What 5 big factors will be driving your post-pandemic businesses?
by Luis De Souza, CEO of NFS Technology
What a roller coaster we’re riding…business mood has journeyed from real panic and fear through resignation to the reality of now.
Business leaders are already focusing on developing different business models, including cost reductions, new ways to work productively and restarting stalled projects.
With remote working now totally a part of our lives, many organizations are re-visiting their technology infrastructure, putting security and user experience at a priority.
But the pandemic is also really impacting everyone’s wellbeing and stress levels – and current support mechanisms are not up to supporting them yet.
Employee support schemes are going to have a big part to play – we’ve seen touching examples of kindness ,and businesses are going to need to put a high priority on how they look after vulnerable staff members and other groups like suppliers.
5 significant factors that will drive your post-pandemic business:
- Real estate costs
- Home working
- Collaboration tools
- Supply chain disruption
- Leadership post-pandemic
Real estate costs – is a transformation ahead?
In this changing pandemic world, there’s one certainty – enforced home working is making businesses rethink their real estate portfolio. They are asking:
- How much space do I really need?
- Where?
- What type?
Even organizations with no previous experience of stay-at-home working can now evaluate how it works for them, providing valuable information on technology support and collaboration.
Before corona, the business market moved slowly to disrupt the status quo in terms of space requirements. It did not challenge actual utilization and alternatives to fixed cost space, such as home working, co-working spaces and hoteling.
Business is now rethinking the 5 traditional assumptions on space: finance, corporate real estate, facilities, HR and technology.
I firmly believe the functional silos of the past will collapse – and fresh thinking will drive a smaller, more relevant real estate footprint.
Landlords will have to offer shorter lease commitments, rent reductions, greater flexibility in premise use – and the growth of flex space, which has driven the growth of co-working space in the last decade.
Why do we need flex space?
Flex space ranges from dynamically changing use of space to more creative options, enabling you to convert your fixed office space into facilities that better serve your business and the local community.
Why should your office not also give service as a food and beverage outlet, a community wellness centre or even training space for companies in the neighbourhood?
Home working
This year, we all went home to work. So how did that work out for you and your business?
Many workers say they enjoy it – although they were not so happy about trying to combine home working with child-care and home schooling.
Did you know:
* 75% told a survey* they were happy that their employer trusted them to work at home
* 68% said they felt sure they were at least as productive at home, if not more.
But even though nearly eight in ten of respondents felt their employer had handled the transition to home working well, less than HALF believed their company would just revert to old practices once the crisis was over.
But will going backwards really work in the new business normal?
Home workers have reported many benefits from doing away with stressful, tiring and expensive commutes; in Japan, for instance, hard-worked ‘salarymen’ who normally see little of their families are reporting increased wellbeing.
Companies with excellent access to the technology that supports remote working, such as video conferencing tools and meeting scheduling software, have reported the easiest transition – and for the most advanced, it has almost been business as usual.
What does successful remote working look like?
All expected challenges you might expect have arisen during this major move – giving home workers suitable technology and bandwidth, for instance, and (a biggie) ensuring data security.
And employers have also had to work hard to overcome that old bugbear of the remote worker – loneliness, turning to popular solutions including regular team chats, quizzes and games
But here’s the thing: they’ve achieved it – and in next to no time, too.
So now mass home working has been achieved, albeit in a patched-up kind of way, companies can begin to assess the benefits.
Employees are doing the same, for sure. And squeezing the home working genie back into the bottle might be a tough task for companies who want to a) go back to old ways and b) retain talent…
In the new business normal, flexibility will a necessity, not just a wish!
With home working experience at their fingertips, business owners can open their minds to some big dreams on future operations, where employees well supported by technology really enjoy working at home.
Maybe they’re dreaming of:
- Home working hubs where employees who live near each other invite colleagues to co-work.
- Offices reimagined as venues, where unbooked space is offered to other organizations for meetings or events.
- Workspace that reconfigures with easily-positioned screens to accommodate the daily requirements of an agile workforce, who book space via a meeting room and desk scheduling software app.. Secrets of the connected workplace.
- Secure borderless workspaces – organizations whose whole workforce can work in anywhere, with the operational infrastructure supported by integrated workplace technology.
- Remote working being positioned as a major benefit when recruiting staff, particularly digital natives Gen X and Zers.
- Offering an attractively flexible response to people’s lives – for instance, three days a week working from home, sabbaticals etc.
Collaboration tools
This new world sounds great – but keeping a remote working system in prime condition is like keeping plates spinning. It requires support, timely maintenance and good management.
Successful remote collaboration will be the passionate heart of post-pandemic business.
Video and audio conferencing have been around a long time, saving travel costs, reducing carbon and stress, but the corona crisis has seen everyone making the most of the technologies.
Effective remote collaboration draws people and technology together in harmony, even across multiple locations and time zones.
Trying to achieve this with non-integrated technology can be tricky, as anyone will tell you who has ever had to call five PAs across the world to set up a suitable video conference time.
The organizations that made the most successful transition to mass home working during the crisis are those who support their workforce with integrated workplace technology.It combines more remote working with the easy ability to use the office facilities where there is a specific need.
They can set up a meeting, book a desk if they do need to come to the office, and organize their collaboration – all from an app on their mobile phone.
Supply chain disruption
As consulting firm McKinsey points out:
“Businesses must respond on multiple fronts at once: at the same time that they work to protect their workers’ safety, they must also safeguard their operational viability, now increasingly under strain from a historic supply-chain shock.”
The supply chain for some goods will probably evolve to reduce dependence on a single country. Apple, Google and Microsoft are already looking to move hardware production away from China to Vietnam and Thailand.
Industry watchers Bain noted in March that some companies were already moving to build more resilient supply chains as a result of factors such as Brexit and the US-China trade war.
This pandemic will force businesses to focus on the 5 key steps to a robust supply chain; risk assessment, supply chain agility, better visibility supplier connections, supplier workforce practices as well as disruption potential.
Many of these things have been assumed rather than rigorously planned in the pre-pandemic world.
In the service sector, it is the widespread flow of information that will be the new critical consideration, with technology such as conferencing apps to the fore.
See how Zoom works with integrated workplace technology
For sectors such as law, a new era is being brought in by increased remote working and collaboration with clients who previously would have been considered impossible as a remote task. We could see other disruptions in the services sector, as staff become more empowered and less dependent on office support teams. Are virtual courts the next big thing?
The traditional supply chain assumptions are now one of many business disruptors, the key themes being; more local, better resilience, lower risk and greater transparency.
Leadership post-pandemic
Across all organizations, leaders will need to develop and evolve their skill set to drive their business in a post-pandemic world.
Courage to confront
Confronting the new reality will challenge many leadership teams who have sold one story to stakeholders and now need courage to present a different reality.
They will need to alter business models, growth forecasts, compensation plans, financing needs – and above all, their approach to attracting and retaining top talent.
Super-flexibility
While the new reality is not straightforward and will affect industries in differently, the way these challenges are addressed will dictate the future shape and growth opportunities for businesses.
With social distancing here for some time, organizations must begin with redefining business models and creating workplaces that fit them, installing the technology that supports remote working, effective productivity and worker wellbeing.
Openness
There’s good evidence from the pandemic crisis that businesses that are open with their workers secure the most positive commitment from their employees.
Leaders will need to learn to engage with teams that are not necessarily office based; the typical command and control structures based on presence and direct approaches to delegation will not apply.
These will be replaced by a more structured approach to communications designed to maintain “high touch” at a distance, requiring more trust and flexibility.
Caring
Managers will need proactive plans to support employees in other areas like wellness, paying particular attention to isolation and mental health.
Sadly, this is a big challenge to the previous normal styles of leadership – and many would say it’s been a long time coming.
So, what could the new normal look like?
‘Normal’ used to be a relatively standardised approach on many leadership fronts, from staff engagement to client and supplier communication.
The new normal will be a lot more about a personalised approach to management. For example, this will mean developing support plans for home workers that reflect their broader needs, from wellness to technology support tools.
Out of adversity comes opportunity
While this new normal could introduce new levels of complexity, forward-thinking businesses can use the opportunity to streamline processes, reduce costs, improve customer service and attract talent.
So, what leadership traits do you need to make this new normal a reality? I can think of three:
- Courage – to confront the new realities
- Vision – to extrapolate how the new normal translates into opportunity
- Empathy – to grow the right team. The new “followers” will be looking for courage and trust, not the old command and control structures.
So what will be different? Nearly everything.
The new business normal is an opportunity to press the reset button – a chance to address so many things that were not right with the old normal.
These range from the drudgery of commuting to work, to business models based on growth and cheap money, rather than sustainability and resiliency that serves all parties sustainably and preserves the environment.
The new normal should also be about actions that serve the global community, not just national or sector interests.
If this pandemic has served to bring the problems of the old normal into focus, we will have moved forward as humanity. That is my real hope – and as the Dalai Lama so perfectly puts it:
“It is under the greatest adversity that there exists the greatest opportunity for doing good, both for oneself and others.”