Month: October 2020

In his latest blog post relating to Future of Work, Curzon Managing Consultant Rodrigo Quezada Dighero in collaboration with Silviu Paraoan, explores how an agile approach focused on people and customers can lead to competitive advantage. This is particularly important now, as businesses are navigating uncertainty caused by COVID-19.

In Q4 2019, companies were finalising growth targets, key priorities, strategy, hiring needs and budget. Yet many businesses have spent 2020 in survival mode, putting the 3 year strategy on hold to necessitate a short term focus on business continuity.

Now, as many businesses enter Q4 2020, leaders revisit the original 3-year strategy plans as they look towards recovery. This inflection point is a great opportunity to adapt to the new world order and practice strategic foresight, as J. Peter Scoblic would say. In fact, this is not just an opportunity; the reality demands that you revisit strategy, adapt, and align your capital expenditure to this new paradigm. Becoming agile is the name of the game, to remain in the game, and to stay ahead of the rest of the players amid the disruption. In this new reality Winner takes All, and to be one, you need, you really need to reassess, adjust and plan your strategy.

Business continuity is one way of responding to disruption. But many people – including me – hold the belief that business continuity won’t be enough. Furthermore, it could put you behind competitors and faced with the risk of becoming obsolete. The time is now to think holistically about how to create opportunities in this new reality and adjust your business and operating models to serve the current and future needs of customers and employees. Two key areas are:

The agile organisation – how are you going to create an organisation that is adaptable, flexible and agile? When I talk about agile, I don’t mean a system. I’m referring to an agile organisation mindset characterised by collaboration and creativity. This means setting up the supply chain, procurement, and people strategies. It means employee engagement and training to encourage creativity and innovation from sales and marketing to operations and supply chain. It means developing a strategy to strive and thrive.

Customer centricity – how are you going to deliver products and services? Businesses will need to evolve to serve in this new environment in which customers have different expectations and needs.

As you conduct your strategic thinking on this first area, there are a few key concepts to bear in mind:

• Overcommunication is key – align employees behind strategic priorities through clear and empathetic communication
• Use technology to augment, not replace, people
• Focus on people instead of processes
• Be flexible
• Collaborate – look for cross-functional collaboration. Maybe it’s time to start building that Business Ecosystem we have been theorising about for so long and make this opportunity a long term approach
• Keep it simple – this is not a time for dense multi-page documents. The agile approach of single-page, action-oriented documents with crystal clear communications is the order of the day.
• Embrace the new cultural and behavioural shifts

How will companies and their operations evolve to recreate the customer experience? Changes will of course create both challenges and opportunities in technology and creative approaches to developing new ways of delivering new systems and products. Done well, this can create significant competitive advantage.

The reimagining of customer experience is a challenge shared across industries. For example, how is banking going to change to better serve its customers? What will supermarkets do to enhance the shopping experience in this new environment?

According to an article in the Harvard Business Review, Bank of America converted more than 3,000 employee roles to meet the demand of additional customer calls during the crisis. In China, companies began an employee “sharing” program across the grocery store industry to meet the need for the delivery of grocery store items.

Agility is key to navigating uncertainty and understanding, meeting and exceeding new, evolving and emerging customer expectations.

The process is not about recreating or redesigning your strategy. It’s about realigning and calibrating what you had to serve in this new environment. What is the gap that has been created between your previous strategy and this new normal, and how are you going to serve your customers?

From my experience, you can do it from four dimensions:

1. Digital – What technology is yet to be discovered or that is in place today that can help you to bridge that gap?
2. Systems and processes – consider what current systems and processes will need to be replaced, modified, or switched to allow a better level of flexibility? What can be changed to allow employees to perform their job functions with excellence?
3. Capabilities – how are you going to develop the required capabilities into your people for them to identify those gaps and cover them through the digital dimension or processes and systems?
4. Physical location – covers the physical location. It is common to hear industry leaders talk about a spike in satellite offices. Is that the right option for you? Do you need to rethink your footprint or can you take advantage of your current location and layout to benefit new operations?

Finally, the most critical part of transformation is collaboration. By listening to employees and customers, you can strategise, realign the operations, and quickly redeploy the strategy in an agile way within the new normal environment.

A few companies are taking actions into this direction, and results are actually promising. One clear example is Nike which beat profit estimates in the quarter ending August 31st 2020. With physical sales decreasing due to COVID-19, Nike shifted focus to direct sales to consumer and digital channels. Their adjustments in strategy led to 82% increase in digital sales.

• How will you quickly adjust your business strategy and associated goals to reflect the turbulence in the marketplace and maintain a competitive advantage?
• Is your workforce engaged, productive, and healthy during the continued disruption?
• Is your business learning and adapting to be prepared for the next disruptor?
• How has your service or offer changed because of COVID? (Front office and back office)
• How has overall the customer experience changed in your business/sector due to COVID?
• How have you been adapting your operations over the last 6 months and how are they going to keep evolving based on needs?

These questions should help you to identify areas of focus and strategic priorities that your people can work towards.

We work with businesses to deliver an agile framework to determine the key factors to quickly adapt, optimise people strategy and enhance your digital capabilities. Ultimately our work helps businesses to grow, improve customer retention and discover new opportunities.