If we’ve learnt anything in the past year, it’s a new appreciation for the effects of sudden, massive change. There were both winners and losers – but those organisations able to demonstrate flexibility were able to respond and adapt rapidly.
Above all, those businesses which were able to rapidly modernise and virtualise their workplace technology, harness diversity and ensure inclusion of remote workers put themselves in the best position to thrive through these uncertain times.
Here are some of the ways your own business can embrace a more flexible and agile operational culture.
Reimagine work
Enable people to work where and how they need to securely, with high levels of performance to maximise their productivity. Give them tools for effective collaboration, even when they are physically remote from their customers and colleagues.
Another goal is for businesses aiming for agility democratisation: empowering your employees with the organisational data they need to perform at their optimum. Almost three quarters (74%) of businesses believe that the use of business data is key for survival in 2021.This was a key finding from our recent global research with IT decision-makers and line of business stakeholders, Fragile to Agile: Withstanding uncertainty as an adaptive organisation. While almost two-thirds (65%) said they want employees to have data access and decision-making power, the majority (58%) admit their decision-making is still heavily or fairly centralised.
Modernise for an adaptive, purpose-driven culture
Cultural change starts with individuals – putting them at the centre of new ways of working. That often means taking a step back so you can see your way to moving forward effectively.
Our new research found that 64% of businesses believe moving faster requires them to scrap their existing transformation strategy and replace it with something new. For speed, you must also reduce the ‘friction’ of change management and traditional time lags – because change must be fast and intuitive.
Continuously innovate the applications your people use with the latest updates – we call this ‘evergreen technology’ – both for good security and to help your people reach new levels of productivity. Extend the use of these applications and digital ways of working to new roles and operational areas of the organisation, so everyone can benefit. Leverage automation and AI to remove repetitive and mundane tasks – leaving your employees to focus on delivering and continuously improving on the customer’s experience.
Operational resilience
Today’s IT environments have become more distributed and diverse. The pandemic saw the rate of migration to the cloud accelerate. Now is the time for modernising management of that infrastructure to bring new efficiencies and reduce operational overheads.
Cloud migration is key to operational scalability, remote working and data access. Consequently, security is essential to cloud success; you must wrap services you deliver from the cloud in zero trust security, modern cloud management and proactive performance monitoring.
Sustainability depends on flexibility
Corporate ‘agility’ has long been considered an essential trait – especially during recent years of digital transformation and the ‘Uberisation’ of entire industry segments. As 2020/21 has certainly proven, commercial success is highly dependent on the ability of any business to adapt its operations to massive change in short order. Nimbleness – in adaptation of existing technology platforms and rapid adoption of new ones – was critical for those companies which have been more profitable than might have been expected.
Ultimately, any organisation is only as nimble as its people. Enabling them to continue to collaborate within and beyond their teams while working remotely was, and will continue to be, a defining success factor.
Find strategies for thriving in uncertain times at Fujitsu Secure Remote Working.
