The first impact is on the rented offices, whose owners will reduce their space and negotiate the price. Anyhow, the companies will need to do an objective assessment of their needs and establish new rules of working together:
- What are the roles that need to be in the office daily?
- When is it mandatory to run a face to face meeting – With clients? With investors? With colleagues? None of them?
- How to develop managerial skills to achieve the right level of team productivity?
- How to manage employees with special needs (e.g. depression, alcohol addiction, abuse trauma, and so many other situations)?
- How much is too much or too little communication with the employees and the entire community?
This period is the right time to ask and challenge the old working format to get the best solution for the coming period when the uncertainty is on everybody's lips. More than ever in the last 20 years, the happiness rate will be higher in the companies that will allow their employees to feel secure and protected while working from anywhere (in the world).
But this dreaming working conditions can become a nightmare if the companies postpone the people process optimization and automation to make their interactive experience a smooth one. They need to:
- Critically audit the HR processes
- Identify the mandatory steps to generate the efficiency
- Adopt the technology and replace the paper
- Train the employees to use new optimized processes/ technology
- Celebrate the evolution
From all the above, the main challenge of the companies remains to critically audit the existing processes and then adopt the changes, which are difficult to implement for different reasons. But if you start in time, we recommend you to consider a 30% efficiency increase, when talking about HR. There are some quick wins, such as little positive changes within the employer-employee daily experience, which can work very well, bot not on long-term.
Change is good, but people and organizations need a long-run strategy to embrace the innovation.