COVID-19 is a crisis on many levels from the health of nations to the stability of the world economy. While the immediate concerns are around reducing the spread of the virus, the financial and mental health impacts are only starting to become transparent. While governments are putting in place unprecedented rescue packages for segments of the economy, many companies have already had to implement major reductions in workforce and needed to close down. Others have had to rapidly ramp up their remote working capabilities for its workforce.
Implementing a Robust Digital Workforce enables your team to work and collaborate efficiently while being located remotely and provides the tools to adapt to rapidly changing business conditions in this dynamic environment.
ACTION PLAN
Below is an action plan to help organisations move towards a robust digital workforce.
STEP 1 – Assess the current tools available to empower your remote workforce.
STEP 2 – Evaluate how to better use your existing technologies to improve channels of communication and collaborative working
STEP 3 – Identify gaps in your digital workforce capabilities and source appropriate components to give your organisation additional options. Providing additional ways for teams and groups to communicate with each other both formally and informally is very important for remote workforce.
STEP 4 – Create the cultural awareness to encourage the adoption of a more digital working environment.
STEP 5 – Support virtual coffee breaks and team video lunches to provide opportunities for sharing and ad-hoc conversations between employees and teams.
STEP 6 – Set up a Community of Practice Group which spans across teams and departments provides a platform for additional channels of communication which during times of crisis and volatility helps to ensure staff have good visibility of what is happening within the company.
The Future of the Digital Workplace
The reality that 2020 and the coronavirus has given us, is that the workforce of the future needs to be digitally robust, able to work remotely and distributed from the teams and groups that we would normally gravitate to. Digital tools that allow channels of communication, collaboration, networking and coordination are vital to a dynamic environment and rapidly changing business priorities.
The future digital workplace will also enable fully distributed teams and the flexing of capacity to match demand by leveraging access to external workforce networks including crowdsourcing platforms.
Post the coronavirus crisis, continuity planning will require regular remote and distributed working to ensure companies can continue to operate in this way in preparation for future similar crisis management. We see these new ways of working also requiring the need for additional automation and digital assistant capabilities to augment the workforce, especially when some of the regular workforce are impacted by illness.
for more information or to request a no obligation meeting with us, fill in our contact us form or call us on +44 333 40 40 373
Related Articles:
How a Community of Practice (CoP) can help teams with COVID-19 Social Distancing?
Setting up, building & maintaining a Community of Practice (CoP)
and more on COVID-19
COVID-19 and how AI can help the healthcare sector during times of crisis
