When Covid-19 changed the world overnight, consumer behavior became radically inconsistent. Customer needs and priorities changed and to accommodate their new requirements, companies had to make speedy decisions and increase productivity in new ways leveraging technology and data. Today, speed and agility has become the basic norm for organizational success.
According to a McKinsey article, a speedy company can expect several powerful results like increased customer responsiveness, improved capabilities and enhanced performance, in terms of return on capital, revenue, and cost efficiency. Reinventing an organization to attain greater speed by design requires making some permanent structural changes. Here are a few actions to help organizations achieve sustainable speed.
Source: McKinsey & Company
- Speed up and delegate decision making
The pandemic has proved that companies are capable of making faster decisions. To make this more permanent, companies should:
- Reduce the number of meetings and lower the number of decision makers
- Hefty PPTs need to be replaced by two pager documents
- Adopt just-in-time planning with the mantra “quarterly is the new annual”
- Top leaders to focus on most important tasks and delegate non-mission-critical decisions
- Step up execution excellence
Instead of tightening organizational control, company leaders must delegate more responsibility to frontline workers. For strengthening the execution muscle throughout the organization, employees must be equipped with the right skillset that make smaller teams capable of functioning autonomously while being aligned to broader company objectives. Setting a precise agenda for the team, and tracking its progress regularly is needed here. Targeted programs, realigned incentives and new rewards and recognition programs must be created to celebrate speed and excellence of the deserving teams.
- Cultivate extraordinary partnerships
Keeping up with the current pace of change is difficult for any organization by itself even if it is leveraging technology and innovation. The new normal has given rise to a more connected world that is erasing the traditional boundaries between manufacturers and distributors, buyers and suppliers, and employers and employees. Partnerships have become very crucial when dealing with complexity and disruptions. A deeper relationship must be forged with partnering companies on the basis of trust for the ecosystem to be fast enough.
- Flatten the structure
For an organization to be speedy bureaucracy must be kicked out and processes must be simplified. Organizational hierarchy needs to make way for leaner and flatter structures, enabling quick response to fast emerging challenges and opportunities. Traditional structures of power must be reorganized to make space for more “doers and deciders”, so that the company is made up of a dynamic network of teams. Silos must be broken, and people with different capabilities must be put together in a team to accelerate innovation and increase output.
- Create nimble, empowered teams
Companies need to unleash “small, focused, cross-functional teams” commonly referred to agile teams that are given a specific mission and whose progress is tracked and measured daily. Deploying many agile teams across the organization and enabling them with apt processes, structures and culture allows the entire enterprise to move faster. Companies with agile teams had an extra edge when the pandemic struck, hence the effectiveness of agile teams is well-proven.
- Making hybrid work model effective
With remote working model proven to be so effective, working in the new normal is expected to be hybrid in nature, where people will work from office and home, and as permanent employees and freelancers. Companies must provide the right digital infrastructure to enable smooth working and collaboration while formulating new norms to foster social cohesion among employees.
- Field the leaders of tomorrow
The pandemic gave rise to situations where people broke ranks to get the work done. Company leaders witnessed certain employees step up their game and face challenges under uncertain circumstances. It is now up to the company leaders to handpick such performers and leverage their caliber to get the organization up to speed.
- Learn how to learn
The pandemic has demonstrated that companies must be flexible, and ready to learn and adapt as the situation demands. With accelerated adoption of digital, automation and robotics, Industry 4.0 will displace old jobs and give rise to new job roles. Companies must work out ways to reskill and upskill their employees at scale to thrive in the upcoming decade.
- Reassess the role of leaders and CEOs
The pandemic brought many fundamental changes to the role of leaders. In the next normal, business leaders must hold on to these new norms, where business leaders need to be visionaries and not commanders. They must build focused teams, give them an objective and provide adequate coaching empowering them to achieve those objectives. The responsibility of the leaders of the future is to inspire organizations, and induct energy and passion in order to accelerate change, innovation and growth.
