Does your business have the flexibility to succeed?
An unexpected experience
The onset of the pandemic forced companies to embark on telework, unexpectedly. Yet, despite the suddenness with which it imposed itself, many companies demonstrated their ability to adapt quickly to change, even if it was not directly part of their plans. Technology is at the heart of this success. She completely changed the way we work. If the nationwide lockdowns had happened five years ago, businesses would likely have faced much greater disruption.
For many leaders, the past few years have had a significant impact on shaping their future strategy. They provided them with the perfect case study to determine that work doesn't need to be done in one place.
But hybrid working is only a small part of a much larger whole in the field of adaptability. If some companies have adapted quickly to remote work, it is not just because they had the right tools, but also because they had an ability to adapt to change in general thanks to a business model. designed to deal with the unexpected.
Adaptability is the new insurance
The pandemic has made companies realize how quickly their markets and ways of working can be disrupted.
Although the magnitude of this disruption can be considered unique, this change is actually becoming a new normal in the professional world. Societal trends and technological innovations are changing faster and faster, bringing with them new opportunities. Your business must be sustainable. It must be able to adapt more easily to these changes, become more flexible and more resistant, today and in the long term.
How to improve your flexibility
The ability to adapt to ever-changing professional landscapes and to take advantage of new technologies and skills requires adopting a fresh approach. Instead of developing five-year plans, the consultants have long advocated a so-called “continuous evolution” approach. Rather than seeing change as a one-time “event”, it should be seen as a constant state, with companies introducing their digital transformation continuously.
To foster a more agile business model, managers should seek to identify the ways of working that limit their adaptability and replace them with newer, more efficient processes that keep up with the times.
From rigid processes to digital workflows: Back-office processes depend, for example, on the processing of physical documents and the on-site presence of employees to manage them, such as accounts payable and the onboarding of new resources. To gain agility and efficiency, managers should seek to optimize the way these processes are managed. In addition to constraining the business to a central physical location, workflows that involve a lot of paperwork and physical intervention from your team will cost you a lot of time. Digital workflow technologies not only allow your employees to focus on more important tasks, but also ensure that they can always oversee their work, regardless of where they are.
From physical infrastructure to the cloud: It's no secret that a cloud-based infrastructure has many advantages for businesses today. At the same time, hybrid working can be the final incentive towards an overhaul of existing on-premises infrastructure. It has a multitude of advantages. Besides enabling teams to work from anywhere, it provides the ability to more easily implement and adapt new cloud-based innovations as they become available in the market, instead of care about the complex (and time-consuming) integration of existing systems.
By focusing on these priority tasks, companies will not only be better prepared to embark on a hybrid system, but will also be more flexible at all levels. Implementing processes and infrastructures with as few physical and geographic dependencies as possible helps ensure business continuity, wherever employees are, even in a crisis situation.
Flexibility as the key to success.
In the aftermath of the pandemic, the companies that really thrived were those that had sufficient digital tools to quickly shift to online sales, remote working, and new revenue streams and business models.
All of these changes relied more or less on an advanced digital transformation: companies with well-developed means of online sales could easily interrupt their operations in their physical stores and expand their online offer. Office-based companies with digital workflows and advanced collaboration tools could quickly scale to remote working at scale, without having to rework complex manual processes and retrain their entire staff. Whether it's transitioning to a hybrid way of working or adapting to unforeseen future changes, the key to success is fostering agility in your organization through continuous digital transformation.
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