New ways of working projects – offer of help

This week we’ve been speaking to a number of clients about the new normal as some people start to go back to work in offices in different parts of the world.

Most of them have set up “new ways of working” projects to consider the new normal. They have understood that we won’t be able to go back to business as usual, probably for a period of 12 to 18 months, and many of them anticipate that some of the changes, such as more remote working and virtual meetings, will become a permanent part of the way we work in future.

In this environment they know that they will need to build new skills and capabilities and that some jobs, and even whole business models, that have relied on face-to-face contact. will need to be re-engineered for this new reality.

A lot of the early discussions have focused on the impact on areas like sales, customer service and consulting where a large part of the important activity was delivered face-to-face. It’s pretty clear that most organizations will not be encouraging unnecessary site visits for the foreseeable future – so what are we going to do to fulfil these essential functions?.

In this case we need to equip our people to compete in an environment where the people who are best at managing online meetings will gain a competitive advantage. We need to re-engineer our sales process, collateral, and skills to get things done in the more challenging economic climate and when we can’t get face-to-face.

We’ve been working on ways of working for the last 30 years, focusing on remote and virtual, matrix and digital ways of working.

We expect all three of these areas to be in great demand in the future

• Remote and virtual working is likely to become a much bigger part of almost everybody’s jobs – accelerating a existing trend
• As we enter a global recession, organizations will need to become more integrated, to share resources and to deliver cross functional improvements – this always leads to more matrixed ways of working
• At the same time organizations are accelerating their development of digital solutions that don’t rely on people being available. This requires more agile and digital ways of working.

If your organization has a new ways of working project or task force we would be happy to offer the first 10 organizations to contact us a free virtual consultation to tell him about what’s happening in other leading organizations and help facilitate discussion about what you need in the future.

If you want to take advantage of this, or to find out more about our new ways of working curriculum, based around 90-minute bite-size virtual workshops, please get in touch.