Digital upskilling: Taking the whole workforce with you

Thirteen Group have been on a digital transformation journey since around December 2019, when it introduced agile working. Some key components that have been introduced as part of that suite of work require varying levels of digital upskilling.

To support its vision, Thirteen had to introduce a more modern technology estate. This included but was not limited to:

• A smart building management system (BMS) to allocate desks, meeting rooms and manage its visitor registration.
• Introducing collaboration platforms, such as Office365, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams
• Introducing new end user devices which suit the different personas Thirteen employs. The type of work colleagues carry out usually allows Thirteen to allocate one of three personas – office workers, front-line workers and home workers – and the uniformity this brings helps with their strategic vision, budget planning and security posture. It also helps ensure colleagues have the right technology to carry out their duties. For example, a front-line worker may need a tablet device or mobile phone whereas a home worker may need a laptop, monitor and peripherals.
• Moving to a data-centric organisation, using data to inform its decision making and moving from reactive to proactive decision making. It did this by introducing Microsoft Power BI along with a cloud data warehouse.

The challenge

• Engaging front-line colleagues who hadn’t previously needed digital skills
• Developing the workforce’s awareness of cyber threat risks and how to spot phishing attempts
• The drastic behavioural change agile working and tech introduced to the culture of the organisation and traditional behaviours. This meant having to learn, for example:
  • how to share access to documents to collaborate on, rather than sending copies of documents
  • how to carry out effective meetings

The solution

Thirteen brought in a specialist Microsoft Office 365 adoption partner, Tribe365, which builds up a Digital Champions network across the entire organisation. This allows those champions to use a combination of webinars, gamification and a champion’s league board to promote the message. There are currently have 70 colleagues in this network with hopes to grow this to over 200 over the next year. Thirteen have

Thirteen introduced a gamified security awareness platform called KnowBe4 which, like Tribe365, puts out mock phishing exercises each day to a representative sample of employees. If colleagues successfully catch a phish, they are duly rewarded.

Thirteen introduced an IT Academy Coach position in the IT team. This position uses data leveraged from the IT service desk to identify demand and shortcomings in knowledge amongst colleagues who contact them. The coach then uses the data to develop a training framework which addresses this demand. This can be done through carrying out toolbox talks with front-line workers, attending team meetings, carrying out short and snappy training sessions, etc. The coach works closely with Thirteen’s learning and development team to help shape, evolve, and modernise the onboarding experience for colleagues from a technology perspective, ensuring they get off on the right foot and are part of the culture from the get-go.

Thirteen made the changes relatable to colleagues: messaging was put across in a way that showcased the positives and flexibility of the technological changes. For example, where there was an issue with colleagues not having their own allocated desk, the messaging was all around being flexible enough to work from anywhere with an internet connection. We used the tagline, ‘Work is something that you do and not where you go’. This changed the culture within the organisation rapidly. Rather than selling it as a cost-saving measure, Thirteen sold it as a benefit for colleagues wanting to work from home.