Brave Business Strategy Planning: Time to Hit Refresh
Lockdown was the biggest learning experiment any of us have ever witnessed. With office-based employees all working from home and companies reviewing how businesses processes and relationships should be conducted and managed. This new normal has prompted all organisations to undertake new business strategy planning. Using this strange period as an opportunity to discover what works and what doesn’t and make changes accordingly.
Time to get Creative
COVID-19 has forced employers and employees to enter the 21st Century by using digital technologies to communicate and collaborate with each other whilst working from home. The old age of ‘this is how we have always done things’ has disintegrated and senior managers need to adopt new ways of working and review processes.
Brave Business Strategy Planning
When pressing refresh - have a vision of where you want to get to, go back to basics and review the outcomes that you want to achieve. Next, consider barriers and identify any problem areas, then break it down whether that’s the employee or customer’s journey. Study how the process works and then re-design it in a more efficient way adopting a user centric approach.
Along with efficiency you also need to ensure that the process is resilient, and you have the capability to be flexible and iterate, to keep evolving and learning from your mistakes. The key to strategizing at this time is focusing on resiliency, flexibility and agility in all areas.
The Need for Speed
An enterprise digital solution takes a long time to deploy and are often expensive but digital solutions such as automation can be designed and implemented in days.
Get creative in re-designing processes and technology solutions to enable you to streamline processes and increase the effectiveness of customer engagement.
Digital by Design
Automation solutions will not replace humans but will augment services, for example, the daily mundane tasks can be handed over to automation enabling the humans to focus on a high value or complex enquiry that requires a chat with a human. Alternatively, if a company is swamped with digital interactions they can be managed and prioritised to be either answered automatically or by a human.
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Skilling-Up
Managers will now need to acquire skills and training to learn how to manage and optimise remote working employees and discover what works and what doesn’t. During the pandemic softer skills have been important to get the balance right between the needs of the business and the pressing demands of lives turned upside down. Managers have needed to understand employees’ circumstances better and the challenges they may face.
A New Dawn
Every business will now face a change in culture where employers will most likely have to provide a hybrid model of working from the office and working at home. Senior managers will have to ascertain which jobs are suited to work from home and which ones aren’t.
They will have to create a culture of trust and transparency. Spying on employees working remotely is not the way to go. During the crisis employees who have been trusted will enjoy the autonomy that they have been given and in turn will be more productive as they are enjoying a better work life balance. During lockdown 47% of UK employees worked from home (ONS) and more than 50% stated they would like to continue working from home or more flexibly as lockdown eases (The Times).
And Refresh
Ironically, this crisis is an opportunity for businesses to reset their strategies, operations, people and culture. Something that they may never have done if it weren’t for the global pandemic. Focus on the positives that can come out of this and design and manage a strategy that is resilient, flexible and agile while setting a culture that is transparent and trusting. We are all in this together and this is an opportunity to reset, learn and evolve.
Start your business strategy planning refresh by exploring the content from our Convergence Summit. The on-demand resources are vital for rebuilding and thriving in this new normal!
