How does the role of leadership change in a digital environment?

The more digital channels of communication are disseminating, the higher the risk of losing personal conversation. In other words, personal contact, being already important in the past, will become even more a key to success in the digital age. Only face to face workshops and conversations will create the trust to build a new culture like lean leadership or new methodologies like agile development. 

How do you engage your employees in participating in the change?

Be transparent about the upcoming changes, in particular about the challenges and the new skills that have to be learned, and about the way the daily job will change. Offering training about the technical possibilities of digitalisation for finance and commercial staff, and vice versa, make engineers understand the business challenges of finance teams. 

What skills do financial employees need to develop in order to stay attractive in the job market?

Become familiar with the possibilities of AI, new digital tools and application, analysis of big date and predictive analytics in order to understand how those technologies can help them doing their job and how those can create value for the companies; for example, new ways of planning or new business models. 

Through your experience in integrating freelance workers, what are the main challenges involved?

Freelance workers are becoming an even more integral part of a company’s life. On the one side, this applies to the company as a social organisation, i.e. employees sitting next to freelancers in the same office, work on the same projects and go together for lunch or a drink after work. So employees have difficulty in understanding why their co-workers aren’t invited to company events, just because they have another type of contract. On the other hand, freelancers aren’t different to employees in creating value for the company; they serve the same purpose and gather particular know-how about value streams, products, and customers. The more this loyalty is rewarded by a company, the less the risk that this knowledge might be shared to the advantage of a competitor. 

What would you like to achieve by attending the 8th Edition Business Performance Management Conference?

To learn about the challenges that companies are facing today and where they see their opportunities in digitalization. How they master the change, which priorities they are setting and what measures they take to embark their staff on the journey.