remote working Archives - �鶹ԭ�� Australia & New Zealand News Center

Turning Isolation into Innovation

�鶹ԭ�� News — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 05:18:47 +0000

Physically distanced from their staff and customers, businesses have found new ways to connect and create during the COVID-19 crisis.

In normal times, innovation is about doing things differently to achieve a better outcome but in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, innovation has more often been about survival. “Most businesses – including ours – had to innovate just to carry on,” says Des Fisher, innovation principal at �鶹ԭ�� Australia & New Zealand.

The most profound change for the enterprise software company was an immediate pivot to all-digital communications with its clients. Ideation is the bedrock of innovation and most of its key tools, such as sticky notes, whiteboards, meetings and workshops, vanished overnight. “No face-to-face – that struck fear into my heart,” says Fisher.

“Chemistry is so useful when you’re innovating; if you’re not engaging properly with people it’s unlikely to amount to much.”

Fisher says that some �鶹ԭ�� clients were initially slower to embrace ideation with digital tools because they were in pure survival mode. “We had to rescue the concept of digital ideation and apply humanity to the technology,” he says. “Engagement is still vital, we just deliver it in a different way.”

Companies also needed to find ways to support their staff who were working from home. In a worldwide COVID-19 initiative, �鶹ԭ�� made its freely available, allowing businesses to do fast and frequent “pulse” surveys of their employees and customers. Australia Post, for example, coping with weeks of Christmas Eve-level parcel volumes, did regular employee pulse surveys to gauge morale and fatigue.

on how its workforce was feeling and how the management team could help. “Organisations are communicating a lot more frequently with their staff and customers, which improves engagement and trust,” says Fisher.

“A data-driven means of understanding how people feel is crucial.” A third major innovation has been using data and digital capabilities to monitor critical infrastructure in hospitals, such as air-conditioner operating pressures and filtration units that keep staff and patients safe. “Most organisations collect a vast variety and volume of data.

Listening to what that data has to tell us can help to improve safety and operate assets more reliably and sustainably,” says Fisher. “This is the next wave – to make better decisions using the wealth of data available to us and reinvent the way that businesses run.”

The post Turning Isolation into Innovation appeared first on �鶹ԭ�� Australia & New Zealand News Center.

�鶹ԭ�� Adaptive Strategies: IAG ‘buddies’ tech staff with business for remote work transition

Fred Azis-Laranjo — Mon, 24 Aug 2020 01:47:41 +0000

Progresses two-year-old ‘ready for anything’ approach.

Insurer IAG created a “buddy system” that paired technology staff with people in its business divisions to help understand some of the problems created by COVID and how IT might assist.

Executive general manager of enterprise service in IAG’s technology division, David Earls, told he viewed the buddy system as “the standout” initiative that IAG had pursued during COVID.

Technology to the rescue

IAG has a few initiatives to choose from here, including a .

Earls said the buddy system saw “everybody in [IAG] Technology sign up to ‘buddy’ with a colleague in one of our business divisions to help smooth their transition to home.”

Buddies were members of Technology “who clearly had basic skills that would help understand the problems that were being faced, and also help to get them fixed for those individuals.”

“I found that we built great relationships across the business, across our teams, and we got a better understanding of the problems that our users were having when we did that move,” Earls said.

“I would call out the buddy system as being probably one of my highlights [in IAG’s response].

“It goes to the heart of the culture at IAG where we really are about making the world a safer place and helping each other.”

Culture driving change

Earls said the cultural piece formed the backdrop of every decision – and direction – taken by the Technology team at IAG.

Earls’ own specific area, enterprise service, is a group function that delivers “efficient, secure and standardised [IT] services across our divisions and geographies.”

“It includes the management and transformation of our people and finance systems to support a data-driven business with increasingly real-time information to inform better decision making for our business and for our customers,” he said.

“It [also] includes our tech support for our colleague experience, enabling them to be ready for anything, [and] our underlying infrastructure and transition to software-defined and cloud-based services.”

Earls noted that COVID was simply the latest in a long line of issues that IAG had to deal with over the past year, including the 2019/20 measles outbreak in New Zealand, Australia’s bushfires, and floods and hail storms.

All of these events “had a massive impact on our business and our ability to react and support our customers in their moment of need,” he said.

The right foundations

For IAG, that meant the company was already building ‘ready for anything’ capabilities for staff.

“We believe we’ve been on this journey for over two years now,” Earls said.

“We already had a backlog of things we wanted to investigate further because we were already on this journey.

“So [COVID] was really an acceleration of that backlog to deliver the extra things that would make this easier and better for our employees and a more engaging experience.”

Earls said that the work this year is mostly focused around improving employees’ ability to work from anywhere.

“We’ve been doing a lot of work this year to ensure that our digital workplace is ready and enabled for anybody to work from anywhere, to have enhanced communication and collaboration from anywhere, and to be able to engage our customers from anywhere,” he said.

“Pre-COVID, our business already made major steps to embrace flexible working and more remote working for our employees. That was a conscious decision by our businesses at every level, because we wanted our people to give their best to IAG when they were able to give their best.

“Thirty (30) percent of our staff were predominantly working from home pre-COVID. We had already created the patterns and the designs that allow us to securely allow people to work from home in a good manner, allowing them to be highly productive, and to communicate and collaborate efficiently with their teams and other teams across the organisation and with their customers.

“COVID clearly was the next step because we’ve gone from 30 percent to high 90s percent working from home on a permanent basis, not on a predominant basis.”

***

To watch replays where other businesses discuss their responses to the pandemic,

This article first appeared on .

The post �鶹ԭ�� Adaptive Strategies: IAG ‘buddies’ tech staff with business for remote work transition appeared first on �鶹ԭ�� Australia & New Zealand News Center.

Ensuring Business Continuity and Collaboration During These Uncertain Times

Evan Mantis — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 02:54:14 +0000

This is a very challenging time for businesses and industries everywhere. Regardless of the industry sector or size of the organisation, everyone has felt the impact of COVID-19, particularly as border controls became more stringent and the movement of people and goods more restricted.

that supply chains are broken, exemplified through a lack of visibility, lack of collaboration, and lack of coordination.

Since most supply chains are based on transaction and reactive models, multi-faceted supply networks cannot adapt quickly enough to spikes or drops in demand. COVID-19 has inadvertently demonstrated the weaknesses of this system and highlighted the need for change.

Digital technology platforms can create the transparency and connectivity necessary to mitigate risks and navigate through crises. Visibility across supply networks is vital in response to emergencies. – ensuring that they were able to quickly develop a temporary hospital and use those beds to treat patients with COVID-19.

This is a time to unite, to focus on everyone’s safety and assist those we can. In response to the huge shifts we are seeing globally across industries, �鶹ԭ�� recently hosted a series of virtual forums called . There were seven industry-specific episodes focused on key challenges, solutions, and learnings from this current crisis.

Also, to help guide businesses through this challenging period, through the crisis period, to support an enhanced supply chain and improved experience management. These two critical branches of business dictate an organisation’s success – because a company’s ability to provide the right product and service to customers and staff is paramount.

Supply Chain Management and Disruption
�鶹ԭ��’s primary focus has always been helping businesses anticipate and adapt to change through technology. Looking at supply chains, we’ve already seen the importance of interconnectivity, the ability to create transparency across supply networks that is embedded across different organisations, departments, and borders. The more connected we can make disparate systems and processes, the greater visibility we can create across supply chains to better manage sudden spikes in demand.

The ability to intelligently manage supply chains with data driven insights helps business plan, adapt, and grow. It’s about understanding planning as a service, which is possible through , which is freely available for business looking to scenario planning and evaluation of supply chain impacts, options, and financial implications.

The also broadens the visibility of organisational supply chains to gain an understanding of suppliers’ situations, analyse risks, and better manage the experiences of staff and suppliers throughout the business ecosystem.

Using this solution, businesses can gather feedback suppliers to understand potential supplier restraints and delivery timelines risks, areas for optimisation, and ways to better collaborate with suppliers to ensure business continuity even during crises. This is critical as suppliers, staff, and customers all face extraordinary challenges and organisations must be seen as responsive and communicative.

Communication and Support for People
Building team cohesion during crises, or reskilling them for organisational changes, is vital. Employees need to feel heard and supported, which is why their engagement can be better managed and understood through platforms like Qualtrics.

using Qualtrics to understand how staff are feeling, the associated root causes, and what they can do to help. With the ability to provide this quick and convenient service across any device helps keep volunteers engaged and provides significant insights for improvement.

St John Ambulance also noted that the speed and ease at which Qualtrics was able to go live, the in-built reporting tools, and automatic alerts, have all made the volunteer experience easier to manage and understand.

The data insights produced during this time of crisis will help business safeguard themselves from future impacts, building resilience and discovering best practice. It is a challenging time, but it also presents an opportunity to refine practices and ensure that everyone is kept informed and safe.

�鶹ԭ�� is here to help and provide assistance for any business struggling to digitally transform and adapt to these rapid changing circumstances. to the second edition of the – going live on August 6^th 2020.

This article originally published on .

The post Ensuring Business Continuity and Collaboration During These Uncertain Times appeared first on �鶹ԭ�� Australia & New Zealand News Center.