen levels, and this also requires the acceleration of internal digital transformation projects aimed to equip staff to continue to deliver public services during lockdown.

As a business transformation project officer at Southwark council, I saw some of these changes first hand. Building on my experiences as a junior public servant, I reflect on the day-to-day realities of supporting the implementation of an accelerated digital transformation. While I do not contribute to strategic decision-making about digital transformations, I contribute to their implementation at a practical level every day as I support colleagues from across my organisation in adapting to new ways of working.

In this article I build on these experiences, to describe the challenges Covid-19 poses to digital transformation as I experienced them, and I review the skills public servants such as myself can employ to meet these challenges.

The challenge

Digital transformations are about much more than technology.

While investments in devices, digital tools and technologies can be made quickly given the right resources, the workforce and culture needed for their long-term adoption can only be grown and developed over time.

When talking about your digital transformation, it’s worth remembering that the changes they bring may have been part of our day-to-day experience for months, but your colleagues may be encountering them for the first time

Yet, during Covid-19, new digital tools and technologies often had to be introduced quickly. These newly accelerated transformations often affect more colleagues with different needs and abilities, who use a wider range of devices in a greater variety of ways of working, and they need to be delivered in a shorter span of time. In this context, not losing sight of the “people side” of digital transformations is a particularly important challenge.

Skills to meet the challenge:

Nevertheless, we are well placed to meet these challenges. Research by the Local Government Association shows that the 21st Century Public Servant already plays new roles and applies new soft skills.

Covid-19 has pushed us to get serious about embracing these new roles and applying these new skills to support our digital transformations.

In my work at Southwark Council, I have found myself applying three key skills to support the “people side” of digital transformation — communication, empathy and problem-solving.

1. Use empathy and emotional intelligence: Public servants have seen significant changes to their ways of working through Covid-19, and our digital transformation programmes may ask colleagues to embrace even more change. Now is the perfect time to apply your emotional intelligence consciously and practice empathy. Indeed, in the digital space, this has even evolved to become Digital Emotional Intelligence, that is the ability to use emotional intelligence in an interconnected, digital environment.

Practically, this means listening carefully and practising empathy as we are interacting with colleagues as well as paying attention to your own feelings in the perfect digital transformation storm.

2. Communicate consciously: Good communication is key to engaging colleagues in any kind of  transformation, and it’s particularly important for digital transformations where it helps speed up implementation, avoids frustrations and smooths the way towards adoption of new ways of working. These are key enablers of transformation success.

On a practical level, this means brushing up on your communication skills, and considering how they can be modified for a digital context. When talking about your digital transformation, it’s worth remembering that the changes they bring may have been part of our day-to-day experience for months, but your colleagues may be encountering them for the first time. It’s best to avoid alienating “technobabble” and rather highlight the similarities between old and new ways of working to give your colleagues starting points for getting comfortable with new tools and technologies.

3. Review your problem-solving capability: Problem solving is perhaps the most common skill I have been practising since the beginning of lockdown and I have learnt that there is more to it than you may think. Given the new complexity of accelerated transformations, understanding and solving problems has become more central to implementation of transformation. With more colleagues, technologies and devices involved all at the same time, the range of problems we solve every day has increased significantly. Indeed, the situation may call for new creative solutions and we should ensure that all members of our digital transformation teams are empowered to think outside of the box.

Our next challenge is to use our emotional intelligence, communication skills and problem-solving capability to nurture the “people side” of transformation

On a practical level, it is worth keeping in mind that problem solving can be a challenging and emotionally involved process, especially in the context of accelerated digital transformations. Therefore, we need to invest more time into defining each problem, identifying its cause, and determining the best response. This requires both the emotional intelligence to distinguish between the problem at hand and the emotional response it may provoke, and communication skills to share understandings of the problem and the solutions.

What’s next for digital transformation programmes?

Public servants have learnt important lessons from lockdown, and it is encouraging that transformation leaders in London feel hopeful and positive about their transformation programmes. Indeed, local government has been said to be potentially “the greatest beneficiary” of digital transformation, when mobile technologies are used to improve productivity to compensate for overstretched budgets.

As we are settling into the “new normal” of working from home, we are getting used to the new tools and technologies which help us keep in touch with our workplaces. Our next challenge is to use our emotional intelligence, communication skills and problem-solving capability to nurture the “people side” of transformation. The problems Covid-19 challenges us to solve may be more complex than those of “ordinary” digital transformations, but we are well equipped with emotional intelligence and communication skills to meet them. — Yvonne Rinkart

(Picture credit: Unsplash)