The pandemic forces us to reimagine business models, intensifying 4 main focus areas

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Learn how Covid-19 has acted as a catalyst for a redesign of the workplace that will endure long after the pandemic and give rise to a new world of work.

By Keith Ferrazzi, founder of Go Forward to Work

Has the global pandemic paved the way for a new way of working? According to current trends, the answer is yes. To survive the COVID-19 pandemic, companies around the world have had to redesign their operations.

According to the 2020 Dell Technologies Digital Transformation Index , 79% of the 4,300 C-suite executives and directors surveyed reported that they had reinvented their business model as a result of the disruption caused by the pandemic.

Of course, coping with upheaval is nothing new, whether social, technological or political. But how companies respond in the future will define a new era in business. Evidence suggests that the black swan of our time how to get usa whatsapp number provided the impetus that organizations need to embark on a bold upgrade. In fact, 89% of business executives believe that if their companies survive the upheaval, they will emerge as a stronger digital business.

Through our global Go Forward to Work research effort, we are tracking a trend toward a totally different way of working. Business model redesign has led to a workforce redesign, with virtual work sculpting the rebuild. Organizations that are getting it right aren’t just moving in-person work to a virtual avatar. They are seizing the opportunities of the next generation , envisioning a new paradigm—one more rooted in the virtual world—and reinventing the way we work.

Since the launch of Go Forward to Work in April 2020, our research efforts have shown four main focus areas for global business leaders. These areas have come to the fore during the pandemic, but will have lasting implications for businesses.

1. Inclusion and collaboration
The move to virtual systems has expanded opportunities for many companies to communicate more quickly and effectively, source talent, and expand their reach.

Companies like Unilever have crowdsourced their 2021 financial plans. In the past, that process would have been tightly controlled by fewer than 20 people. The new landscape is discarding old fiefdoms and inviting leaders from around the world to participate.

Similarly, in traditional remote work, people tend to stay within their core team. But in a world where all team members have access to more information, opportunities for collaboration can also expand.

We have seen that the way to collaborate and recover most effectively is through co-evolution. In other words, all parties are interested in “reaching higher together.” They support each other in achieving personal goals by exchanging values, so that they can achieve results more quickly within a shared mission.

We’re seeing this in organizations like LyondellBasell Industries, which have significantly changed the way they cultivate supplier relationships. They’ve focused on bringing external partners deeper into their community and redefining supplier relationships. This type of “team-based” collaboration with external partners creates a strong ecosystem of support and generates new growth opportunities quickly.

2. Agility
Speed ​​has always been a business imperative. Even more so in the wake of the pandemic. Many teams have moved to an agile sprint model for project management, allowing them to operate more effectively in crisis mode.

Agile sprints break large projects into smaller work milestones that teams focus on and tackle in short time periods, such as a week. At the end of each short period, the team reviews their progress and bottlenecks. They then iterate to make the next week of work more efficient.

At Go Forward to Work, we've seen that agile sprints enable companies to transform quickly while minimizing risk.

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3. Forecast
Despite early warning signs, COVID-19 caught many companies off guard. Chinese subsidiaries closed weeks before the pandemic reached the West. These insights could have helped many companies put contingency measures in place. After all, we live in a global economy. Viruses don’t stop at borders, and neither do the implications of our business decisions. Fortunately, more business leaders are now thinking globally and making foresight an important goal.

For example, we are seeing companies establish listening posts to continuously detect and assess risks and assign each member of their executive team responsibility for specific risk elements, whether competitive or geopolitical. These types of plans will help executive teams decide which elements warrant scenario planning.

4. Resilience
Organizations today are working with employee engagement metrics. There is no doubt that similar measurements will emerge regarding resilience. There is a lot of ground to cover on this topic, and companies are just beginning to crack the code.

As our work on Go Forward to Work has shown, the ability to learn and adapt is fast becoming the most enduring skill that all workers must hone. We have entered an era where the resilient worker will no longer be a rarity. Resilience as an employee will become the primary requirement.

Winning companies after the pandemic

These four factors are not new, but they have taken on new dimensions in the post-pandemic landscape. Business leaders have always been hungry for better approaches to running their business and delivering value. But that hunger has not always translated into a new diet – until now.

In this new era, a growing cohort of executives and business owners around the world are committing their organizations to change and accelerating the pace of their digital transformation because they know, firsthand, how their world can change in an instant.