The long road to recovery

The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a significant toll on human life and has triggered a domino effect across the global economy in sectors such as healthcare, retail, and manufacturing. On the other hand, it has also sparked a wave of innovations, even if countries, organizations, and individuals may not have felt ready for those changes.

Work from home

Today companies have no choice but to allow their knowledge workers to work from home, with some of them promoting the argument that this should be the norm in perpetuity, while those at the opposite end of the spectrum view the office as quintessential for work. Successful examples of fully remote companies include the likes of technology companies such as Zapier, Trello, and TopTal, with some that have recently decided to allow their employees to work from home indefinitely even after the pandemic ends (Box, Slack, and Shopify). Conversely, companies that experimented with the model in the past and decided to switch back to an office include big names like Yahoo, IBM, and HP. Since decisions like this take time, and we have plenty of them to make when it comes to the post-pandemic economy, which way to go?

A recent McKinsey study recommended a hybrid model that is adjusted to best serve the interest and priorities of each organization. Start by taking into account factors such as the ability to access talent, the productivity of individuals and teams alike, and the cost of real estate. Leaders must consider that this decision will affect others within and outside their organizations.

Consider this:

• A few days in the office every week can very well give you all the relevant in-person interaction for effective collaboration, water cooler idea generation and resulting innovation, and social connectedness.
• While offices are great at the “we’re all working on it feeling,” working from home is different. Managers have the responsibility to compensate by doubling down on what I like to call “brain massage” through coaching, enabling cutting through red tape and energizing their remote teams to work fast, which is especially important in responding to the acceleration caused by COVID-19 across multiple industries and sectors (i.e. telehealth, online collaboration platforms, supply chain IT transformation, food delivery services).
• Finally, whatever ratio between the two you decide, it’s important to have a few select metrics in place to track and improve the different initiatives.

Time to upskill

In the ocean of news regarding furloughs and layoffs, one company’s decision stood out recently. Verizon decided to retrain its employees. While I’m quite sure their executives have done the math and realized that the costs of deploying 5G, IoT, and Edge-related technologies down the line could increase exponentially if they laid off their employees today, I admire their entrepreneurial thinking and focus on responsible business practices. Their CitizenVerizon program is geared not just toward their employees with 20,000 retrained already but also to 500,000 other mostly lower-wage earners with a focus on jobs of the future, all of which by 2030.

Other corporations have committed vast resources for the same purpose with PwC allocating $3 billion investment for job training, Orange setting aside $1.5 billion, and Amazon creating a $700 million fund to reskill 100,000 workers. Not only do these funds respond to the needs brought about by the 4th industrial revolution, but they also soften the impact of COVID-19. While many industries were affected and some even shuttered during this pandemic, others saw increased demand, which created an urgent need to quickly relocate resources in the labor market. Why should you, and how can you be part of this?

Consider this:

• If you were able to benefit from government programs, grants, and incentives, then you are well-positioned to facilitate retraining. While providing services to your clients might be out of the question, use the time that your employees have for retraining either through very accessible options such as Udemy, edX, and Coursera or by partnering with universities that are under serious threat unless they can find a different model to stay relevant. Most likely, the “facilitation” comes down to creating a framework that’s focused on rapid re-skilling to transition into a new role or gain skills required to take on new tasks.
• Running rapid internal re-skilling programs isn’t enough by itself. Realize that for at least the next 12 months the “low-touch economy” (a term coined by Board of Innovation) is here to stay. It has created many challenges for businesses to provide services and sell their products to customers, but also for those who want to go back into factories, offices, and other environments where in-person interaction is required. Despite these challenges, market demand is there and favors those who can find solutions that are characteristic of low-touch supply and delivery chains (see Amazon and Instacart as examples). For some, the solution might be as clear (yet still complex) as switching from brick and mortar to e-commerce, while for other businesses it might mean that they need to pivot to different market sectors, other distribution channels, or entirely different business models.

Naturally, there’s no absolute one size fits all process to guarantee success during and post-pandemic, however, some businesses are finding growth (not just survival!) opportunities during this crisis. This is a time in which leaders should take a few steps back from working in the business and switching to working on the business, start by recognizing that what has gotten them here, won’t help them make it through the pandemic, and getting used to the fact this is not a drill. This article in Knowledge@Wharton business journal reminds me that this kind of strain felt at every level of the economy is the perfect catalyst for innovation.