Energy meets digital – the people strategy challenge

Digitisation is coming to the Energy sector and it’s coming fast.

The industry is embracing disruptive and emerging technologies, SMART infrastructure and the widespread use of predictive analytics, but what is the impact of digitisation on organisational culture?

Energy companies have arguably been seen as traditional siloed business units with a culture dominated by an aversion to risk and poor customer centricity. In many occasions, whilst organisations can see the value from embracing digital, executive teams are unaware of all the full implications of digitisation on areas of the business such as human resources and organisational design.

Implementing a cohesive people strategy that includes organisational culture, hiring strategy, and talent management processes is the type of subject currently keeping Executives and HR Directors awake at night.

Combining a digital workforce with a traditional energy workforce adds a new layer of complexity to the cohesive people strategy challenge.

How can such diverse types of individuals sit happily under the same vision, strategy, process and structure? For example, a misalignment between the two groups could be as simple as work wear or hours of work. On a deeper level, there could be misalignment between expectations of how a company should behave or how management lead.

An energy company with digital capability spread amongst their teams could find themselves with two critical cultures within the organisation behaving very differently.

Consequently, leaders within energy businesses need to embrace complementary learning journeys, to disrupt traditional team or project leadership structures, and encourage agile working, autonomous working, innovation and learning.

Several reports have found that companies want to attract the best digital candidates need to offer the following:

• Autonomous working conditions
• Agility
• Entrepreneurship
• Collaboration
• Innovation and learning
• Customer orientation
• Digital Leadership
• Digital technology and processes

Ensuring corporate culture embraces these dimensions across their leadership and people strategy is not easy but is essential to company health and success.

Fostering creativity, encouraging risk taking and innovation, and rewarding these behaviours is critical to engaging with a digital workforce. Challenging ‘Business as Usual’ should become the norm and employers have to provide a platform and process for employees to present and implement new ideas.

Digitisation of the workforce and work place means companies have to operate outside of their comfort zones. This is particularly relevant for the ‘traditional’ energy companies. How they integrate this new aspect into their culture will keep them competitive and ensure they attract the best and right talent.

Matthew Woodall is an Energy sector Search specialist with over 20 years in the industry. For further insights and regular industry updates please connect with him on LinkedIn.