Driving Transformation in the Hybrid Work World

hello everybody and welcome my name is charles ross i'm a principal uh economist impact and i lead our technology in society practice it's a great pleasure to spend the next 20 minutes also with you today talking about this great topic of how apac businesses are driving transformation in the face of changing hybrid work models big topic big challenge to help me answer some of these questions i've got a great set of panelists with me here today and i'm going to let each one of them introduce themselves so chris can i ask you to introduce yourself very quickly first for us hi my name is chris belogi i'm the head of ict and business transformation at southern cross care we cover sa nt and victoria in australia fantastic chris really good to have you with us here today and we have attila if you can introduce yourself my name is attila imam i'm the head of culture at capital a uh and our portfolio of companies uh includes of course the well-known airline airasia fantastic attila really good to have you with us as well and last but not least daryl if you could just take a moment to introduce yourself yeah hi everybody daryl mckinnon i lead the google workspace business for asia pacific based in singapore fantastic uh welcome daryl got really good sort of diverse backgrounds on our discussion today which is going to add some really useful insights for all of you who have taken the time to join us here today a big thank you from me to to you for doing that we hope we can make the best of your time some of the research we've been doing recently with google workspace which will be available for you to download um once it's published in a couple of weeks and found that while they're pre pandemic 92 of people worked fixed work hours during the pandemic that 92 dropped to an astonishing six percent so massive impact on our work lives this astonishing change has changed the way we think about work and it's really driven the development of these hybrid work models but we want to understand what do these changes mean in reality for companies and how does it really shape the flexible work policies which 90 percent of firms we surveyed have been implementing um so my excellent guests will bring their perspectives from a range of industries to help us answer some of these questions so getting straight into it in terms of the trends the tiller if i could go to you first um your company's gone through a massive reorganization during the pandemic i'm sure you'll mention a little bit about that when i when i go to you but during this time when workplaces and ways of working have been disrupted how has your ability to keep people motivated and focused being impacted here attila well thanks thanks for the question charles um and jumping straight into it the um i think you're right it's it's about uh managing um um sentiment and behavior rather than a a technological adoption change for us we've been used to um uh um you know connecting through technology uh as we're spread out across um um the region um so for us it wasn't about the technology adoption but about the engagement of of our people uh now that they've been dispersed and it was also a challenge to manage sentiment um in terms of of dealing with uncertainties as a result of it so not only was it a uh uh trying to connect people and and adapt the way of working but it was also giving um more focus on how people were feeling and thinking which of course we did before but we tended to have to do it in terms of our operational people in terms of the people on the front line dealing with the customers or dealing with you know in the air but we we very quickly found that we'd had to extend uh that support uh in fact right across uh um all roles uh uh and and across all organizations within our umbrella of companies um chris from your perspective um i feel like it's you're in a relatively unique position you're you're in terms of the aged care sector you've got frontline workers have cr clearly been at their at their coal face if you like and some of the the challenges that the pandemic has been throwing at us and your your workforce is split between them and and some of the back office support and i think clearly i these pieces parts of the workforce have been impacted in different ways can you give us some insight into what that has looked like for you as a business yes it's obviously uh presented us with a number of challenges being in what we call an essential service you know the pandemic meant that uh things got busier um we needed to get staff still on site obviously we run residential homes where staff have to attend the site um and also people in their homes that needed caring for um you know technology has played a big part of that in that you know we've been able to leverage some of the cloud tools uh without having to physically be on site so at the beginning of the pandemic doctors didn't want to transfer between one residential site to another so it was great great adoption of you know video tools to enable them to do those tele health and consultations was was really fantastic for the teams there supporting teams yeah back office so again whilst they had to maintain their workloads um we were able to shift them into some sort of hybrid working environment where it didn't really matter where they were however that said because of the nature of our business we did find that you know our office had to operate um we had to continue being here um even if we did do shift work through the office to to thin out the numbers we still had to carry on working and i think i suppose we're one of those frontline industries where you know at the beginning and we continue as i said to to make sure that staff carry out their duties effectively and support the elderly which is what we're here for and i think technology has played a big part in that and i think like all of us you know we we've we've speeded up the deployment of some of the technologies to support that and it's been a great great reason to make change within our business yeah i hear that a lot when i talk to business leaders such as yourself that it has been uh the pandemic has been a spur for uh for innovation and sped up the development and deployment of of lots of new ways of working adoption of technologies etc etc so great great to hear that daryl lastly i i tend to assume and i'm sure others sort of tend to assume that um that the tech firms are very much at the forefront of industry trends and and new ways of of working you after all sort of develop and create a lot of the technologies which enable a number of things that chris and attila have been talking about so the assumption is you've been doing this for a long time um is that a fair assumption is that is that true or has the pandemic actually had an impact on the way you are working over yourself yeah thanks charles look i think from a google perspective we've been using these technologies for many years in fact we tend to say you know every day is a workspace day for us and how we use these technologies but i think similar to other industries people always like to connect so all these technologies can help us do our jobs more effectively what we have to find is how do we actually create and cult and drive those those cultural connections that we all thrive from when we were in the office so we had a lot of lessons a lot of pivots around you know maybe transferring from a thank god it's friday event which is maybe a physical event so making sure that was a virtual event and how did you make sure you included people in that just keep those connections going and as we move back to a hybrid world it's not that we're all going to be back to work and we used to joke that was how do you get people to work and then work to people it's not that everyone's going back to the office again so how do we make sort of events like that be hybrid and so we're working through that a lot of it's taking the technology and making it work well and also getting people to think about new ways of working and how you don't have to do it just do it one way how can you take it and use that technology to solve problems and i think that's when we as humans are at our best right when we actually have a problem to solve and then how do we solve it so just switching to the challenges and some of the challenges we might face with these new ways of working um attila we from our research um a strain on organizational culture was highlighted as one of the biggest challenges to come from these new ways of working given what you've been going through recently i just wonder if you could talk about some of the strategies you deploy to keep people engaged and productive the um i'd like to highlight three of which of which all really uh um use technology to to to enable um the first one was simply a question of meeting productivity uh and given that people were dispersed not knowing whether they would be in the office or not technology allowed us um to ensure that there was transparency in information right about the meeting that would ensure the meeting was more effective so insisting on calendar transparency which of course the google calendar uh enables and allows um and accepting that there are multiple formats to a meeting right so maybe in person so maybe joining virtually some maybe just joining through a voice so allowing allowing those different uh formats to come through uh certainly helped um and and ensuring that meetings were more uh productive by being clear about what the meeting was about and i think sometimes we took meetings for granted that we could just catch up with each other and having that discipline to see whether this was a brainstorm or a decision-making uh process or just the huddle uh helped i think focus people on on meeting productivity um the other two really dealt with engagement uh and again technology really helped here the first was about reaching um allowing people to reach a help whereas before um well-being support and especially emotional support uh tended to be by word of mouth uh we had chat bots um which and which allowed people to reach out uh and and and ask for help through through different channels including the phone chat email or whatever um and what we did was we built on this by expanding the um the peer support program that we run in airasia internally to include different languages across all different countries and ensuring that case management was more effective as well um so so um that was a question of making a support um more accessible and then the third thing i'd like to highlight is our approach uh to information and um socialization and for this uh while we we had a platform which enabled information to be pushed out or people to connect we found that during the pandemic culturally we had to um invest in i suppose what the tv people would call um broadcast programming right we'd have a team which actually created programs schedule them um you know uh uh um sort out content and we literally ran an in-house almost tv channel with different kinds of channel uh channels uh addressing different needs social needs information needs um um you know formal needs and so on and so forth and then push these out so that people knew with certainty when when to tune in what what information they needed and and um um you know and and and feel that connection in a much more uh uh uh organized way rather than sort of tuning in and and and not knowing when information would would come out so three things then in in in summary meeting productivity because of transparency um [Applause] well-being support access to well-being support through a technology and um and being much more disciplined and organized about program content and scheduling to ensure that information reached people who were dispersed physically chris i wonder do you think this sort of this change comes naturally for people um i think i grappled with it a little bit but in the end i got there it comes naturally for people uh i i think humans are creatures of habit you know if we can do the same thing every day in the same way we'll do that because that's our comfort zone for most people and i think you know as leaders in a business that's the biggest challenge for me is you know 89 of you your your employees will be happy if they could sit at their desk or they could come to work and they could use the same tools in the same way they've done since the day one uh so it's about bringing that change that's one of the things i i loved about the google workspace was the fact that it forced people to change you know it's all very well giving them the tools but if they can carry on keeping their files locally or work in that same way that they used to work they will do because they're creatures of habit so as soon as you put in tools that say actually it's harder to do it the way you used to do it here's the new way and look how good the new way is and they suddenly get what we call the light bulb moment and they go oh hey actually that is much better and i think you know i've really found that once people see that light bulb moment they suddenly they suddenly make that shift off there is a new way of working there is a better way of doing it but i think as leaders it is difficult you're going to get a few people that really just resist to the nth degree they really are stubborn they don't have to change they go to work exactly the same way at the same time every day and do the same thing and frontline workers were probably easier for me because they had to adapt they had to take on video conferencing because that was the only way they could connect they couldn't physically go to meetings to meet each other and so they were forced into that which again made them change the way they approached their work we also had a lot of requirements around data capture and reporting so again we had to use tools to do that and adopt those tools very quickly so those are now ingrained into our new processes and i think moving forward you know we have made such a massive change in such a short period of time and as i said before this has been been speeded up through the whole covid pandemic and enabled us to come out at this point where we are so much more efficient in the way we work yeah it's a good point you talk about efficiency and um and so to some extent we we covered this in our in our research to understand whether this remote working these new ways of working is going to help us to be more efficient can we really i'd love to ask you this question daryl can we really innovate as well through a hybrid environment or a remote making environment can we innovate as well as we would do in person thanks charles and your my answer will be i believe we can and if we just listen to kind of um you know what attila shared and and what chris shared they demonstrated how those organizations are innovating you know in these times of challenges i'm sure the capital a team had some innovations and how they work through the pandemic by having to move to this new way of working and and for chris's organization obviously they had to drive innovation and how they service you know their residents and their patients through that environment so i think through these tools we are able to innovate is it the same way we gather around the campfire in the old days and and chip away to vent our tools a little bit different but that's the way you know society and technology evolves it's really about bringing together people with a good idea and then allowing them to brainstorm that idea and you know go over it and go over it again and then really come out with how they do that and if you think about all the great ideas whether it was done in a garage or that was done around the campfire or whether it was done over video i think we'll continue to see innovation with those different tools we're just changing the way we innovate and i notice for a fact that um you know i've had three teenagers go through the last two years in pandemic and they haven't got out to meet their friends but they've been working on projects virtually they've come up with great ideas about how they could do new ideas so i see the next generation i will probably do that better than our previous generations because we're always evolving and adapting so i would contend that we can uh doesn't necessarily mean that we don't miss being in the same room together or around the campfire but it is possible to innovate without being together i just want to focus on the imperatives now and we found from our research that one of the key imperatives for business leaders to maximize the value of these new ways of working is this need to treat all wake up workers evenly and fairly now almost 70 of the server respondents that we spoke to said that this essential office staff and support staff should be treated the same and offered the same degree of flexibility and privileges as other workers um think about that in your context chris it sounds like an extraordinarily difficult thing to try and grapple with given the very different natures of the of your team's roles um is this a big imperative for you and and how are you grappling with it or if you have other imperatives please shout out those as well yeah i mean it's a good point i think you know nowadays people can go out there and look for what is important in their work-life balance yes look our frontline workers that doesn't even come into play you have to be on site as i said earlier so but our back office staff and that's probably where the challenge comes in and again some teams need to be physically here some teams need to deal with issues day to day um the nature of our work however some teams don't um and i think for us you know we really have to gauge our own teams and really understand you know is there a need for them to physically be here can we be flexible i think we've all become certainly more flexible um we've uh you know we have adopted the fact that as soon as you feel slightly unwell or you have something you don't need to be in the office with you know you've got something you need to do it's that work-life balance and i think it's making us all readdress and assess the way our work-life balance sits within us and our teams recruitment is challenging at the moment especially in our industry so you're looking at ways of staff retention and making it a place that people want to work and if there's a balance that they want it's about listening to that and working with that yeah really really good points and it's clearly that staff and talent retention is is something which all companies are grappling with and they're all trying to find out this this this balance of flexibility with productivity and enabling innovation and um all very good points thank you i'd like to hear from attila just to understand the sort of imperatives what is top of mind for for you as you work your way through these these new ways of working are you focusing on sort of additional technologies you might need to be investing in is it around digital skills that you need to be you might need to be building your team to take advantage of of these tools are there are there other things that you're looking at sure thanks so essentially we've gone through the pandemic which has disrupted work life but as a result of the pandemic and as well as part of the trajectory that capital a companies and airasia in particular had gone through we were undergoing a transformation to become more than just an airline so here we had a transformation uh uh uh imperative as well as you know a an adjustment to the new ways of working as a result of the the lockdowns and the pandemic so what's key for us now is really to to to leverage um the the technology that we have and and the more integrated the better um to do essentially the following and connection just connecting itself is is is is important but the way we connect um has got to be more immediate right if we're going to be dispersed and not physically in person you've almost got to feel that that person is online an email doesn't really cut that for us and that's why we've we've invested a lot in chat and chat technology um including the automation of chat and so this is where google chat comes in we also need to ensure um that where we're aligned especially with the transformation that we're aligned with the direction that we're going in and that we're collaborating towards that vision and of course you know uh you can't get better at collaborating than than than with the the the google workspace uh productivity tools because we you know we found people very quickly cottoned on to the fact that wait a minute i can work on this document the same time you are and and and and it really feels as if you're sort of building uh you know working on a building together as opposed to passing it like a hot potato for revisions and that that obviously really helped and then of course uh moving forward to get teams together in a in a in a uh well a place so to speak um where where they feel that they're that they're that they're together even though they're not physically together and can set each other tasks is also very much helping that collaboration so um the point really is is is to to connect people in them in a more immediate way um to align uh people and get them collaborating uh uh again in real time and and and um together virtually right um it goes a long way in terms of uh providing um you know a a a virtual way of working even though we're not physically together and aligning them towards the the direct the new direction of the company so that's where the imperative is it's reconnecting the people our people with each other but also reconnecting them with this transformed organization and the transformation process that's sort of taking place in real time and that's where the imperative lies of course i can talk about the specific lines of business that we're in and and where we're pushing in terms of regionalization and so on but from a cultural perspective i would say that's top of mind right now so we are unfortunately out of time um i'd like to uh pass a big thank you to each of my panelists thank you to chris thank you to attila and thank you for to daryl for for being very generous with your time here today thank you to everybody out there as well for um giving us some of your time to listen to this discussion hope you found it interesting i hope you learned something during this discussion as well i certainly have done um and i look forward to sort of having the opportunity to speak to you again in the future i hope you all enjoy the rest of your day and thank you very much

2022-08-30 09:42

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