Since the beginning of the pandemic the business world has changed. For some companies the last two years have created good business opportunities and a stable income. In addition, 2020 and 2021 brought gigantic digital transformation to many businesses globally. Selling goods and shopping online is nothing unusual anymore, and virtual communication and collaboration are routine. Even if digital transformation wasn’t on your business agenda before, now you and your staff are effectively working from both office and home.
Hybrid working encouraged businesses to look closer into their businesses plans and strategies and reshape them to match the new requirements. Naturally businesses were and still are questioning this way of working, instinctively worrying about customer experience, culture, leadership, workforce and technology integration.
Problem areas
Over the period of the last two years, it has been observed that this combination of working from both home and the office environment has brought a decline in some vital skills and abilities.
It has been observed that life skills such as communication and effective listening have fallen apart since the beginning of home working. Zoom and Teams meetings, and lack of eye contact have impacted on many human skills. People are expected to be able to manage themselves, tasks and time effectively whilst working from home but a lack of supporting technologies and active leadership impact on this significantly. Interactions with other people declined massively which consequently impacted on the ability to manage, lead and influence others.
There is also a problem with the content. Before Covid there 50 years of content was put on YouTube every day and by the end of the last lockdown it was 65 years. Now it is predicted at about 75 years. A lot of this stuff is not even looked at. It means that we are pumping content into social media channels, and we are not doing it right! Also, more people are using email to send out poor quality marketing information, creating more clutter. We must remember that more noise means less signal so don’t send email for the sake of sending it, focus on what’s in it instead. Many businesses are just wasting their time because they are not doing it properly. Some believe that we are living in a generation of busy idiots.
Daily messages in the mainstream and social media should also be reshaped and instead of constantly telling ourselves that we need to go back to the old way of doing business we should accept that this is the new way of doing business and there is no going back. All our customers can be found online these days, which means that going digital is not a choice it is a requirement and instead we need to get into the circle of constant change. So what’s the way forward?
Digital upskilling
Change is happening more quickly than ever before and that influences customer behaviour, so not only do you need to know where to find your customers but also how to engage with them. Technology is getting more sophisticated and human ability is always going to lag behind so you and your staff will have to catch up as much as possible.
Before the pandemic, businesses focused predominantly on three main areas:
- Communication
- Brand reputation and
- Strategy.
Nowadays, the focus should be placed mainly on updating technology and organisational digital skills. This can be challenging but it is not a matter of whether it should be done, but how it should be done.
Two things are certain:
- updating technology can be challenging
- updating digital skills should be an ongoing task
Since the beginning of 2020 we have gained more ability to adapt to change and we are more solution focused than ever before. A shift in the demographic has also been observed. Due to furlough, it became the norm that people take responsibility for gaining new qualifications and skills. By attending webinars and spending more time online people have been upskilling themselves, but there is still work that needs to be done:
Data:
- Data privacy and safety is extremely important and should be a vital part of every business. We need to start owning the relationship with people.
- We still need to learn how to use the two years of extreme data collected during the pandemic. Data needs to be analysed otherwise we cannot judge where we are and cannot improve.
Technology:
- Remote collaboration is the big one, it is the way we interact with, influence and understand others. The ability to get on and work well with other departments face to face or remotely is a must and technology can help.
- We need to learn to use digital to add more value.
Skills:
- Although individuals are taking more responsibility for their own training, companies should also add to their learning. This mix will make a massive difference.
- We should place more focus on listening skills as these are the foundation of soft skills which are transferrable and can be rebuilt.
Communication:
- We need to find a way of getting people to our websites and start engaging with them again.
- We must stop shouting stuff and have conversations that are much closer to people, talk about and do things that are a lot better for our customers. We must be more intelligent and more targeted and stop swearing! By the way is swearing a new trend on social media? Can’t we just be more polite in our communications?
Conclusion
Hybrid working brings some challenges, but I think these are counterbalanced by the positives. With a little help from IT departments or trusted IT companies like us most businesses benefit from working from anywhere. The combination of face to face and remote working is a good shift and a good change. Digital is no longer an end of funnel, you just need to be able to use your ears effectively to listen, voice to influence and data to understand, and technology can help.
Kamila Zolotar BA (Hons) MSc MCIM
(General Manager)
