This blog post is based on a webinar, Building a Resilient Business for the Future of Work, which can be viewed in full here. It is the fifth webinar our The New Workspace series. The event featured the insights of Carla Hall, Head of Workforce and Workspace, Fujitsu; Jason Southern, EMEA Head of Professional Visualisation & Virtualisation, NVIDIA; and Gerard Lavin, Product Strategist, Citrix.
The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a light on the need for businesses to be adaptable and ready to react quickly to unexpected situations. The past few months have taught us that disruption can happen to any business, at any time, and while the current scenario is an extreme version that no one could have anticipated or planned for, the focus now is for businesses to be futureproofed against further disruption.
As we look to the future, how do business leaders go about building an adaptable, digitised organisation that will thrive amid the new ‘normal’? There is much work to be done in shifting to the new dynamics of the workplace, but by utilising the tools and technology readily available to us such as artificial intelligence (AI), the digital workspace, and the cloud, businesses can stay on top of trends and stay productive.
Because of the pandemic, many organisations have had to quickly adapt and implement new technology and digital strategies in accelerated timeframes. What industries have had to adapt the most, and who has done it well?
The speed of change over the past year has been phenomenal, across a wide variety of industries and job functions. Some sectors, such as grocery and finance, have needed to scale very quickly and have been able to take advantage of the opportunity to move their businesses forward. Others, such as travel, have had to scale back very significantly. The situation has also meant that some organisations that were previously averse to remote working have been forced into change, and over time, have seen that productivity can continue under this new model of work.
Carla Hall, Head of Workforce and Workspace at Fujitsu, says the past few months have “really challenged the barriers of what is possible”. She shares that at Fujitsu, roles and responsibilities that were previously seen as an obstacle to remote work, such as service desk and contact centre roles, have proved that they can operate in a very different way and still be efficient and productive.
Gerard Lavin, Product Strategist at Citrix, also says that in countries such as Germany and Saudi Arabia the more pragmatic approach that regulators and governments have begun to take toward public cloud has helped the situation significantly. “Organisations allowed to take advantage of public cloud were able to react much more quickly to the pandemic and be more agile and responsive,” he says. “While data sovereignty and data governance requirements obviously aren’t going to change, it is nice to see some countries finally being more realistic about what needs to happen.”
A disaster recovery plan is usually designed to help businesses survive over a short period of time, but not many businesses plan for a pandemic. How do you build resilience plans for such extreme circumstances?
Business continuity, or disaster recovery plans, have traditionally assumed that disruption would last 24 to 72 hours before being resolved. Many were based on a systemic global breakdown of supply chains. However, what we have experienced with the COVID-19 situation has thrown that notion on its head.
Jason Southern, EMEA Head of Professional Visualisation & Virtualisation at NVIDIA, says that instead of attempting to predict the unpredictable, “We need to ask ourselves: What is the fragility in our business?” By this, he explains, “If we were impacted again in a similar way to COVID-19 and had to send our workforce home again or lost our entire supply chain overnight, how could we take that fragility out of our business and build resilience in? Not for the short term, but for a longer period.”
Hall also shares that the business continuity plans Fujitsu had in place, and its customer’s plans, all assumed a return to business as usual. But with COVID-19, there is no ‘business as usual’. “This is about being able to flex and adapt, forever,” she explains. “This is as much about a culture shift as a technology shift. It is not just a case of looking at supply chains, but rather empowering our cross-functional teams to be able to make decisions quickly. We cannot predict what comes next, so we need to be more agile.”
What is the role of technology in making businesses more adaptive and resilient?
According to Lavin, “Technology is key, but it is just one part of the solution. There must be cultural change, too, and there has to be the right use of the technology, at the right time, in the hands of the right people”.
Organisations must also trust their employees to use the technology they have been given. Additionally, businesses should be looking at the role that newly emerging technology, such as automation, and advances in machine learning and AI, can play.
Southern agrees that businesses should be “stretching themselves beyond the bounds of what is on the shelf today, and thinking ‘where do we go next?’” However, he also warns against applying technology for the sake of it. Instead, businesses should focus on “where it will add value”.
At Fujitsu, Hall says they have seen the greatest technology success “when the shift has been supported by fantastic comms and support networks … with the focus being to create a connected workforce”. Hall says the pandemic has forced her business to find new ways to use technology that they already had (particularly collaboration toolsets) and accelerate use of it, resulting in huge adoption rates.
Are we looking at the next Industrial Revolution, in terms of the way we work, and the operating model of businesses?
We have been on the cusp of the next Industrial Revolution for a quite some time, says Lavin, driven by the Internet of Things (IOT) and AI. He believes we “now have the opportunity to move much more quickly because people have bought into the reality of change and can see there is no going back”.
Fujitsu is significantly reducing its office spaces around the world, because of the pandemic and mandate to work from home. “It is an exciting time,” Hall says, and “we now operate our global delivery centres in a completely different way. From a business perspective, there is no going back”. Furthermore, Fujitsu has seen the opportunity to reach out to a new pool of talent, which previously might have been overlooked due to their geographic location or skills that were thought to be office-based. Hall says the flexibility of the home working situation has also opened up the job market to returners, particularly those caring for others, or suffering from chronic conditions that make a daily commute difficult. “COVID-19 is breaking down many barriers and so many benefits come with more flexibility … but we need to balance that with not losing the culture or creativity of our organisation.”
Yet, the current homeworking situation is not a long-term one, and as Lavin says, at some point restrictions will ease and businesses will need to consider how, if at all, they plan to use their buildings and office space moving forward. “We are likely to see more blends of ways to work,” he says. “The big city centre office may go but people still need social interaction, and so we might see UK banks, for example, using their retail spaces as hub offices.”
As Southern asserts, not everyone can work from home long term. “We have to account for that. We cannot swing to a completely remote working industry. I don’t think we will go back to the central office from 9-5, but I think we will use technology to enhance and improve the workday experience.”
How best can we leverage AI in the workplace, to help employees?
AI has already infiltrated much of our daily lives — in Netflix or Spotify recommendations, for example — and slowly it is making its way into the workplace. However, its full potential is yet to be seen and as Southern says, “Currently, we are in the phase of narrow AI, where it is very efficient at doing a specific task, such as image classification, and gradually it is being used to increase efficiencies in the workplace by taking away repetitive, mundane tasks”.
“AI is not going to replace everything, but it will complement it,” Hall says. One of her retail customers that uses AI to analyse data and intelligence about stores has moved from a centralised decision-making model to a more regional level, involving store managers. “It is much more enriching for the store manager if they can couple AI with what they already know about the store and make decisions very comfortably.”
According to Lavin, AI is also helping significantly in finance for risk analysis, particularly for environmental and sustainability risk modelling. “The area is evolving very quickly, where risk analysis is being augmented with cloud-based machine learning, to take expert institutional knowledge and combine with AI to get even better results,” he shares. In a recent Citrix study, 77 percent of respondents agreed AI will significantly speed up their decision-making process and make them more productive in the future.
Leaders have seen the value in digitising their business, but where is the best place to start?
It can be tempting to get carried away with the technology, but it is most sensible to begin with defining the problem, listening to users or customers, and identifying common pain points. From there, engaging with internal teams through a co-creation process and collaborating to find the solution, is the best way to build a digital business.
“Start small,” Hall says. “Co-creation really is the way to approach this, with smaller teams across the business that might have a different lens or perspective.”
Ultimately, businesses should be looking at who is causing disruption within their market, and particularly now. “Look at what the best and the rest are doing and then react quickly,” Lavin says.
