Promoting a company as a digital business whilst still using internal outdated processes perhaps means not walking the digital walk. Especially in the remote workforce debate.
Digital Workforce
One of the greatest operational challenges leaders are facing following the pandemic is navigating the difficulties of workforce physicality. Decisions relating to whether staff remain at home, return to the traditional office, or combine the two into a hybrid.
The answers depend on certain questions:
- What is your company culture?
- Do you have the virtual infrastructure?
- How often do teams need to collaborate in a central location?
- What do your staff want to do?
- Can IT implications be securely managed remotely?
Effects of COVID
Before the pandemic office-based company environments were traditionally performed in-house by staff residing in central locations. This typical routine aligned the 9-5 schedule and coincided with commuting.
However, working life after the pandemic is set to look very different following the largest workforce experiment ever conducted. Leaders are under pressure to either revert to a pre-COVID stance or to advance the benefits defined in the aftershock and delve into the new normal.
For businesses built upon the digital spectrum, failing to go remote could be counterintuitive to the company’s ethos. Evolving digitally means embracing the concept in every aspect of the business including how and where staff work. Thus, forcing staff back into a physical office could be viewed as antiquated and in today’s socially connected world this could affect how the brand is translated especially by job candidates.
A Digital Business
Being a true digital business means investing in technologies, tools, and applications to enable collaboration, business processes, and sharing of data.
The challenge for executives is creating a bridge between tangible and intangible elements where staff can store, utilise, and process information. Connecting these two aspects via networks and cloud computing so employees can access information working with more agility and more importantly can be done from anywhere.
Collaboration – the ability for workers to connect individually or as a team regardless of where they are situated. The process of co-ordinating functions to the benefit of internal and external customers.
Business Processes – redesigning processes, automating tasks, and optimising workflows integrated with software to increase productivity.
Data – securely enabled access to company files and knowledge sharing across the enterprise.
Digital Benefits
Becoming a truly digital business can provide many benefits including:
- Improve resource productivity.
- Reduce operational costs.
- Enhance customer journeys.
- Streamline business processes.
- Enable internal customers to interact.
- Greater control for leaders.
- Attract top talent.
- Improve operational security.
- Widen the gap in a competitive market.
The challenge comes in making the right decisions to release the above gaining greater efficiencies. The current economic situation has piled on the pressure to improve and enhance how workers perform.
Executives who implemented digital transformation technologies before the pandemic coped much better versus those who applied less IT focus. Industries with a lower dependency on physicality obviously faired stronger but these areas have not been without problems.
Digital Arena
So, going forward how much effort will it take for a company to transition into the remote digital arena?
First, let’s dispel certain illusions starting with the use of email. This advantageous platform is still effective particularly in the use of digital marketing campaigns but as a stand-alone tool is not enough of a step into the digital realm enabling remote work.
Second, video conferencing is more than just virtually connecting teams face to face. It is an integral part of the remote workers toolkit needed to network with teams, managers, and customers. Due to the number of applications available it is vitally important to adopt service standardisation, encrypted securely and for all staff members to receive training on functionality.
Third, and slightly more obvious is network connectivity and equipment. A company may have comprehensive digital processes but without the right supported devices employees will be unable to experience the full benefits.
Fourth, the realistic threats and challenges of managing cybersecurity with staff working remotely. All employees should be educated on the risks and ensure the most up to date software is installed on devices.
Fifth, IT support processes need to be updated to reflect home workers. Giving them access to raising tickets and connecting with professionals to fix problems to ensure productivity isn’t affected.
Sixth, issues relating to social behaviours of the workforce need to be addressed. Mental health has dramatically increased with staff feeling lonely and craving the interaction with co-workers. These are real concerns to employee productivity and managers need to ensure staff are happy and healthy.
Seven, whilst productivity has increased this is largely at the detriment of the individual. To prove their value staff now feel obligated to work longer hours. Leadership needs to step in dealing with the issue reducing expectations and possible burnout.
Emerging Technologies
It would be a miss not to mention emerging technologies and how these can benefit organisational functions especially when utilising remote staff.
Virtual Reality – an effective way to upskill and train operational employees with continuous learning programs.
Big Data – can monitor IT data sets and reveal cybersecurity anomalies in the prevention of networking threats.
Machine Learning – algorithms can be beneficial to customer service representatives predicting clients’ behavioural patterns based on historical experiences.
Artificial Intelligence – especially useful for HR departments when screening candidates and reducing effort of trawling through CV’s.
Robotic Process Automation – generating financial reports required for compliance audits performing repetitive tasks and eradicating human error.
A Digital Example
At VERITAS we began as a digital business with our workforce spread across different continents. Therefore, we experienced no shift in working practices when the pandemic first emerged.
We don’t miss the water cooler moments because we’ve never had them. Instead, we made decisive reasoning from the beginning to choose the digital pathway not only for our customers but also for our team.
Our business is built on the premise of clients and inspectors working together through an enabled QA/QC platform with secure integrated process workflows. This necessitates collaboration, sharing of information and tools to communicate globally.
To suggest our team members can’t do the same would contradict our company values and overall mission to digitally connect clients with global technical inspector resources.
Conclusion
As companies grapple with committing their operational workforce to remote working, employees are still working inefficiently adopting their own workarounds to stay connected and be productive. This may have been acceptable in the early days of the pandemic but a year on these realistic threats need to be managed and with a sense of urgency. Failure to react will give rise to a dysfunctional workforce impeding on the business.
Whether individuals remain remote and/or incorporate hybrid working companies must evolve providing staff with access to software, tools, applications, equipment, and support. As always, these change strategies must filter from the top of the organisation down to the individual working remotely.
It is important to ensure leaders practise what they preach by absorbing and more crucially walking the digital path in all areas of the business.