New ways of working – 3 priorities for the rest of 2020 and beyond

It is September already, still a third of the year to go but priorities for many of us have changed since we set objectives and plans at the beginning of the year. People, skills and ways of working are high on most managers’ agendas’

• 75% of organizations are considering increases in remote working and many are reviewing office leases and facilities plans. Many have seen productivity and cost benefits from remote working. However, climate surveys are now showing that has often been at the expense of employee engagement and wellbeing. We now need to make remote and hybrid (part office part home) working sustainable for the medium to long term
• COVID has been a “digital accelerant” – many of us are having to re-imagine and re-engineer customer experiences, roles and business processes that used to be delivered face to face. Plans for digital transformation are being brought forward everywhere. Research from MIT shows that changes such as business skills, incentives and operating models have fifteen times more impact on the likelihood of success in digitization than changes in digital technologies. Amazon Web Services research shows that the three main barriers to digital, success are culture, skills and organization. It’s about people, more than technology.
• As we enter a global recession, we need to share resources and costs more effectively and organisations need to break through their silos and become more integrated, matrixed and networked to deliver this and to enable digital transformation. At the same time, we all need to stay agile, innovative and flexible in a period when cost cutting can lead to increased centralization.

Remote management, working from home, digital transformation, matrix management and agile working all require significant changes in culture, skills and ways of working. None of them are completely new but COVID has accelerated all of these trends. Any one of them would be a major change project and many organisations need to deliver them urgently all at once.

In the past these capabilities could be built up  progressively over several years. They are also cumulative, if you can’t work remotely you will struggle to make a matrix work. If you cant break your silos and work across the business in a matrix, good luck with digital transformation!

We have been specialists in new ways of working for over 30 years and we have ready to run content in all these areas. You can see an interactive graphic of our recommended learning paths and key modules in here. All these 90-minute modules can be delivered through interactive webinar or online learning or tailored further if required. They can be run for groups of participants or intact teams.

Most major organizations are now focusing on new ways of working and we are working with several of our clients in these areas to design specific programmes to meet their objectives, or just to plug in rapid upskilling programs at scale. We also run webinars with intact teams wanting to discuss and agree how they plan to evolve the way they work together over the next few months as circumstances change.

Business conditions are tight everywhere, but if you need to make progress on any or all of these areas with your team or wider organization before the end of the year, or if you want to start putting together plans for 2021 and we can help, please get in touch.