With the UK (and most of Europe) now grappling with a ‘second wave’ of the COVID-19 pandemic, business leaders are again facing new restrictions and guidelines to help contain the spread of the virus.
Ensuring business continuity and protecting employees and customers is as important now as it was eight months ago. However, my conversations with UK business leaders, partners and customers have shifted notably since March.
Earlier this year, the emphasis was on crisis management and emergency response. Now, we are discussing the longevity of the changes we are experiencing. The consensus is that the new, ‘distributed’ world of work is here to stay — but are we ready for the new ‘business as usual’?
Digital Transformation
Three ways the upcoming Now at Work event can help prepare your business for the future
I don’t have enough fingers to count the number of ways in which the pandemic has changed the workplace, but one thing in particular stands out: COVID-19 has catapulted us into the future of work, whether we like it or not.
As with businesses and organisations of every size, we’ve been forced to find instant solutions to challenges many of us weren’t expecting to face for many years to come.
Like finding ways of changing cultures in days, and shifting entire workforces from physical offices to remote working, or enabling customer service teams to function seamlessly without their call centres - at a time when clients and partners needed them the most. And now, as the lockdown measures ease, coming up with ways of getting teams safely and securely back to work with minimum fuss and low risk.
Strategy
Stop trying to remake the old; get on with making the new
I would like to start with a simple question: If you were starting a company from scratch today, how would you build the organisation and its core infrastructure?
There are not many, if any, people who would design a business that looks like a legacy organisation.
And yet there are so many organisations – typically large, long-standing businesses – that are still reliant on legacy infrastructure. The fundamental question, then, is how do we help people break this reliance on legacy and focus on developing systems as if they were working from a clean slate?
Trends & Research
Research
Why human-centric metrics are essential to business agility
Research
What makes an agile business? The key steps to pulling off an agile transformation
