Like many people, I was on-boarded in my new workplace remotely this April, amidst the ongoing global Covid pandemic. Thankfully, my organization was already equipped and enabled on a technology platform which allowed me the opportunity to understand my duties & become productive.
Whether there are tectonic shifts in geopolitical forces the emergence of a new superpower or an overhauled supply chain, one reality is undeniable — every business will improve its in-built resilience to better withstand future shocks.
The pandemic has challenged organizations to manage themselves in a completely new way. The workplace today is most distributed and teams need to be more diverse and dynamic than ever before. The short term is an enormous change in their business plans & the long term is a need to adapt and refocus on the delivery of their original goals. Businesses around the globe need to re-think business continuity and resilience. Being in the virtual meeting rabbit hole could remain for a while, longer than what most anticipated initially. Even so, in the post-vaccine era, some of these working realities would continue to stay. A healthy organization needs to be prepared to work from anywhere. The need for “Digital Work Transformation” is no longer exploratory — it’s real, it’s immediate.
For any organization, re-imagining how it gets work done, needs to center around bringing people, information, and applications together. For an individual, the objective should be to focus time on impactful work with the right access to the people & knowledge that will help in the best performance on the job.
Working in the New Normal will require:
- People will need to come together at a moment’s notice, generate breakthrough ideas, and most importantly, maintain a shared purpose — A true culture of collaboration.
- Access to the right content & the right subject matter expert so that each employee can be more efficient in their jobs, build on their ideas & contribute towards organization goals — a collective & connected knowledge to achieve better outcomes.
- Intelligent productivity, where technology is an enabler rather than an obstacle for an individual to focus time on real work, expand skill sets & speed up processes.
The biggest barrier to change is often culture. When managed right, Future of Work platforms fundamentally modify the way organizations work & handle challenges. It reorganizes how you do things & how people cooperate with one another. It is critical to project manage this change. These technology platforms can be fully managed ‘off the shelf cloud solutions, however, every organization needs top-down change management within.
The focus needs to be on:
- Sponsorship & engagement — Leadership air cover is critical in this climate of enforced change. Work still needs to be transformed step by step to give every employee an opportunity to adjust to the change & consider it to be a good thing, rather than a burdened challenge.
- Communication — This ensures people understand the vision and benefits of the change. It needs to go beyond the technology with a focus on people, processes, culture & mindset.
Whilst governments battle the health & economic crisis, business leaders need to crystallize their relevance in the post-virus era. Future of Work trends was already discernible pre-Covid, however, they are now pronounced louder. Work is no longer an office that you go to. The new normal is the current normal. Let’s embrace it.
