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Oracle India's Country Head & Senior Director, HCM Cloud Pens His Views On How Differently We Have To Modify The Offce Working Culture
Collaboration, flexibility, inclusion, and accountability are some values that organizations have been striving for with some but not substantial progress. But the massive change associated with the coronavirus could and should accelerate changes that foster these values.
As we all are blinking into the post lockdown future, we would need to strike a balance between what worked before and what needs to be done to succeed in new normal. Collaboration, flexibility, inclusion, and accountability are some values that organizations have been striving for with some but not substantial progress. But the massive change associated with the coronavirus could and should accelerate changes that foster these values.
Remote working is not just about giving your employees a laptop and reimbursement of internet bills. It is about helping employees to set some norms and rhythm of traditional work - for example, the workday is done once you leave the office. As one CEO puts it as “It is not so much working from home; rather, it’s really sleeping at the office.” The employers need to set “office hours” for particular groups, share tips on how to track time, and announce that there is no expectation that emails and phone calls will be answered after a certain hour.
According to McKinsey, the data-based, at-a-distance personnel assessments bear a closer relation to employees’ contributions than do traditional ones, which tend to favor visibility. Transitioning toward such more scientific systems could contribute to building a more diverse, more capable, and happier workforce. Remote working means no commuting, which can make work more accessible for people with disabilities; the flexibility associated with the practice can be particularly helpful for single parents and caregivers. Hence, remote working means companies can draw on a much wider talent pool.
Office life is well defined and creates some useful informal actions. Networks can form spontaneously and there is on-the-spot accountability when supervisors can keep an eye from across the room. It’s worth putting in effort to create similar informal interactions virtually. TED Conferences, the conference organizer and webcaster, has established virtual spaces so that while people are separate, they aren’t alone.
All passion and adrenaline rush of any pandemic will not last long. However, there are ways to embed all that is giving results now and the benefits can be sizable. During and after the 2008 financial crisis, companies that were in the top five places performance wise were about 20 percentage points ahead of their peers. Eight years later, their lead had grown to 150 percentage points. The lesson: those who move earlier, faster, and more decisively do best.
Accelerate the transition to agility
Agility is defined as the ability to reconfigure strategy, structure, processes, people, and technology quickly toward value-creating and value-protecting opportunities. In a 2017 survey, McKinsey found that agile units performed significantly better, however only a minority of organizations were actually performing agile transformations. The current crisis has forced many of them to become agile —and have seen positive results.
Agile companies are more decentralized and depend less on top-down, command-and-control decision-making. In the process, they also create agile teams, which are allowed to make most day-to-day decisions; senior leaders make the more long term decisions Agile teams do not mean out-of-control teams: accountability, in the form of tracking and measuring precisely stated outcomes, is as much a part of their responsibilities as flexibility is. The overarching idea is for the right people to be in position to make and execute decisions.
One principle is that the flatter decision-making structures that many companies have adopted in crisis mode are faster and more flexible than the traditional ones. For example, a financial information company saw that its traditional sources were losing their value as COVID-19 deepened. It formed a small team to define company priorities—on a single sheet of paper—and came up with new kinds of data, which it shared more often with its clients. The story illustrates the new organization paradigm: empowerment and speed, even—or especially—when information is patchy under trying circumstances.
Another is to think of ecosystems (that is, how all the parts fit together) rather than separate units. Companies with healthy ecosystems of suppliers, partners, vendors, and committed customers can find ways to work together during and after times of crisis because those are relationships built on trust, not only transactions.
Finally, agility is just a word if it isn’t grounded in the discipline of data. Companies need to create or accelerate their analytics capabilities to provide the basis for answers—and, perhaps as important, allow them to ask the right questions. This also requires reskilling employees to take advantage of those capabilities: an organization that is always learning is always improving.
Hope and optimism can take a hammering when times are hard. To accelerate the road to recovery, leaders need to instill a spirit both of purpose and of optimism and to make the case that even an uncertain future can, with effort, be a better one.
(The views expressed in this article are written solely for BW People publication by Shailesh Singhla, Country Head & Senior Director, HCM Cloud, Oracle India)
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