With COVID-19 continuing to impact people and business, the world is changing and so must we, but the sad truth is that some businesses won’t transform fast enough to survive this crisis. Estimates as to when the crisis ends vary from months or a year or even more, as many variables are not quite understood yet. Meanwhile, organizations of every size dust off their business continuity battleplan to maintain essential business functions, safeguard the well-being of employees and cashflow. Unfortunately, some very unlucky industries hit-hardest, including retail, transportation, and travel are often forced to hit the pause button, and waiting becomes the only choice. For other less unlucky companies it’s all about embracing the new situation and minimize the damage, whether it’s canceled business travel, fixing disrupted supply chains, establishing digital sales channels, stocking up hand sanitize or executing on emergency communication protocols. Those business continuity plans are usually prepared for a wide range of different scenarios, so many of today’s actions follow a strict protocol, which will do just fine for the predictable problems of a crisis. The special flavor of this situation is the large-scale home quarantined people, which makes this emergency different. With billions of healthy people sitting at home, this is the history largest lockdown, a situation the world has not seen before. Organizations that succeed leveraging the remote workforce effectively will not only overcome the crisis and contribute to keep the lights on for system relevant activities, but also gain competitive advantages for the post-COVID 19 era.
Establishing a work from the home environment doesn’t happen overnight, as it is a multi-level endeavor. The obvious first step is to ramp-up the IT infrastructure to allow secure access to the networks, followed by establishing conference tools to make virtual collaboration possible. Challenges, which today’s IT giants can tackle quite well, so it isn’t a surprise that virtual conference tools such as MS Teams or Slack seamlessly manage high triple-digit growth and infrastructure provider, such as Microsoft or Amazon supply the needed computing resources by prioritizing crisis relevant services. Infrastructure and tooling challenges can be deployed in days because this is top-down decisions, and companies have proven many times to deliver in comparable situations. By far more challenging is to establish a healthy remote working culture, which can’t be deployed top-down, it’s a product of people’s behavior, evolving. This is neither something we can simply turn on, nor can we rely on any existing playbooks, and all that on top of the stress of a pandemic, we all need to learn to switch gears to the new normal, it’s a trial-and-error process in the absence of preparation and training, which can be overwhelming, as employees have to transition, abruptly, from fast-paced offices to kitchen tables. We have seen some initial struggles with tools, now the conversation quickly becomes about how we can adjust the work from home culture to overcome challenges such as Social isolation, distractions at home and building up remote social interaction.
