Even as we start to emerge from restrictions, its difficult to remember life before Covid. The rules, the tiers, the daily statistics, the absence of friends and family – its difficult to comprehend how much we have become accustomed to. Covid has impacted all of us in so many ways, including in business. The pandemic has crushed some, turbo charged others and for most it has created a dizzying surge towards digital. This has prompted me to share my thoughts on how the pandemic has shaped digital ambition and delivery within many organisations.
Cast your mind back to your workplace in late 2019. You may have been deep in delivery of the next step on your digital transformation journey. Perhaps you had just bought a solution to enable you to interact digitally with your customers and colleagues? Maybe you were serendipitously primed and ready to deal with the impacts of a global pandemic (but you didn’t know it). Or maybe you were not so lucky…
For many of us in the UK, March 23rd 2020 probably felt like Marty McFly’s acceleration to 88 miles per hour – being launched into an uncertain future. But, during the last year, you adapted and coped. You likely had to take huge and rapid steps towards digitising your business. You will have achieved a lot even if it is not the digital future you had envisaged. Things might still be a little cobbled together, ugly even - similar to Marty and Doc arriving back in 1985 to find that Biff Tannen rules the world. Your roadmap has skewed into an alternative reality.
So, here we are, like Doc and Marty, we have to figure it out but there’s no Delorean. No chance to go back and approach our digital transformation the way we would have wanted. We need to make the best of where we are now. So, what have we learned and how can we move forward and build on the changes we have made in the last 12 months or so?
Firstly, I think technology adoption is only one part of the jigsaw. I will also share thoughts on how the pandemic has influenced decision-making, communications and authenticity at work which all in turn can impact our digital ambition and delivery.
Technology adoption
You’ll certainly have made greater use of Office 365 productivity tools like Teams and Planner during the past year and you may have embraced collaboration tools like Mural, Miro and Jamboard. Whatever the tools, I am guessing there have been some teething issues and team members may feel despondent – they’re ‘muddling through’ but unclear how to truly harness the power of these tools. While it is not the way we would encourage adoption of new solutions, the reality is that we have all been forced to adapt and adopt which means you are out the starting block and there is no going back.
We now have an opportunity to re-set and help team members to get the best out of productivity and collaboration tools. What can we do that is a bit more creative than sticking training guidance on Teams or Yammer?
· Create opportunities for purposeful play. I accept this is a term often reserved for 3-5 year olds but it is equally applicable in workplaces. Exploring the potential of new technologies can be done in a safe and fun way that allows people to explore the limits of the tools and their own capabilities – gamify challenges, use the tools to solve workplace problems, encourage new teams made up of people who don’t normally work together to come together to find new ways to use the tools.
· Open source support within your organisation. Build communities and networks to share good practice and provide support. Lockdown will have generated many experts in your organisation – find them and incentivise them to support others.
· Challenge yourself to do more. Find a ‘gold standard’ organisation in a different sector that will share how they use such tools. Different sectors are good because it is then about the use of the tools, not about the content. Also, different sectors adopt different ways of working and that helps to open minds.
Decision-making
The pandemic forced many organisations to make rapid decisions and to change their approach to decision-making. The proverb ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ was true for many businesses. Businesses changed production to create PPE or hand sanitiser or ventilators. Restauranteurs brought fine dining into our homes, local butchers and bakers took their lead from Amazon and many businesses took the decision to pay it forward. Changes to policy, for example, on flexible working were also taken without hesitation and technology investment decisions were cleared through governance committees incredibly efficiently. Perhaps decision-making needs to continue with this new sense of loss-aversion i.e. “what happens if we don’t do this”? Agile gives us a framework for this - the Cost of Delay – definitely worth a look.
Changing who makes decisions also delivers a more resilient organisation because it benefits from increased empowerment. When the Covid chips were down, leadership teams couldn’t make every decision themselves – there were simply too many. Empowering teams to self-organise and make decisions allows teams to take more ownership and feel more positive and energised to deliver. Leadership teams should provide clarity regarding roles and responsibilities and can then focus on guiding, steering and coaching teams to make good decisions. It is the perfect illustration of moving from teacher to coach.
Communications
We have all communicated in the past year like we have never communicated before but that does not necessarily mean it was all good! Communication tools such as Teams and Zoom have experienced a huge uplift in engagement. MS Teams went from 20m users in November 2019 to 75m by April 20201! Zoom went from 40k daily active users to 1.5M in 6 short months2! You may have had these tools in your organisation for some time but you probably have more discipline and regularity in the way team members engage with these tools now.
However, there is still much work to be done:
· how do we build on the experience of the last year to ensure that communications are inclusive? For some team members, these tools have lifted the formality constraints of the office and physical meetings and have given them more confidence to speak up. For others, video calls have introduced more anxiety because every time they speak they take centre stage on everyone’s screen! We need to recognise and be able to validate different communication preferences.
· if you use Zoom or Teams for meetings and workshops, think about how you can use complementary tools such as Slido, Mural and Jamboard to capture input and collaborate with all attendees, ensuring all voices are heard. Capitalising on the comfort of remote meetings and collaboration tools will allow you to take all colleagues and customers on your digital journey – ensuring greater advocacy and adoption.
· finally, we need to proactively design how we will make blended communications work. 100% face-to-face or 100% digital are easy models but when some of us are back in the workplace and others are remote, poor meeting discipline and/or bad behaviours will result in voices being silenced or going unheard. We need to get ahead of this now.
Authenticity at work
We have also experienced behavioural changes in the way team members interact now which will help organisations deliver their digital ambitions. There is a new openness - we are less shy bringing our whole selves to work (including our curious children and pets!). This undoubtedly helps achieve greater appreciation of the diversity in your current workforce and provides a great platform to push your D&I ambition further than you thought was possible. Greater diversity and inclusion benefits everyone as it leads to richer inputs, constructive challenge and greater creativity for change initiatives.
So, you may not feel like you are living the vision you set out for on your digital journey but you are probably a lot closer than you think. Don’t wait for another lightening bolt to hit the flux capacitor, master your own future - armed with the scars, the learning and the tools you now have.