What it really means to be a connected business

The whole­sale adop­tion of remote work­ing by many firms over the past 18 months has required their employ­ees to be ever present and always switched on, ready to respond to the next cas­cade of Slack mes­sages before log­ging in for yet anoth­er Zoom meet­ing. 

Com­pa­nies have come to depend on the qual­i­ty of their work­ers’ domes­tic inter­net con­nec­tions, but fast broad­band doth not a con­nect­ed busi­ness make. Nei­ther does sim­ply enabling col­leagues to stay in touch with the lat­est in com­mu­ni­ca­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion tech. 

Video con­fer­enc­ing and mes­sag­ing plat­forms have become fix­tures in the new world of work­ing and are like­ly to remain so for the fore­see­able future. Even though some busi­ness­es are wel­com­ing all their employ­ees back to HQ full time, many more have opt­ed for a hybrid work­ing mod­el. For this to be effec­tive, they must adopt a new approach and cor­po­rate cul­ture to sup­port it.

Connect up the systems

The first thing busi­ness­es need to do is to invest in an online plat­form that can bring all their soft­ware, sys­tems and data togeth­er in one place. This is because ‘dig­i­tal fatigue’ has become a big prob­lem for employ­ees dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. Their increased screen time has been com­pound­ed by the fact the aver­age work­er has to access 41 dif­fer­ent sys­tems a month, accord­ing to Huler, a tech­nol­o­gy firm that has built a “human-expe­ri­ence plat­form”. The aver­age employ­ee also wastes 21 days a year deal­ing with IT prob­lems such as out­dat­ed soft­ware. 

Angela Ashen­den is prin­ci­pal ana­lyst at research provider CCS Insight, lead­ing its work on the aspects of work­place trans­for­ma­tion. She believes that using a one-stop shop of this type enables employ­ees to focus their efforts on man­ag­ing clients and cus­tomers, whose expec­ta­tions will prob­a­bly have changed since the start of the pan­dem­ic. 

“We’ve all embraced online team meet­ings dur­ing the pan­dem­ic – and this tech­nol­o­gy will remain cru­cial as we shift to hybrid work,” she says. “But busi­ness­es need to con­sid­er how the impact of hybrid work­ing will extend beyond inter­nal oper­a­tions to exter­nal rela­tion­ships and process­es too. They must start think­ing strate­gi­cal­ly about how to take use dig­i­tal solu­tions to aug­ment cus­tomer rela­tion­ships – to stream­line process­es and improve trans­paren­cy and trust.” 

Communication keeps employees connected 

The sud­den shift to remote work­ing will have been a cul­ture shock for many peo­ple. If busi­ness­es are going to adopt hybrid work­ing per­ma­nent­ly, then com­mu­ni­cat­ing changes to employ­ees will be vital, espe­cial­ly to mobilise tal­ent and keep clients and cus­tomers hap­py. This is the respon­si­bil­i­ty of the lead­er­ship team, accord­ing to Lara Owen, senior direc­tor of the glob­al work­place expe­ri­ence at GitHub, an open-source soft­ware plat­form. 

“Giv­ing peo­ple the tech­nol­o­gy they need to work pro­duc­tive­ly is the easy part of rolling out dis­trib­uted work. Ful­ly oper­a­tional­is­ing it requires going way beyond sim­ply installing video con­fer­enc­ing soft­ware,” she says. “The real chal­lenge is to ensure that the human con­nec­tion is nev­er lost. That requires an invest­ed lead­er­ship team with a clear mis­sion and pur­pose. When you have clar­i­ty about your cul­tur­al pri­or­i­ties, you make bet­ter deci­sions about tac­ti­cal changes and invest­ments.”

GitHub has encour­aged dis­trib­uted work­ing for more than a decade. There is a fine, but impor­tant, dif­fer­ence between remote work­ing and dis­trib­uted work­ing. The for­mer is pure­ly the act of work­ing at any place that isn’t on the company’s premis­es. The lat­ter refers to col­lab­o­ra­tion by teams whose mem­bers are in dif­fer­ent loca­tions. 

Even though employ­ees have embraced dis­trib­uted work­ing – only about 700 mem­bers of GitHub’s 2,000-strong work­force reg­u­lar­ly work on its premis­es – Owen and her team go to great lengths to ensure that the human con­nec­tion is nev­er lost. 

“We still find our­selves con­stant­ly inno­vat­ing and try­ing new things to keep peo­ple hap­py and engaged – and, quite hon­est­ly, to add a lit­tle fun to their day,” she says. 

Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, GitHub start­ed a pro­gramme of events called Hub­ber Care. Its offer­ings ranged from mind­ful­ness ses­sions to DJ sets over Zoom. Man­agers were even encour­aged to start their video meet­ings off with a game of Pic­tionary. 

A work in progress

Lisa Finnegan, vice-pres­i­dent of inter­na­tion­al HR busi­ness part­ner­ing at LinkedIn acknowl­edges that the hybrid work­ing mod­el pos­es chal­lenges for employ­ers when it comes to main­tain­ing a sense of com­mu­ni­ty and help­ing employ­ees to devel­op mean­ing­ful rela­tion­ships. 

“To ensure that you stay con­nect­ed, it’s impor­tant to take a reg­u­lar ‘pulse check’ of your employ­ees to under­stand how they’re feel­ing,” she advis­es. 

Imple­ment­ing a suc­cess­ful hybrid work­ing cul­ture that keeps employ­ees con­nect­ed won’t hap­pen overnight, though. “Pos­i­tive cul­tures evolve. Cre­at­ing it right is part strat­e­gy, part tri­al and error. It means being pre­pared to fail some­times,” says Owen, cit­ing one exam­ple when this hap­pened. Dur­ing the height of the pan­dem­ic, GitHub tri­alled a movie night, but it didn’t attract a big atten­dance. 

“We sub­se­quent­ly dis­cov­ered that employ­ees felt a lit­tle burnt out from video con­fer­enc­ing to par­tic­i­pate,” she explains. “We learnt from that and adjust­ed our pro­gramme accord­ing­ly. Lis­ten­ing to feed­back is crit­i­cal.”