Driving People Excellence in Remote Working World
The pandemic style work-from-home model was not the easiest of transitions to make. For starters, employees were battling one of the largest health scares across the world. And if physical wellbeing and safety were not at-risk enough, mental health also took quite a hit against this backdrop.
With instances of digital unpreparedness paired with blurring work-life boundaries resulted in dwindling employee engagement rates. As a result, businesses were losing traction and the fear of job security seeped in which further diluted employee performance.
At dentsu World Services (DWS), we were also going through somewhat similar challenges at early stages but a thoughtful strategy that we adopted quickly resulted in higher employee engagement and better employee experience for our people.
Let’s discuss the 4 point strategy that we followed to drive people excellence in the remote working world.
1. Output driven strategy for focused results
We adopted an output-driven strategy that involved setting clear job roles and deliverables with clear responsibilities. The leaders communicated the right expectations and tracked our team’s progress along with immediate feedback.
Remote working left no room for the traditional 9-to-5 setup. With blurring boundaries, we needed a tangible way to measure and review performances while the teams worked virtually. We focused on regular check-ins, daily scrum meetings, increased and open communication and flexible scheduling to maximize results. Along the way, we made sincere attempts to address the roadblocks and continued to witness incremental progress each day. Inculcating a process of self-management developed an increased sense of responsibility especially for large teams and ensured higher accountability resulting in higher output. We focused more on quality than number-of-hours booked by individuals per day.
To make this strategy a true success, there was a pertinent need to open up every possible communication channel. Only when managers are truly capable of setting the right KPIs to map performance — the employees would be able to deliver better.
2. Developing a remote working culture and normalizing it
Work culture is the common thread tying together many individuals having similar interests, priorities, and attitudes. In the past year, we observed — given that remote working takes away from the social aspect of working together in a physical workspace, remote work culture became even more crucial to bridge any disconnect and inculcate the feeling of common objectives. It also doubled as the guiding compass for businesses onboarding new talent to the team.
At dentsu, we believe in adopting fundamentally humane principles than mere profitability. We foster a culture of empathy and care. To empower our employees amidst the pandemic, we created a robust and 24*7 support system for our team to address their concerns by offering them the right tools, tips, and information from experts. Our company-wide wellness surveys and regular check-ins allowed us to monitor the pulse of our people and action their feedback accordingly. We organized online training on culture, our values and made it part of our day to day whilst working remotely. We created a champions group to drive remote working culture who helped us drive and make it operational.
Overall, incorporating positive and progressive behaviours could help strengthen businesses beyond expectations.
3. Improving employee experience using technology
Employee experience is a key driver of success for any organization. Whilst hiring, induction taking place remotely, ensuring greater employee experience was a top priority for our team.
From onboarding and training to appraisals and feedback, there are several touchpoints to enrich the entire gamut of employee experience. A simple act as checking in on an employee’s health and wellbeing could make a world of difference in how they perceive your business values. At dentsu, our human resources team turned into effective listeners and leveraged technology to understand the authentic sentiment of our employees. We introduced Denzy, our AI-based chatbot to gather feedback in real-time and assess employee experience at various touchpoints of the employee lifecycle.
4. Contingency planning for assured delivery
Failing to plan is planning to fail. Whilst we were getting our Business Continuity Planning (BCP) activated for remote working, we also focused on getting our People Continuity Planning (PCP) right. We immediately created back-ups for our key staff, and the deputies were in charge if the leader was out sick or busy taking care of friends and family. Our timely planning and reviews helped us manage our client deliverables without any disruption. Therefore, it is recommended that every organization should articulate contingency plans for deliverables (internal or external) in the remote working world that might be hugely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
A simple way to plan for such contingencies would be to acquire a team buy-in to introduce such auxiliary plans.
To conclude, I would say that as we gradually emerge from the clutches of the pandemic, business operations will continue to embrace the ‘new normal.’ The remote working model will remain relevant for some time or, at best, transition into a remote and on-prem hybrid workforce. Businesses that wish to sustain excellence will have to adopt a people-centric approach in their organization.
Are you or your organization walking down the same path? Tell us about your learning and evolving journey below. We’d love to hear from you.
Author: Shashikant Shimpi, VP and Country Head, dentsu World Services.
