People, Processes and Digital Transformation

Even companies that were great at digital transformation pre-pandemic have struggled to keep up with the infrastructure changes and demands of the last few years.

Working practices have changed, are changing, and still have a long way to go. How are we going to build better workplace communities post-pandemic?

Since 2020 we’ve been working on specific challenges faced by our client’s teams. These are a few of the key areas where we’ve seen organisations struggle:

• Onboarding new staff
• Supporting new and/or young staff members in a remote working environment
• Understanding (and respecting) each other’s workload when we have less visibility of colleagues
• Coping with a changing culture of online meetings where a quick catch-up by the kettle would have been the previous norm
• Healthy boundaries when working from home
• Increased sickness cover and how to manage handovers when we have less visibility of each others’ responsibilities
• Panic over “invisible work” leads to more “cc’ing” culture for emails (resulting in confusion over who’s taking action or responsibility)
• Increased pressure on IT infrastructure and complicated security setup for home/office networks
• More reliance on collaboration software which has little to no oversight when implemented within smaller teams (bypassing IT departments)

The pandemic forced many of us into self-reflection on the micro and macro scale. It also meant we had to learn to work together and tolerate change on a scale few of us have experienced.

In the past 3 years, my focus has shifted from traditional digital marketing delivery and training to process design. Let me explain.

Our clients have trusted us for years to train and guide them through the technical landscape. When the pandemic hit, and suddenly everyone was working from home (often without the tools they needed or with them but with no idea how to use them), they called us.

For the first year, it was about trying to do “business as usual” with existing staff. Then we moved on to recruiting and onboarding new staff (and, in some cases, whole teams) while working 100% remotely or in a hybrid setup.

It has been a journey!

Think back to your own start in office environments. How much do you think you learned simply by osmosis from being around other people?

Behaviour cues and standard workplace practices didn’t have to be explained in the past (at least, that’s how we acted — not considering neurodiverse colleagues who have always struggled). We took it for granted that new colleagues would pick up on “how things are” or how certain people “just behave that way”. To uphold this in our new hybrid or remote working environments puts tremendous, unnecessary pressure on colleagues.

This is where structured, agreed-upon processes come in. Instead of being bureaucratic and time-consuming, a good process can save time and resources and reduce team stress. At least, that’s been our experience — and we want to share some examples with you.

You can learn more about digital transformations and access free resources and live networking events by joining our online community, the TwoBees Digital Network.