Why Our People Hold the Key to Our Digital Transformation

How do you digitally transform your organization and help roughly 50,000 people gain the technology skills they will need for the tech-enabled jobs of the future? One way is to do it through what we at PwC call “citizen-led” innovation -- leading from the ground up by empowering our employees to be change agents. 

Starting about a year ago, PwC launched our Digital Accelerator program -- an initiative that has taken about 2,000 of our employees out of their current day-to-day roles and fully immersed them in training to sharpen and develop their tech capabilities and digital literacy. Our Digital Accelerators undergo an immersive training program to learn about key digital skills such as automation, machine learning, data analytics, design thinking, and digital storytelling. 

After diving into the learning assets, our Digital Accelerators bring their new skills to their engagement and internal teams and serve as catalysts to help them challenge conventional approaches to work and tech-enable aspects of their job. Our Digital Accelerators are on a mission, tasked with changing the way their teams work together, bringing technology and digital solutions to constructively disrupt the old ways of doing things, and driving a more “digital first” mindset across every level of our organization.

The Digital Accelerator program is part of a much larger journey PwC is currently undertaking -- to digitally transform our entire organization of roughly 50,000 people. We want to provide our employees with a world class work environment that allows our people to enhance their daily tasks through the tools we’ve provided them. This is a critical point: we aren’t simply upskilling our Digital Accelerators, or targeting specific teams. We are on a journey to upknowledge our people, without regard to role, tenure or title. We’re all in this together -- and so long as our people lean in with us, we will give them the opportunity to upskill themselves.  

This is no small task. We are investing heavily in our people, empowering and encouraging them to become lifelong “infinite learners.” At the same time, we’re investing in technology that allows our people to be more innovative, collaborative and agile. While some organizations focus on how human talent will be replaced by tech, our firm is seeing what powerful tech does to build up our people: technology is making their work more efficient, improving the quality of their results, and - perhaps most importantly - unlocking their time so they can bring the full breadth of their talents to our clients’ experience. 

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with a group of our Digital Accelerators and talk about what they have learned through their experience and what they have seen change within the firm as a result of this work. As usual, I learned from them. I’m happy to share my top takeaways for executives seeking to embrace digital upskilling to transform their organizations.  

Empower your employees to be change agents. 

At a firm with roughly 50,000 people in the United States, we know that our employees are our greatest resource to inspire change within the firm. PwC's Digital Accelerators and digital upskilling efforts are a critical part of our agenda to tech-enable our business. We are focusing on streamlining the work we do and infusing innovation in our day-to-day work to deliver greater quality, value and meaningful insights to our clients. Everything from basic data and analytics, to more advanced robotics -- we’ve seen the skills of these individuals develop, allowing them to become resources to their engagement teams and clients, as a result of them being embedded directly with their peers. They are able to share a higher level of advanced technical skills across their teams, including: 

• Innovating on the ground in ways that allow us to create exciting opportunities for our teams.
• Identifying new services and incremental features/offerings.
• Disrupting the competitive landscape.

The impact our Digital Accelerators are creating goes well beyond their immediate teams, it is helping further drive client service excellence and creating a broad “feeling” across our firm that we are serious about driving true transformation -- not just talking about it. By identifying a dedicated group to dig deeper into this transformation, they have generated excitement among their peers and saturated the firm with their sense of purpose. They know they’re part of something bigger, something that’s changing the way we think and operate at the firm in real time -- and they have embraced both the opportunity and responsibility of this remarkable moment in our firm’s 170 year history.  

For years, executives have known that if you attract great talent, and you invest in them wisely, they’ll deliver great results. Empower your employees to be change agents in your organization and I am confident you won’t be disappointed.  

Customers benefit when you digitally equip your employees.

The long held mantras of “customer first” and “customer obsession” have shaped executive thinking around growth and client service for decades. At PwC, we have long embraced the principles of customer obsession in how we think about and serve our clients and stakeholders. At the same time, we’ve embraced these same principles as we shape our people experience. Like every other business, our customer experience is driven by our people - and their experience is driven by the culture we create, how we invest in their skills and help them grow their careers.  

By investing in our people and giving unprecedented access to tools that can help their future careers, they in turn are able to hone in on the critical tech skills that bring us closer, make us faster and help us work smarter to generate a measurable, positive impact for our clients. Said another way, they see the challenges on the ground -- and they have the tools (and empowerment) to immediately address them. 

Reimagine the way your people think about data. 

Pick your stat or your study, they all tell us the same thing: individuals (and in particular business executives) have more data available to them now than at any point in history, and less data today than they will have at any point in the future. We know that not all data yields actionable insight, and with so much data at our fingertips, it can be difficult to know just what to do with it. 

We leveraged our Digital Accelerators to help our people learn how to efficiently analyze, digest, and comprehend data differently. They are going beyond understanding what this means for them individually -- they are developing and applying critical skills in creating and communicating insights that are relevant, meaningful and impactful to our teams and our clients. 

With the right tools and the right skills, tasks that were once repetitive and time-consuming can be automated, not just by IT but by our “citizen developers” on the front line of our client service. Efforts that took days or even weeks are being converted into hours or minutes. Teams previously bogged down in trying to get data ready for analysis are instead unlocking that time and focusing it on actually conducting the analysis and storytelling with data to share new insights. They are enjoying the challenge, our clients are enjoying the benefits, and our people have an opportunity to display the formidable skills for which we hired them in the first place. 

Upskilling your workforce does not have a definitive timetable.

Efforts that have a beginning, middle and an end make us all more comfortable. We can measure progress, but more importantly we can arrive at a defined destination and declare accomplishment. Upskilling is different. 

Upskilling and digitally empowering your workforce simply doesn’t have an end date. At PwC, we recognize the skills we’re focused on now are simply stepping stones to the next set of skills that will drive tomorrow’s value. Progress can’t be accomplished simply by “rolling out a program” -- it has to be accomplished by changing the way individuals think about, and embrace, their own continual development (and how organizations provide them the tools to make that possible).  

If we want to do right by our employees - while they’re with us or wherever their career takes them - we cannot stop, and we have to encourage them to keep at it too. This isn’t simply an investment in the individual employee -- it’s an investment in your organizational agility, a critical capability for organizations who aspire not just to survive, but thrive in this age of digital disruption. 

If you’re not changing at scale, you’re not changing. 

When I took on this role, I anticipated the challenging scope of the agenda and I knew how important upskilling was to our strategy. Our entire leadership team understood the need to set a rapid pace, and we had cautious confidence that our people would embrace the vision. But few of us anticipated the degree to which that embrace would yield such incredible inspiration as our people demonstrate their agility, creativity and a sense of purpose in changing our entire firm for the better. My conversation with these remarkable Digital Accelerators highlights the incredible impact they and their colleagues are having on both our teams and our clients every day.  

As we look ahead to the future of our digital transformation, we’re doubling down on our investment in our Digital Accelerators and our commitment to upskilling our entire workforce. Our digital transformation is core to our strategy - it’s not an “add on,” it’s not a corporate “program,” and progress requires working tirelessly to reinforce and embed it in everything we do. We all know change at scale is hard, and making change stick requires relentless discipline and unforgiving focus. It also requires a talented and committed team to make it come to life -- and I’m grateful our team effort includes the leadership and commitment of our remarkable Digital Accelerators. 

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Watch my full conversation here: