No one wants Covid-19 and there is very little in the way of a Covid silver lining but it just might be the best thing that’s happened to digital transformation in a long time!
These are strange and unusual times as half the world is now in lock-down as we fight Covid-19. It has also been an extremely busy time for most IT teams as they have rolled out remote working to 100% of their colleagues. Most organisations have been working towards any time, any place, any device for years now but as many IT teams found out allowing remote working for a few Microsoft Office focused users is very different than supporting a whole organisation. Despite that all IT teams I have talked to have successfully turned office bound organisations into virtual organisations in a week or two.
An amazing feat and one that has raised its fair share of challenges. Many of them are technical in nature but it also highlighted a number of skill and capability issues (how do you collaborate effectively when you are physically distanced?) and many historical analogue processes that are difficult to complete in a remote environment (eg I can’t work at home because I need to print and I don’t have a printer ….. Why do you need to print? Because that’s what we have always done!). For many organisations working through the critical people and process issues has taken as long if not longer than it took to sort out the technical issues. While most of the people and process issues have been sorted in most companies there is an ongoing need for support and skills building.
Congratulations to all those involved, a tremendous effort that reflects well on IT professionals. Now, as we come out of the immediate crisis of enabling the virtual workplace I wonder if Covid-19 has achieved more for the creation of the digital workplace in a month than traditional businesses and IT teams have achieved in the preceding 20 years or so.
It’s quite sobering to think about and it is a great example of the power of a crisis (Winston Churchill would be proud) but it makes you wonder, what now?
I see three possibilities
- We ride out the crisis as best we can and when it is over we celebrate and return to our normal ways of living and working.
- We merge what we have learnt into our existing ways of operating, creating a more flexible work environment for some of our team while requiring others to resume “normal service”. We also congratulate ourselves on our new found business continuity capabilities.
- We seek to systematically leverage the opportunity that mass remote working has provided and embed the digital workplace as the new normal.
As Winston Churchill said, we should never let a good crisis go to waste and it is in that spirit that I believe we should vigorously pursue option three and seek to leverage this opportunity to embed the digital workplace as the new normal. Here are some suggestions on how we can go about doing just that:
Support, encourage and train customers to access our services via non physical channels. Customers are increasingly having to access our services remotely. As they are forced to change their behaviour take the opportunity to support them to learn how to use your most preferred channels. So, if your customers normally walk into a branch but are now accessing your call centre take the next step and support them to learn how to use your app or access your website. Yes it will take more time now but the change is more likely to stick as their behaviour is changing anyway. There could also be substantial long term benefits as the virtual channel is often the lowest cost to serve as it scales at close to zero marginal costs.
Invest now in improving the digital literacy of your teams. Just as customers are needing to change their behaviour so are our teams. Take the opportunity that forced change presents by supporting your team to build their digital skills so they are increasingly effective in using digital tools and working “online”. Start by supporting your team to get the best out of collaboration tools and continue to support your team to be safe online. Make online training freely available, set up a support hotline (perhaps as an extension of your help-desk) to answer team members’ questions, and create a wiki or FAQ of tips and tricks where you can engage and leverage the capabilities of your already very digitally literate people. The more you can do to build your team members skills now the more likely it will be that you can sustain and build on the digital gains.
Remove the need for physical presence at specific locations from all business processes. To make this happen you will need to identify and specifically target processes that have historically required physical presence. This may include the need to create, hand off or file “paperwork” or the established process of printing and filing documents or the need to physically sign documents. If a process does require physical presence (for example completing a lab test) seek to electronically capture and hand off data electronically as close to source as possible.
Deliver minimum viable solutions. When things are “normal” established ways of working rule. In these circumstances minimum viable product most often means “everything I do now, but better”. Change becomes expensive and complex. Covid-19 however has disturbed “normal” and we should seek to use this time of change and perhaps a little chaos, to challenge the status quo and deliver minimum viable digital solutions to existing analogue processes. These MVPs can seed the change and provide incremental improvement for remote workers and form the basis for future industrialised solutions.
Wherever possible, create new ways of working. The notion of change begins with an existing state that we are unhappy with and that we wish to improve. There is a place for this in all change programmes, however it risks incrementalism. In creating a digital workplace incrementalism means we are much more likely to digitise existing ways of working rather than becoming truly digital. Digitising is a step forward but it is also a missed opportunity to truly reinvent ways of working considering currently available tools and methods.
Finally, in preparation for a return to “normal” consider redefining the role of the physical office. The office is unlikely to go away any time soon, we are after all social beings. However, if the office is no longer required for your team to successfully operate what is the role of the office? Because we are social beings many people will still want to come to work but are you actually going to require people to “come to work” every day as we traditionally have. If you are going to require people to come to work everyday you risk losing talented employees over time as some will seek out the flexibility remote working can provide for them. If you don’t require people to physically come to work every day then how are you going to build and maintain the social and cultural fabric of your organisation? Perhaps, this is the new role of your office, it is longer a place of work but a place to connect, to build relationships and to build culture.
I am sure there are many other things that we can do during these strange and difficult times to move the digital workplace forward a few steps but this is a start. I encourage you to take this list of ideas and think about how to apply them to your business. I am interested in learning about your results and perhaps together we could begin to create our own tips and tricks to share across our community.