In the midst of this pandemic, companies have had to learn to deal with two aggravating factors: telework and labor shortages.
We’ll return to the delicate subject of labour shortage in the next post.
On the teleworking front, critical decisions are on the horizon: what actions and investments will you need to prioritize to both optimize human comfort and maintain performance in this new permanent hybrid work environment?
Telework Organizational Challenges
Is the quality of your organizational functions up to the telework productivity challenge?
Have you optimized your collaborative processes and tools since the pandemic began?
How many decisions were made in the moment before the pandemic as employees met unexpectedly in a hallway, the elevator or the cafeteria?
For example, the Sales Director would call one of his representatives in the cafeteria to inquire about the financial situation of an important Client; this same Sales Director would reassure the CFO about this Client the next day by passing him in a corridor, explaining privileged information about his situation and at the same time asking him to re-evaluate his credit rating with a view to modifying his payment terms.
These circumstances are no longer present and several organizational processes (Communication, Customer Service, Management, Billing, etc.) have suffered since the advent of the pandemic!
You must therefore fill the gaps in terms of services and communication between departments, between employees and with your clients to ensure the smooth running of the company; notably through collaboration and project management tools.
First of all, let’s remember this new 21st century adage: Paper Is a Killer or if you prefer: Paperless Business Is Champion!
For your information, you can find here how to go about becoming a Paperless Business.
On the other hand, we assume that you have a basic collaboration infrastructure in place, including the essentials:
– Secure real-time work sharing platform
– Automated document archiving process
– Office 365 or Google Workspace
– Secure video streaming application
– Secure personal computers
– Dual authentication on all devices and third-party enterprise applications
And here are a few other enterprise functions we think are essential to improve Telework Management:
PRIORITY WORKFLOW
This would certainly be THE priority among priorities; making sure that priorities are clear to all managers and, to this end, sharing a tool for visualizing the Priorities Workflow with the relevant bodies would be most beneficial.
MASTER AGENDA
The benefits of a shared calendar are well documented, especially in terms of Resource Mobilization, Notifications and Reminders. Surprisingly, few companies use such a tool efficiently; that is, with the right levels of permissions for editing, reminders and alerts.
TELEWORK PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Indispensable in the context of telecommuting, we will not reinvent the wheel, but let’s emphasize that not all Project Management software is equal! You can be satisfied with following the Work-in-Progress with a Task Synchronization or, if you look a little bit, you will find a Project Management software that calculates in real time the executed Hours and the Remaining Work, backed up with intelligent Invoicing functionalities.
Edge Process or Happiness Is on the Client Side
You’ve all heard about the latest technology trend: Edge Technology?
Essentially, it’s the concept of moving information processing previously performed on the Server side to the Client side, “at the edge”; similar to IoT technologies where much of the processing is done in the device itself, not on the Server side.
The Edge Technology trend runs counter to the Cloud offering and to that end, Google recently launched a new suite of services to meet the “Edge Technology & IoT” demand.
This brings us to the following paradox: while the majority of companies have to operate with a good part if not the majority of their employees telecommuting, and therefore distributed, their processes are still centralized at the core of the company.
So what’s the problem, you might ask? Secure collaboration tools and remote connection solutions allow employees to access business applications and processes without any hassle.
Maybe, but the fact is that no one would want to go back in time and do without eSignature applications, for example? And yet everyone was dealing with the old process where the representative had to bring paper copies of the contract to the customer to sign and then bring them back to the company. This is a process that used to be centralized in the company and has become an “edge process”, a process that is executed on the customer’s side and no longer on the company’s side.
So still in the telework movement, I think the question is worth asking; are there any business processes that would be more efficient, simpler, or cheaper if they were run on the customer side, that would be outsourced to an employee or a third-party service?
Another example of an edge process is a third-party online payment and automated transfer service that takes over the process of collecting and tracking customer payments with deposit verification that was previously done within the company by the Accounts Receivable / Billing / Accounting department.
Let’s also think about the IP Telephony Service that decompartmentalizes your phone system from your company and now associates it with an application installed on devices that you can carry wherever you want.
Thus, in our opinion, the edge technology movement and its corollary, edge process, deserves reflection in this era of pandemic and telecommuting.
Note also that in some of the examples cited above, there is the “paper process” thread that seems to be emerging, so follow the lead!
So, are you going to go “on edge” or not?
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