| | MARCH 20208CIOReviewBy Virgil Miller, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Aflac U.S. and President, Aflac GroupINSPIRING PRODUCTIVITY WITH AN INNOVATION FOCUSED CULTUREDisruption. It's become the word of the day as start-ups like Uber and Amazon reshape entire industries and new technologies like robotics and AI rewrite business processes and job descriptions. Companies that sit back and stick with the status quo are at a bigger risk of not surviving. Instead, businesses must disrupt themselves before another company can disrupt them.As a result, businesses must focus on innovation and how they can meet customers' evolving expectations. To achieve success, businesses must identify what customers expect today as well as what they will need in the next five-to-10 years. Cross-team collaboration, cutting-edge skills and the ability to make changes quickly are critical to realizing innovation. With that in mind, here are three tips for empowering innovation in your company. EMBRACE AGILE TEAMSImproving productivity and innovation starts with encouraging a culture of collaboration. By creating teams that mix business and technology professionals, the company's encourage knowledge sharing, collaboration, and greater agility. Cross-functional teams also benefit from sharing different perspectives early on in a project, meaning teams can build consensus for a given solution or approach early on in the process. Aflac isn't a company that believes in business execution without innovation. That's why we launched an innovation lab called "Hatch" that acts as both an accelerator quickly solving problems and an incubator exploring innovations like AI. In the lab, we give these cross-functional teams a real-life business challenge to solve together. The challenge comes directly from our customers and is centered on where they want to see a different experience. The teams come up with solutions that aim to improve the customer experience. These solutions are implemented and, afterward, each team has presented the results in areas such as customer testimonials with metrics around revenue or efficiency improvements. This allows the team to understand how their work is making a difference at the company, building purpose and improving buy-in to our overall innovation goals. INVEST IN EMPLOYEE TRAINING AND RESKILLINGWith technology advancing at a rapid pace, yesterday's technology skills no longer are relevant today. Therefore, companies must continuously invest in training employees in order to keep their skills up to date. For example, skills around data science, DevOps and Java coding, while not as relevant 10-20 years ago, are now in high-demand and critical to many business innovations today. In the customer IN MY OPINION
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