3 Principles Behind Building Your Future-Ready Digital Team

As the competition for talent keeps getting fiercer, companies need to make sure they tap all available opportunities to bring in and foster digital talent and expertise.

Companies are facing a big challenge in building and sustaining effective, future-ready digital teams.

A finding from Accenture Interactive’s recent “Organizing for Success” report indicates just how serious this issue has become, with nearly a third of companies not satisfied with the skill sets of employees in their digital organizations.

So what are companies and their leaders to do? I’d like to share three important principles companies should follow. These are things companies often easily overlook or sometimes adhere to only halfheartedly when building and sustaining digital teams.

1. Identify Your Needs Beyond Today And Tomorrow

Though most business leaders know better, hiring decisions overall are often motivated by existing needs rather than future demands. This behavior will backfire twice as badly in the digital space. Why? Because change is guaranteed—and it’s guaranteed to happen fast. So think beyond the status quo and understand where the landscape is headed in the next one to five years.

The ability to hire based on forward-looking digital trends is what separates the wheat from the chaff. Current market leaders are filling their ranks with talent that will allow them to be successful in the next phase of the digital transformation.

According to our study, companies are most inclined to add roles in digital strategy, digital marketing, and customer engagement at this time. This indicates a shift away from rather short-term and transactional initiatives to a focus on long-term goals that will build a foundation for thriving digital orchestration.

2. When Looking For Digital Leaders, Don’t Forget About Millennials

Especially in some of the more traditional industries and companies, employees in their early 30s are often still seen as being too young to lead wide-reaching transformational programs and develop digital strategies that will impact an organization’s entire business.

Don’t fall into that trap. Millennials are proving to be incredibly valuable assets to digital companies. This demographic grew up with technology and they understand how to think big when it comes to incorporating technology strategies throughout an organization. Bringing Millennials into your digital organization leadership can create the right balance between the pragmatic approaches of Generation X and the technology-driven mentality of Millennials.

What’s more, Millennials have a more collaborative view of success. Millennials in leadership positions care less about legacy and power and more about working with others for a common good, as stated in a 2015 WorkplaceTrends study.

3. Don’t Expect Expertise To Retain Itself

Great, so you hired the right digital professionals. This doesn’t mean they will still be the ones you need tomorrow. Expertise in digital tends to get stale pretty quickly. This has nothing to do with an unwillingness to continue to learn, but with the lack of stimuli employees start experiencing after their first exciting months at a new company or in a new position.

From day one, organizations should provide them with the input that they need to succeed long term. Investments in trainings on emerging technologies and in opportunities to try out and experiment with trending digital developments are necessary to ensure that digital teams stay ahead of the curve and can help keep a company’s competitive edge.

The most forward-thinking organizations will use emerging digital technologies, such as virtual reality, to bring training content to their employees. After all, an organization can’t really expect its teams to think strategically about technology when it’s failing to adopt innovative methods to train them.

Curating, grooming, and fine-tuning a strong team is really the best way to outpace competition in the digital market. As the competition for talent keeps getting fiercer, companies need to make sure they tap all available opportunities to bring in and foster digital talent and expertise. After all, as all important things in life and business, digital is about people first.