A promise to myself and my business: to put that new learning into action – today.
Two weeks into the Covid lockdown and we were all marvelling at our ingenuity for making the transition into virtual business practices. Across the country, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and other virtual conferencing applications suddenly went from a luxury gadget to the central office practice for thousands of workers. We learned how to work the things, with the file sharing and the mute buttons, and we developed new personal values based on how comfortable we are having the camera on, what professional clothing we thought appropriate for speaking with CEOs, from your bedroom.
They say, ‘Necessity is the mother of all invention’ and faced with the entire population house bound, an incredible step in evolution occurred in employees and employers alike.
So how can you ensure that your business continues to benefit from taking this evolutionary step? How can you carry on the momentum and avoid the easy fail of reverting back to previous business methods?
Critical reasons to harness this now
In case you hadn’t noticed, being able to offer flexible working elevates you astronomically as an employer. In fact, xx% of employees surveyed by Linkedin equated it as being worth the same as a xx% pay rise. It exponentially expands the breadth of the talent pool from which you can now recruit if you are only asking them to visit a central office two days a week instead of five. It’s how to tap in to the ocean of highly skilled professionals who find themselves compromised out of the full-time workforce at age 35 due to being a parent. And it’s certainly how to keep that enormous training investment you made after a maternity leave.
It also significantly broadens your potential client base. If you can confidently transact with the millions of potential customers who have also had to evolve their comfort zones to achieve personal relationships, you stand to market to and sell to a much wider audience.
Here are three ways I plan to benefit the most from the new skill set currently available before it erodes.
1. Show your high expectations
The first step in creating this culture is your own expectation. If you are a business leader, the targets you set and the culture you live dictates the pace and the quality level of your department or business. If you are a team member, you have the opportunity to advocate this by example by showing your skill at engaging better with more colleagues such as home workers or external suppliers. If we expect employees and colleagues to continue to use video conferencing for each meeting so that home-workers have an equal voice, then the culture will become norm. However, if we all get back into the office and say, ‘OK, we’ll save that brainstorm until Thursday when everyone is in’, those globally effective workers will slowly shrink back in to only locally effective workers as it becomes obvious that they will be left out of meetings unless they are physically in one room again.
It may be that an area of staff appraisals or KPI includes use of all available technology to achieve wide and flexible input from all team members.
It is said that a new employee is most valuable in the first 90 days before they have become acclimatised to the culture of the company. So embrace this new virtual-business skill set in your team like a new starter arriving with their wild ideas. Think quickly about where you can use it, where you can mitigate conflicts, and how that skill set can add to your effectiveness.
2. Be the change you want to see in the world
Lead by example. Now you have thought through the regular meetings and file sharing that you can globalise to include staff in any location, apply that wherever you can.
For many, it’s actually easier to work from home. Certain industries have discovered productivity has rocketed where employees have their own personal space while still being able to access 8 meetings by video per day.
Having tried to mix video conferencing calls with a busy office, my tip is, buy everyone a decent headset.
You’ll undoubtedly be busy building the new reality for your business for the foreseeable future, but the advantage is that we are operating on entirely new territory which does not yet have a defined pace, so there is the opportunity for us to newly start as we mean to go on.
3. Manage the flies in the ointment by upskilling them
You will also have a few workers who were not at all comfortable with the new way of interacting online and are desperate to make the office the centre of the business universe so that they can feel like themselves again. These could be anyone of any age; the habituals who live at the office from 7am to 7pm because they like belonging somewhere and thrive in reward structures based on ‘unproductive presenteeism’. These critics are, understandably, threatened by the new virtual connectivity of your business, so you will either need to change them – or change them out – so they don’t poison your waterhole. Your own expectations and examples of using the new skills, even in the office, goes half way; the rest comes from user confidence.
As businesses begin to recover from the unprecedented and dented business year, we all need to harness any edge we can get, and this one could play out very advantageously in the long run.
Brightbird Marketing 