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Success or stagnation in the communications industry? Unlock the value of your workforce in the digital age

By Deborah Brecher, Peter Hansen and Ryan Shanks

2 | Success or stagnation in the communications industry?

Winners in the communications industry will be those who can unleash the value of talent in the digital age. Those who can integrate new and traditional workforces, attract a broader network of talent both inside and outside the organization, reinvent traditional jobs and lead the transformation to a digital culture. Success isn’t just about geographic expansion, new products, or mergers and acquisitions. It’s about the competitive advantage of your workforce.

Traditional communications service providers are at an unprecedented crossroads. Take one path and there’s growth and success—with providers using their infrastructure and capital to expand into lucrative new businesses. But take the other path and there’s stagnation or decline, out-competed by other players, partners and over-the-top Silicon Valley companies that are re-inventing the end-to-end voice-video- data proposition.

What is the No. 1 factor that will determine success or stagnation? It’s reinventing the talent agenda for the digital era.

Consider four specific dimensions:

1. Workforce composition: Shifting the balance between digital and traditional workforces to compete more effectively.

2. Sourcing: Managing a more diverse talent ecosystem—those on your payroll and those outside your payroll.

3. Job reinvention: Using digital technologies to support the changing future of work, including both new and legacy workforces.

4. Leadership and culture: Developing distinctive leadership capabilities, and the right culture, to succeed in the digital era.

Time to rewire your organization Take a look at your talent mix. Does it reflect today’s digital imperative or rather an older, product-centric focus? For many CSPs, a legacy workforce perspective puts them at risk of being outflanked by nimble competitors with more digital talent.

Consider the typical CSP’s workforce composition compared to a Silicon Valley firm. Recent Accenture Strategy analysis highlights the sharp contrast. According to our analysis of social and job sites, nearly half of CSPs’ recent job postings (45 percent) were in sales and customer service; only 12 percent were in engineering or IT. For Silicon Valley companies, those numbers were nearly flipped: Only 13 percent of open postings were in sales and customer service, and 51 percent were in engineering and IT.1

To compete effectively, the makeup of a CSP’s work-force must change—from an army of sales and custom-er service workers to roles in areas such as software engineering and new-product development. Skillsets now need to be anchored in digital literacy. New types of jobs such as “intelligence architects” will also arise, created by the digital revolution. Innovations such as

robotic process automation (RPA) will lead to the rise of human-robot collaboration.

Equally critical is improving the consumer experience across the multi-channel relationship—from an improved installation experience at the home, to the creation of high-value apps and online tools that enhance the self-service experience, to a smaller but more empowered sales and service workforce.

Look beyond your payrollMeeting the new digital talent needs of a 21st century CSP will mean that some of the most valuable workforce contributors won’t be traditional employees. Rather than trying to bring all critical talent in-house, companies need to think in terms of a global, anytime, anywhere workforce. Work will be divided into “micro-tasks” and distributed with a resource-on-demand mentality.

Digital skills will be in high demand across industries. CSPs are competing for digital talent with companies in high-tech, products, financial services, media, entertainment and more. Where will the best workers go? That’s an issue. Recent Accenture Strategy research found that only 12 percent of recent US university grads report being interested in a career in the communications industry.2

Add it up and the imperative is clear to look beyond your internal payroll. CSP executives need to think very differently about what talent is needed, where it lives and how it is accessed.

Success or stagnation in the communications industry? | 3

12%interested in a

communicationscareer

43% Other Non-Tech

33% Sales

7% IT5% Engineering

12% Customer Service

36% Other Non-Tech

10% Sales

18% IT

33% Engineering

3% Customer Service

CSPs Silicon Valley

Accenture Strategy analysis, 2015


Digital leaders needed

What’s old becomes new

Our research has found that 62 percent of high- performing organizations cite the ability to build the right leadership team as the most important factor in improving agility.4 But who are the right leaders? The nature of leadership is changing as the speed of work in the communications industry accelerates. Effective leadership will depend on managing complexity and exercising judgment in the face of ever-increasing amounts of data and the collapse of traditional hierarchies. Emphasis will be on collaboration, experimentation and relinquishing control to free up employee creativity.

For example, CSPs could borrow a page from both Hollywood and Silicon Valley in the product development space, creating leadership teams around a particular goal and then realigning for the next challenge.

In addition, effective digital leadership requires different mindsets and behaviors. Do current leaders have what it takes? The answer isn’t clear. According to a recent Accenture study, only 48 percent of surveyed workers felt that leadership and management are ready to adapt to advances in digital technologies, including social media, collaboration tools, mobile applications, robotics and analytics.5 Leadership development needs to be focused on recognizing and capitalizing on digital opportunities.

Many traditional jobs will still exist in the CSP of the future. However, the nature of the work, the key capabilities required and the tools used will change in the digital world. For example, the traditional call center role is becoming much less about following scripts and more about being empowered to make decisions on behalf of customers. This kind of service must be enabled by collaboration technologies as well as analytics capabilities to solve customer issues in real time.

Or take a look at the new tools available to field force engineers. One CSP has recently deployed Google Glass wearables to field force technicians switching custom-ers from old networks to new IP networks. The solution provides real-time access to schematics, and allows more experienced technicians to see what their junior colleagues are working on so they can help them.

Workers embrace the technology, feeling better prepared for their jobs, and the company has already seen productivity improvements from this state-of- the-art technology.

Integrating these technologies into current ways of working will require effective change management to deal with technology, process and culture change. But you might be surprised at the willingness of traditional workers to embrace digital. A recent Accenture Strategy survey of 2,506 European workers found that more than half of employees surveyed (57 percent) see the impact of digital technologies on their work experience as positive and only 8 percent as negative.3

Impact ofdigital on the work

experience57%positive

8%negative

Ready to adapt to advances

in digitaltechnology

48%

Creating the workforce of the future

Master the balancing actCSPs need to rebalance their workforce across all jobs, legacy and new—shifting scarce resources to focus on the digital experience while reinventing the traditional customer service model and cost structure. Becoming fully digital and customer-centric means moving more customer relationships online. CSPs will have a smaller call center, but more high-quality mobile and intelligent apps and a better online experience. This means they need more UI experts, analytics professionals and software engineers. At the same time, traditional sales and service workforces need to provide exemplary service, as the types of opportunities and challenges they deal with become more complex and sophisticated.

Connect the dotsAttract and nurture a broader network of contributors, including full-time employees, on-demand labor, partners and consumers. Think bolder and bigger about where and how to source and integrate talent into critical work phases, from application and service design, to marketing campaigns, to creation of new business models.

Reinvent traditional jobsMany CSPs are building out their digital capabilities, but leading organizations are also using digital technologies to re-invigorate traditional roles. Update job descriptions in areas such as sales, field tech and customer care to include critical capabilities for the digital age such as digital project management, data interpretation and digital channel management as well as advanced problem-solving and collaboration. Next, identify critical capability gaps and develop a plan to transform these traditional workforces through innovative talent sourcing and development programs. Finally, empower the new workforce by providing information and knowledge at point of need to raise productivity and increase customer satisfaction.

Crack the leadership codeNew leadership behaviors and cultural changes are required to drive success rather than stagnation. Combine recruitment of outside digital leadership talent with pioneering training and development activities—coaching, action learning and mentoring—that quickly build leadership capabilities at all levels to inspire the workforce of the future.

Pay particular attention to leadership development for your front-line managers, as they are closest to the customer and will feel the greatest change from the impact of digital on the workplace.

Our research and experience point to four critical dimensions that CSPs should address to create the workforce of the future—one that is innovative, digitally adept and capable of supporting new, more customer-centric strategies:


To accelerate growth in a challenging marketplace, successful communications service providers will unlock the value of their workforce in the digital age. These industry leaders will re-balance their traditional and digital workforces to optimize the customer experience. They will source talent beyond their payroll and reinvent traditional jobs. Equally important, they will rapidly establish a culture and leadership approach that infuses digital talent, tools and ways of working across the organization.

For an industry at a crossroads, a fundamentally different approach to sourcing, developing and growing the workforce of the future could spell the difference between a right turn…and a wrong one.



Checklist: Re-examining work design at its most fundamental level

How is work organized? • Silos and hierarchies collapse

• “Resource on-demand” mentality prevails

• Work is divided into “microtasks” and distributed

What work is performed? • Analytics drives experimentation and adaptation

• Human-robot collaboration becomes the norm

Who performs the work? • Global, anytime, anywhere workforce

• Skillsets anchored in digital literacy

• New types of jobs created by the digital revolution

• Customized work experiences create a new value

proposition for employees

• New physical and virtual workplace designs take hold

• Leaders are groomed to manage complexity

• Executives exercise judgment amidst a plethora of data

• Leaders relinquish control to free up employee creativity

Why, when and where do people work? How is work led and managed?

Copyright © 2015 Accenture. All rights reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.

This document makes descriptive reference to trademarks that may be owned by others. The use of such trademarks herein is not an assertion of ownership of such trademarks by Accenture and is not intended to represent or imply the existence of an association between Accenture and the lawful owners of such trademarks.

Join the conversation @AccentureStrat @AccentureComm

Contact the authorsDeborah BrecherPhiladelphia, [email protected]

Peter HansenNew York, New [email protected]

Ryan ShanksDublin, [email protected]

Additional ContributorsHolly Tu [email protected]

Mariel Furlong [email protected]

Maeve Farrell [email protected]

CJ Sinar [email protected]

About AccentureAccenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 336,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$30.0 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2014. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

About Accenture Strategy Accenture Strategy operates at the intersection of business and technology. We bring together our capabilities in business, technology, operations and function strategy to help our clients envision and execute industry-specific strategies that support enterprise wide transformation. Our focus on issues related to digital disruption, competitiveness, global operating models, talent and leadership help drive both efficiencies and growth. For more information, follow @AccentureStrat or visit www.accenture.com/strategy.

Footnotes1 Accenture analysis of job postings on social media sites from a representative sample of both groups based on market share, April 2015

2 “Are you the weakest link? Strengthening your talent supply chain,” Accenture, 2015

3 “European Workers Set to Embrace Digital Technologies in the Workplace, Accenture Research Shows,” Accenture press release, May 7, 2015

4 “Leadership Imperatives for an Agile Business,” Accenture 2015

5 Accenture Strategy Employee Research on Being Digital, 2015

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