Over the past few weeks, my colleagues have described how platforms, practices, and partners drive a future fit technology strategy. But one element underpins the entire strategy: people. As a result, organizations must adopt practices that allow them to unlock the full potential of their employees through positive employee experience. To help you start, we boiled down the top insights from Forrester’s inaugural Technology Strategy Impact Awards into four sets of best practices, supported by companies’ real-world examples. Here they are:

  1. Use leadership to inspire and motivate employees. Leadership sets the tone, culture, and expectations for the rest of the organization. Top organizations invest in building great leaders — ones who are deeply committed to solving customer problems and understanding and improving employee experience. High-performing organizations also close the gap between leadership and employees, ensuring that leaders are available to remove obstacles and support their employees, creating increased trust and transparency across the organization.
  2. Empower employees to deliver on their mission. Leading organizations know that to unleash their full organizational potential, they must empower their employees, rather than rely on command-and-control practices to drive decision-making. Leading organizations invest in practices that empower employees and accelerate time to market. Empowered employees allow organizations to move more quickly to meet new and emergent customer needs, with teams closest to problems enabled to deliver resolutions.
  3. Continuously develop technology skills and careers. Technology leaders are aware that upskilling their organizations has become an urgent need, as technological advancements have increased the speed at which skills become obsolete and new ones are required. Upskilling not only prepares your organization for the future and reduces the costs of acquiring new skills for the organization via hiring, but it also creates organizational agility as you cross-skill your employees and demonstrates your organizational commitment to employee experience.
  4. Encourage creativity and innovation. With every organization having access to similar technologies and platforms, there is more emphasis than ever on enabling creativity and innovation. As organizations are continuously challenged to differentiate and deliver enhanced customer experiences, organizations that put in place the conditions for creativity, such as risk-tolerant culture, are the ones that are best positioned to identify new opportunities to create value.

Our new report What Makes A Future Fit People Strategy? dives into these specifics. Read real examples of how a transportation company encourages accountability for customer experience by requiring tech leaders to annually shadow an end-user employee, of how a nonprofit upskills employees in emerging technologies by creating learning sabbaticals with a Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS) of 89 out of 100, and more.

And if you want to celebrate your future fit technology strategy — and the people behind it — there’s still time to submit an entry to Forrester’s 2023 Technology Strategy Impact Awards before the deadline of Monday, June 19. To view complete award nomination criteria and submit an entry, visit here (NA), here (EMEA), or here (APAC). Good luck!