Agility, purpose, trust: Enabling collaboration during times of dynamic change

Agility, purpose, trust: Enabling collaboration during times of dynamic change

Businesses in the UK continue to face increasing pressure, due to the changes brought on by the pandemic and Brexit. Gene Farrell, Chief Strategy and Product Officer at Smartsheet, explains how businesses can face these new challenges and emphasises the importance of dynamic thinking.

The dual impacts of Brexit and the pandemic have led the UK to enter its first recession in 11 years. With trading conditions extremely tight and the furlough scheme expected to end after Q1 2021, organisations are under immense pressure to do more with less. Apart from a few essential industries, most businesses have reduced staffing levels and are now in a protracted hiring freeze. This has led to a stripping of knowledge, requiring many organisations to assess how best to reorganise business functions and make more efficient use of staff and IT systems.

According to an analysis of the health, economic and social effects of COVID-19 at the end of 2020, containment restrictions have had major impacts on the economy and public finances. Coupled with this, the impact of Brexit is forcing more pressure on businesses due to an increase in import and export procedures, new regulatory requirements and additional human resources issues. Although many of these issues are shielded by the transition period, organisations need to prioritise putting the proper systems in place while supporting their remote workforce, which is experiencing the second largest decline in productivity since records began in 1959 according to the Office of National Statistics (ONS).

Road to recovery

Through all the data, there are still strong signs of economic recovery – a trend that will continue to accelerate alongside the rapid pace of the vaccination roll-out. Yet in the short term, many businesses are expecting a depleted workforce to deliver more with less, forcing senior leadership to look at ways to improve the efficiency of operational tasks. And in some instances, how technology can be used to automate or streamline processes.

A recent report by Smartsheet that surveyed UK respondents, including a dozen in-depth interviews, paints a mixed picture of the UK position. Overall, the findings revealed that many businesses have adapted at speed, proving that working remotely can work. However, some organisations over-indexed on excessive video calls and chat threads impeding real collaboration and productivity. The survey found that during the first wave of the pandemic, 53% of employees felt like they weren’t ‘on the same page’ as their colleagues, and 68% felt distracted by too many chats, phone calls and email conversations. As one interviewee, a senior marketing professional from retailing, described it: “The impact of this is on people and collaboration. How do you build a relationship when you’re staring at a screen? How do you build trust to have honest conversations? In a face-to-face meeting, you know when to interject, because you can see people’s body language, and you can sense their tone, whereas it’s all so much more stilted online… It’s the quality of those collaborations, not the nuts and bolts of the data being shared.”

The research also suggested that 88% of UK employees thought that the amount of time spent on video calls made it hard to get work done. Younger workers were even clearer on this, with 92% of Gen Z workers and 91% of millennials agreeing. As a manager within telecoms put it: “At the beginning we got into over-communication mode, where everyone was over-communicating about everything… We’ve got to a point where you have to replicate those quick 10-minute conversations versus everything being a half-hour Zoom call.”

The report uncovered three key values that many business leaders see as critical to not just overcoming the short-term challenges prompted by the pandemic and Brexit, but to longer-term strategic aims to improve productivity. In broad terms, these fall into the buckets of agility, purpose and trust.

Encouraging agility

The past year’s health and economic shocks have demonstrated that organisations unable to adapt to sudden consumer or operational shocks tend to struggle the most. To stay relevant, companies need to be agile, keeping up with customers’ needs in the moment, but the shift to a hybrid or remote setting has made this more difficult. As a result, many organisations are moving towards applications and collaborative solutions accessible via the cloud to better facilitate use by a more distributed workforce. As a manager within the UK energy sector described it: “COVID has forced us to at least try some of these tools. We would probably never have stood up five or six different document and comms collaboration tools simultaneously, but for COVID.”

Openness to new tools and flexibility in ways of working is crucial, but organisations must think strategically. Business leaders should consider ease-of-use, multi-function capabilities and integrations with their existing applications to ensure value across the whole organisation.

Empowering purpose

Another strategic direction is an increased focus on purpose. Brands that know why they exist and who they serve often flourish, but to achieve this, organisations also need to invest time in helping staff refocus on those core purpose-driven tasks. With 40% of the UK workforce still working remotely, organisations are realising that some employees may take to the new world like ducks to water, but not everyone will, so it is crucial to invest in tools that empower everyone. Working remotely can involve a steep learning curve, so implementing technology that enables teams to create processes and workflows without the need to code can alleviate that negative impact.

Earning trust

Creating and then empowering this defined purpose can align an organisation, subsequently building trust from the inside out. Brands that act in conflicting manners can lose the trust of customers, especially during times of uncertainty. This means that active communication among staff, partners and customers is vital. As a manager with the energy sector described it: “We always underestimate those changes… There will be a lot of people who will be on the bottom and you need to bring everyone together. So, communication and training has to ensure that a very big part of the people are together with you.”

The age of collaboration

These challenge-driven opportunities have led to a rise in collaborative work management technologies that allow organisations to collaborate on work in real-time, automate workflows and deploy new processes at scale. In simple terms, they are often used to codify a known, real-world workflow into a software-driven process that keeps teams focused on work and unlocks innovation. UK organisations have recently adopted these systems, including parts of the NHS that rapidly rolled out solutions to help track supplies and fitting of personal protective equipment (PPE).

Looking forward, events like the pandemic and Brexit force changes, and organisations must have the ability to adapt to the situation while also preparing for what’s next. This will likely mean more use of cloud-based technologies to allow for streamlined collaboration not tied to a physical location. Pre-pandemic, many businesses took a ‘top-down’ approach to Digital Transformation, led by IT or senior stakeholders. Others left individual teams and departments to choose their own solutions but didn’t roll these out across the organisation. Moving forward, more organisations will look to use more company-wide and increasingly dynamic work management technologies that both employees and IT leaders can agree on, ultimately encouraging agility, empowering purpose and earning trust.

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