How about a Culture of Innovation in Shared Services?

Innovation: top talent priority

The SSON's annual State of the Global Shared Services Market Report 2019 was just released, and highlights "innovation" as both a key skills gap and priority in SSO talent strategies.

SSON columnist Sudheer Kaavil Valappil considers the implications in the article below.

Source: SSON Analytics

A New Culture

With boundless opportunities coming from the digital revolution around us, it is not a surprise that Innovation is considered the top talent priority globally across the SSO sector.

Given the sector’s, well-known struggle with employee engagement (plus retention), building a culture of innovation could be the best solution to address both past as well as future challenges.

With the proliferation of extremely agile digital tools, the promise of RPA pivoting with deep learning AI solutions, and the unravelling of the world of Blockchain, there is an overarching sense of being overwhelmed with the possibilities out there. The rapid pace at which these trends are evolving is further exacerbating the decision-making process for leadership teams who are mainly used to the traditional approaches to transformation, with three to seven-year projects!

Fostering a culture of innovation is one of the best ways to surf the wave of changes ahead while ensuring an optimal approach to transformation. Here, highly engaged operations team members own the end-to-end innovation roadmap while the overstretched process teams shift their roles from ‘transformation leaders’ to ‘transformation facilitators’. Insights on market trends, decisions on technology selection, opportunities for process re-engineering and more, can be crowdsourced from inside the organization by better leveraging employee aptitude and interest – such as market analysis, technology trends, creativity, and numerous other relevant interests.

With technology-adept millennials representing the majority of the workforce, no other sector has the unique opportunity to fully leverage this wave of technology transformations as does the SSO sector.

To better understand the Culture of Innovation, it is good to align on these terms:

• Innovation or Innovative Thinking is the characteristic trait of being able to relate to a problem while feeling empowered to solve it.
• Culture is represented by the characteristic features of everyday existence (way of life) shared by people in a place or organization.
• A Culture of Innovation is when ‘Innovative Thinking’ becomes a cultural trait.

We can better relate to the value of a Culture of Innovation by looking at places where this culture is alive, such as:

• Amazon: Here innovation fostering has been converted to science; everyone from a warehouse supervisor to a data science executive is empowered to innovate, submit improvement initiatives in a simple template, and given sponsorship try risky new ideas.
• Alphabet: With its 20% projects on requested cross-company assignments in addition to the famous Google X – Moonshot, its projects have truly galvanized employees to solve worthy global problems while propelling the organization to be one of the most valued in the world.
• Silicon Valley (region): By pioneering technology revolution since the early 1970s, this region has fostered innovation by the simple approach of encouraging creativity along with empowering employees to test new solutions (often with really expensive hardware/software).

While these examples may seem far-fetched for the ‘transaction factories’ of SSO centers, there are already many leading SSO pioneers who are starting to foster a culture of innovation through early steps.

Building a culture is a long process requiring sustained focus from leadership to ensure its success. That said, even early successes coming from a culture of innovation can yield promising returns and accelerate the creative spiral that can spread quickly through the organization.

A culture of innovation can be built in any organization by ensuring that every member of the organization has innovation as a core responsibility on a daily basis, and is empowered with the required knowledge, methodology, and tools.

The three fundamental requirements for a Culture of Innovation are:

1. It should cover every member of the organization from reception to mail room to the board room; no exceptions.
2. Innovation should be a core responsibility to be reviewed on a daily basis, not something that can be parked until the end of the year as an annual objective.
3. Critically, everyone should be empowered with appropriate knowledge, methodology understanding, and tools to experiment.

While the arguments to build such a culture are extremely promising, the typical challenge in building such a culture is quite mundane, as per the famous Chinese saying, “A journey of a thousand miles, begins with a single step”. When it comes to implementing a culture of innovation, the first step is often the insurmountable one: The step where leadership teams can align on the fact that their low-cost center can become a true innovation hub!

So...

Are you ready to champion innovation as a cultural trait within your organization?