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Filling the Gap Caused by the Pandemic and the Great Resignation

Filling the Gap Caused by the Pandemic and the Great Resignation Image Credit: hadrian/Bigstockphoto.com

Two massive cultural shifts - mandatory remote work caused by COVID-19 stay-at-home orders and the Great Resignation - have revealed gaps in company processes.

We’ve all seen or experienced the massive switch to remote work brought on by COVID-19. Companies that previously insisted that in-person employment was the only way to ensure productivity are now embracing remote and hybrid work environments. Even as COVID-19 rates reduce, a full return to the office is out of the question for most companies.

Investments in collaboration tools such as Zoom or conferencing software, recording and transcription software, and project collaboration tools are now baked into the budgets of nearly every company. This is, indeed, “the new normal.” Just as businesses began setting up new processes for remote work environments, the Great Resignation caused more turmoil and change.

Workers aren’t willing to be loyal to companies at the cost of their own upward mobility, paycheck, or fulfillment. They are taking the bet that the grass will be greener at different companies or in different roles. The general belief is that it is easier to move forward in your career and to find better working circumstances by switching companies rather than sticking it out at the same company for years. All of this means that employees are leaving their jobs en masse, and it’s getting harder for companies to hire and retain talent.

Now, between the constant employee churn and the remote nature of work, we’re noticing that:

  • It’s harder to spot inefficiencies in our business - people aren’t next to each other chatting about how to fix a problem and improve a process, answers are delayed, and miscommunications occur.
  • Leaders have lost the advantage of glancing up from their desks to see teams swivel chairing and problem-solving. Previously, a problem may have been brought up and a plan put in place by a short discussion near the water cooler. Now, when leaders are made aware of problems, they need to plan for meetings and create agendas.

Now, with the Great Resignation causing high rates of employee turnover, the issues of remote work are becoming more prevalent. If it’s hard for people with tenure at a company who know each other and the business to make the adjustment to remote work, imagine how challenging it is for brand new employees. New employees don’t have the institutional knowledge of where siloed information is kept, and they don’t even know who to ask. This sort of gap slows down processes, creates duplicate work, and can reduce the speed of business to a crawl.

We’ve seen what happens to companies that cannot pivot and adjust quickly in times of crisis. Most of them are no longer here.

People-based fixes

So what’s the solution? First, leaders need to get rid of the out-of-sight-out-of-mind mindset. With remote teams, no news isn’t good news. You need to seek out areas for improvement proactively. It’s no longer apparent when employees aren’t in the office, are frustrated with technology that isn’t working, or can’t figure out how to execute a task.

At brightfin, our game plan for seeking greater insight into our teams’ abilities and progress is threefold:

  • Put Boots on the Ground: To find out how our teams are really doing, we need to overcome the remote nature of work. Our leaders are traveling more to get face time with team members. This helps us discover skill and process gaps before they become crevasse-sized problems. We’re individually building our collective knowledge through these visits and finding ways to improve processes as well as team members’ work environments.
  • Create a Process Improvement Committee: Composed of team members who are hyper-focused on results and rooting out inefficiencies within systems, continuous improvement is the mission of this committee.
  • Institute the Innovators Circle Program: To reward team members (below management level) for ideas that make our jobs more efficient, institute a program that rewards innovative thinking and ideas for improvement. A reward structure might look like an initial payment for the idea, an additional bonus if it is implemented, and company-wide recognition.

System-based fixes

The struggle to optimize remote teams is common to corporations around the globe. And in times when you don’t have boots on the ground (as mentioned above), the solution to optimization has to be found via remote systems. There are several actions that most businesses will need to take if they want to fill the gap:

  • Enable the move away from manual spreadsheets and into a fully digital work environment where they can:
    • Visualize mobile, telecom, and cloud spending in one unified dashboard instead of downloading information from multiple sources and attempting to compare.
    • Automate IT invoices in a single place (this saves time and expenses).
    • Eliminate time-consuming manual entry of assets and enable better tracking of tickets in one system vs. multiple.
    • Implement the ability to allocate IT costs by department, project, or location.
  • Increase efficiency by handling the entire mobile device lifecycle management in one system.
  • Provide a Unified Endpoint Management system that allows IT teams to track their mobile devices, wipe them clean (if necessary) and prevent phishing attacks.

According to Gartner, 48% of employees will remain in a remote working environment post-pandemic. That’s up from just 30% before COVID. This means improving processes for remote workers is critical because they aren’t going away. A large portion of this responsibility will fall on the shoulders of IT professionals who will move from setting up computers with the right programs, accesses, and so on to being a huge part of ensuring that work can be facilitated at all.

And, again, it isn’t just the remote nature of work that IT leaders will need to contend with. Another consideration for IT leaders is the increased use of “contingent” or “contract” workers as a result of the Great Resignation. According to Gartner, 32% of companies are replacing full-time workers with contract workers. IT staff will need advanced capabilities to set up remote workstations and then promptly disable and wipe them as contract workers are phased in and out based on demand.

Streamlining operations, roles, and processes should always be a goal for companies. The pandemic and recent Big Quit spotlighted the gaps and weaknesses in processes and the need for more efficient workflows. Duplicate documents, siloed software, and swivel-chairing were apparent over the last year and a half, and IT leaders must partner with company leaders to seek out these gaps and bridge them before they become cracks in the company.

Author

Ed Roshitsh is the CEO of brightfin, a technology expense management software and services company. Ed is the former CEO of Dude Solutions, which he lead to a successful exit in 2019. Prior to Dude Solutions, he served in senior executive roles at PointClickCare, Granicus, Vertafore and Blackbaud. He has also served as a board member at Intelex and Granicus as well as advising a handful of startup software companies.

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