Skill Shifting During Pandemic!
Companies, agencies, corporates, organizations, and workforces, skilled workforces always work in order. The order comes from predictability, clarity and we are attuned to derive that with basic working protocols, SLAs, Job Roles and Responsibilities, ROIs, and measures. A company that prides on incremental progress has its roots in excelling in having maximized productivity and the ability to control it in the smallest of action.
Matured industries are blessed with best practices and years of experience that well define structure, operations and internal processes. Combination of tacit and non-tacit knowledge, cultural practices, and swiftness with which companies detect and correct the gaps with incremental corrections.
That was when we were in the normal world, without Pandemic. Working within known world order was very much about creating strategies, achieving sales targets, goals, and innovating to stay ahead of the curve. What is happening to our fine matured corporate order right now?
Hibernating!
Everyone is in Survive & Sustain mode!
But there are some organizations like, Zero Gravity Communications that are working to shred the uncertain clouds of corporate future by going BEYOND.
How?
1. Exploring unknown strategies
- Open for ideas – however crazy and whomever they are coming from everyone is ready to listen. Might not have the courage or resources to act upon them but for sure listening is on. Almost everyone with a professional background has attended a webinar or knowledge platform to acquire knowledge hoping that will help open new perspectives.
- Suddenly Corporates have patience – Everyone is talking about empathy, mental health, wellbeing, collaboration, and contribution beyond the purpose of lasting and surviving. Companies want to put employees and partners first while balancing the vendors and relationships.
- There are no Customers – No one is talking about selling to customers, it is all about entertaining, engaging, and keeping them connected is all corporate care. Such surreal thoughts wouldn’t have been there in the wildest imagination of any big consulting firm or CEOs while charting out the 2020 agenda.
2. Innovating their products and services stack
- Adapting relevant with a swift pivot – Companies going over video conferencing services, to creating sanitation products. Traditional sales are overtaken by digital channels that earlier weren’t a priority.
- Interim services or products – A food delivery shifting to delivering grocery, or bike-share fleet doing Vegetable delivery, Microsoft service provider chasing new clients for migration projects in lockdown. Essentials, Tech, FMCG, Services all on edge to be purposeful.
And, while doing all this another important aspect is to stay afloat.
3. Conserving to last
- Cost-cutting emails to vendors: Every servicing vendor has within a week or 10 days of lockdown has got an email asking for a discount, delay, or hold of services. All advertising put on hold, campaigns suspended, development projects held back, expansion plans put on the backburner and everyone is out to hold their servers ( if they are lucky to have. )
- Employees face an unknown future: Across the world, Airbnb to Ubers some with heart and rest without much effort is laying off the workforces. Some holding with words of promise to join hands in a better time and rest leaving the people hanging high and dry.
- Limiting Exposure: Organizational internal financial institution health is also on test. Liabilities or exposure, flaws in business models, or fudged numbers on sales everything is out there to get exposed in wake of the pandemic. The restaurant industry which always rested on the time bomb called “unreal rentals” was first to collapse with big guns not even having enough to support the workforce. Folding like a pack of cards, big cities have big brands shutting. SMEs exploring work from home for a year releasing the leases. Retail, Fashion, Lifestyle is yet to even come to terms with what awaits them.
- Startups are fighting: For a change, startups are not talking about the burn, time to get in real action to survive. The fancy buzz word for the startup unit economics is reset for most of them, now it is let’s get down to profitability and sustenance. Such delight in hard times.
While the new order takes over across the corporate world let’s talk about a very important aspect who brings all these changes and still holding your Organization or whatever remains of it is your Team. The team that is still employed, working in a locked up home or walking in the office wearing the life on their sleeves.
If you are able to survive, sustain, and stabilize it is sure something correctly done but not just the one person but together as a team.
One of the key aspects of that is how leadership levels are defined, trained, prepared, and have acted with proactiveness when the time comes calling. Their ability to be agile and become or act as torchbearers for the teams below is going to be one of the key strengths and organize can truly need right now. If there is chaos at any level of the corporate hierarchy it will have a huge effect of the same on the level below and above the pyramid.
Meanwhile, one thing that will be key for teams to adapt and relearn would be Skill Shifting.
Walk out of the typical, defined role and job description and widen the horizons. A typical definition of skill profile and job description is about to change.
* If you were admin or operations manager at the office right now you might become remote manager helping follow-ups and team coordination or assist with support maintenance or whatever team needs.
* A designer used to work with a copy, or creative lead might just have to visualize on his own or can expand his skill set to create strong independent concepts.
* A Project Manager or Account Manager isn’t just managing his / her client right now but exploring how to save that client or use relationships and find new leads.
* Content teams are innovating ways and means to make their companies/agencies relevant which is beyond their job role to produce content.
* Sales is for everyone, operations are a shared responsibility, and most importantly people who might just come around to let the remotely working team together from their mental health to a creative health point of view.
The examples of skill shifting that an employee or team will have to do are ample. There won’t be defined, there won’t be lines, there won’t be limits. Wherever you see gaps that you can fill, take steps to glue the virtual working ecosystem alive is all that your Organization needs. While the companies reorganize, realign to survive the pandemic, the act of sustenance isn’t possible if skill shifting doesn’t percolate it done to team levels, individual employee levels.
So, the question is ‘have your skills shifted to help your Organization survive, sustain and come out of pandemic hibernations?’
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