For hybrid work to continually deliver results, leadership commitment is a must
After remote work exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, in the last few months, most organizations have settled into a hybrid arrangement, which involves working two to three days a week at the office and splitting tasks that are best done in person versus those done individually. For many of us, this change in our routine signifies a return to normal – coming back to a life we left behind – our offices, our commute, and our colleagues. However, we might just be embarking on a journey that is even more challenging than what we experienced before because hybrid work is more complex to get right than remote work. Perhaps there isn’t any company out there that will get this right, bang on, but the ones that will do a better job of making this model work will certainly edge out competition, especially as we, as an industry, continue to grapple with unprecedented attrition. On the flip side,
if organizations treat hybrid work as a stop-gap arrangement, a wait-and-watch game until everyone can be hollered back to the office full time, results will show.
Speed isn’t everything
A speed versus velocity approach might be constructed as:
Reacting with speed: With speed as a priority, when customers have new circumstances, companies feel pressured to create and commit to new products, services, and solutions fast and partner with an organization that enables this timeline and mindset.
Responding with velocity: Before launching new products, services, or solutions, a velocity-centered approach is required to nail a customer experience strategy and help better prioritize customer needs and outcomes.
Successful velocity implementation
depends on combining
five principles
Prioritize gaining deep insight on customer needs, even unarticulated ones
Establish a culture that promotes experimenting with new ideas
Adopt and reinforce an agile-at-scale approach
Not even the largest or the most resilient organization can constantly outrun, outsmart and outperform
Not even the largest or the most resilient organization can constantly outrun, outsmart and outperform
so trying to keep up with
the new and the next is somewhat futile. Instead,
if leaders invest time in articulating a clear long-term vision, it stands to offer clarity and direction should things get chaotic.
Reorient how you communicate
Organizations are now well versed with agile innovation and most are on the move
Hone a long-term vision that will provide context for short-term actions
It’s great to know who your competitors are and what products are out there in the market
Instead of reacting to competition, if companies focus on delivering an optimal customer experience and nurture
Commit to transformation through the right digital capabilities
Read more...
A long-term vision does not mean that companies should rigidly follow a game plan and never pivot.
Read more...
Read more...
Read more...
Read more...
We always ask ourselves the question, “In this fast-paced execution environment, how can companies gain competitive advantage and stay in line with changing scenarios?”
Not even the largest or the most resilient organization can constantly outrun, outsmart and outperform so trying to keep up with the new and the next is somewhat futile. Instead, if leaders invest time in articulating a clear long-term vision, it stands to offer clarity and direction should things get chaotic.
Hone a long-term vision that will provide a context for short-term actions:
Not even the largest or the most resilient organization can constantly outrun, outsmart and outperform so trying to keep up with the new and the next is somewhat futile. Instead, if leaders invest time in articulating a clear long-term vision, it stands to offer clarity and direction should things get chaotic.
Hone a long-term vision that will provide a context for short-term actions:
A long-term vision does not mean that companies should rigidly follow a game plan and never pivot. The job is to know where and how to allow small-scale changes and micro-shifts, informed by data and digital maturity. For this scenario to tangibly deliver results, access to the right tools and technological architecture is indispensable; this is where velocity is rooted, ready to be strategically harnessed.
Commit to transformation through the right capabilities:
It’s great to know who your competitors are and what products are out there in the market but use your discernment when it comes to letting that information affect your response. Often, anxious to counter competition, companies slash prices and launch products without envisioning the entire customer journey outside-in, and fall into pitfalls, spending millions of dollars on creating another version of something that already exists in the market.
Prioritize gaining deep insight on customer needs, even unarticulated ones:
Instead of reacting to competition, if companies focus on delivering an optimal customer experience and nurture customer-centricity, they can close the loop and pioneer new frontiers with less competition, gaining definitive competitive advantage. Strive to provide a safe environment for employees to experiment and drive innovation through engagement. If creating brand new ideas are not promoted, it is only logical that people will make incremental changes to existing offerings.
Establish a culture that promotes experimentation with new ideas:
Organizations are now well versed with agile innovation and most are on the move when it comes to adopting agile ways of working. However, its validity has somewhat heightened because of how complex our daily lives have become in the past two years due to the pandemic. With a new level of seriousness and commitment, companies seek to move more quickly, empower their employees, and adopt customer-centricity. Agility can quickly redirect people and priorities towards more value-creating opportunities; that’s why it is a prerequisite in today’s transformative landscape.
Adopt and reinforce an agile-at-scale approach:
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Information Security Management
Environment, Energy, Health and Safety Management
Quality & Service Management
Modern Slavery Statement | Privacy Notice |
Disclaimer | Sitemap
India US UK South Africa
Think Velocity
© 2003-2021 Zensar Technologies Ltd. CIN:L7200PN1963PLC012621.
All Rights reserved
Stay connected
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Going beyond table stakes and tackling the talent crisis
Why do companies struggle implementing design thinking in product development?
Let me underline couple of key criteria that digital natives and startups have already embraced and increasingly, we see others implement.
Typically when you say, “Hey, we’ve got to look at a project and deliver it through scrum as a methodology, run sprints, and deliver the product after x number of sprints,” people tend to categorize it as a technology or as a CIO problem. But speed and agility are not just technology problems or CIO problems. We now see a lot of mature organizations take a wider, more enlarged view of what agility is. Agility actually starts with business and continues through technology, process and ends with delivery of the technical product. So, business-first agility is critical. A decade back, when agile as a process was first taking roots, I’d often say, simply put, there are four stages of evolution that an entity can go through in order to embrace agile. First was test-driven development, i.e., test cases were written before you could develop them. Second was scrum as the popular method of delivering agile processes into technology projects. Then criticism emerged around scrum because it did not deliver high resolution so the common rigors of project management that one would see in the waterfall method got compromised. In the third stage, scrum evolved to include high-resolution project management overlay to ensure that scrum-based projects were more definite, predictable, with a clear outcome.
AB:
1:
2:
Stage four was business-first agile. Where we are right now is that agile as a process needs to run through the organization. And we witness business-first agile in quite a few of our client partners. They have agile work pods in their business teams and it continues through technology, process and delivery.
The second key part of the double-click is that product management is also not just a business problem. Product management, as a discipline, needs to run through the process - business continuing into technology. So, technology needs to take adequate ownership of product management. Often times it is the coming together of business and technology as a part of the agile process because every scrum team has a product manager, etc. but the appreciation of the product needs to run from the front to the back. So, on the one hand, there is agile as a technology process that connects to business and on the other, product design as a discipline, links all the way to technology delivery.
Vivek Ranjan, Senior VP & CHRO
A top-down assertive tone will impact talent retention poorly because, increasingly, people want to accomplish tasks with a sense of shared vision. Don’t treat return to office as the new normal; be clear about why a hybrid working model works and how a periodic in-person presence serves the broader strategy. People must embrace the idea of purpose-in-presence when deciding how and where work needs to happen. To implement this, we leveraged the work-from-anywhere as a flexibility option for all our employees, but we also conducted a pulse survey to support a voluntary return to office.
The hybrid work culture will test the authenticity of our people-first approach — a ruminative set of dos and don’ts work. Because we have all experienced the fatigue of being on endless calls through the pandemic, we now formally encourage scheduled 30-minute meetings to end early by five minutes and scheduled hour-long meetings to end by 10 minutes so that people have some time to take a break and recharge before the next call. We believe that when we listen to our employees as much as we listen to our clients and include experiential learnings, we take concrete steps toward building a more compassionate work culture.
Leaders are not task managers. We must commit to embracing complexity and nuance in situations that employees might be facing. With all this comes the need for self-inquiry and the ability to hold ourselves accountable because our management style is deeply conditioned in favor of face-to-face interaction. Weeding out bias from our mindset, decision-making, and technologies is crucial, and there is value at stake if we don’t level up to these challenges.
Consider the impact
of a prolonged pandemic
on mental health
Challenge core impulses regularly
Leaders must lead
the charge and take responsibility for hybrid work to be viable.
Remote work has enabled us to expand our reach and dig deeper into geographies to access a talent pool that was earlier out of our reach.
Some people were hesitant to move out of their hometowns due to personal commitments, others were restricted by physical challenges,
but on our payrolls, these people are now building both dimension and diversity. We expect this trend to accelerate, spurring an even faster adoption of automation in the workplace.
Innovation in recruitment has advanced to the point wherein hiring through digital platforms is ubiquitous. The challenge is to create a more personalized experience right from the get-go.
Overall, the pandemic has heightened the importance of delivering the right employee experience through digital transformation. And we are all for a pitch-perfect, powerful, and best-in-class toolkit as a first step. However, a successful digital transformation must also include understanding nuanced circumstances that people might be grappling with because, ultimately, tools don’t take into account complexities, and it is becoming increasingly important to look at how grey areas can be addressed or risk losing out on talent.
Going beyond the table stakes and tacking the talent crisis
Reorient how you communicate
Consider the impact
of a prolonged pandemic
on mental health
Challenge core impulses regularly
Read more
Read more
Read more
Leaders are not task managers. We must commit to embracing complexity and nuance in situations that employees might be facing. With all this comes the need for self-inquiry and the ability to hold ourselves accountable because our management style is deeply conditioned in favor of face-to-face interaction. Weeding out bias from our mindset, decision-making, and technologies is crucial, and there is value at stake if we don’t level up to these challenges.
Challenge core impulses regularly
Reboot digital transformation, make it work
Zensar’s first rebranding
in 20 years
Use design thinking for better
product management
Five rules to accelerate
velocity transformation
Velocity survey – how to
move without breaking things
For hybrid work, leadership commitment is a Must.
How to foster a
velocity mindset
Quiet quitting –
A wake up call to emphasize
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
More Insights
Reboot digital transformation, make it work
Zensar’s first rebranding
in 20 years
Use design thinking for better
product management
Five rules to accelerate
velocity transformation
Velocity survey – how to
move without breaking things
For hybrid work, leadership commitment is a Must.
How to foster a
velocity mindset
Quiet quitting –
A wake up call to emphasize
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
More Insights
Why do companies struggle implementing design thinking in product development?
Let me underline couple of key criteria that digital natives and startups have already embraced and increasingly, we see others implement.
Typically when you say, “Hey, we’ve got to look at a project and deliver it through scrum as a methodology, run sprints, and deliver the product after x number of sprints,” people tend to categorize it as a technology or as a CIO problem. But speed and agility are not just technology problems or CIO problems. We now see a lot of mature organizations take a wider, more enlarged view of what agility is. Agility actually starts with business and continues through technology, process and ends with delivery of the technical product. So, business-first agility is critical. A decade back, when agile as a process was first taking roots, I’d often say, simply put, there are four stages of evolution that an entity can go through in order to embrace agile. First was test-driven development, i.e., test cases were written before you could develop them. Second was scrum as the popular method of delivering agile processes into technology projects. Then criticism emerged around scrum because it did not deliver high resolution so the common rigors of project management that one would see in the waterfall method got compromised. In the third stage, scrum evolved to include high-resolution project management overlay to ensure that scrum-based projects were more definite, predictable, with a clear outcome.
Stage four was business-first agile. Where we are right now is that agile as a process needs to run through the organization. And we witness business-first agile in quite a few of our client partners. They have agile work pods in their business teams and it continues through technology, process and delivery.
The second key part of the double-click is that product management is also not just a business problem. Product management, as a discipline, needs to run through the process - business continuing into technology. So, technology needs to take adequate ownership of product management. Often times it is the coming together of business and technology as a part of the agile process because every scrum team has a product manager, etc. but the appreciation of the product needs to run from the front to the back. So, on the one hand, there is agile as a technology process that connects to business and on the other, product design as a discipline, links all the way to technology delivery.
AB:
1:
2:
Reboot digital transformation, make it work
Zensar’s first rebranding
in 20 years
Use design thinking for better
product management
Five rules to accelerate
velocity transformation
Velocity survey – how to
move without breaking things
For hybrid work, leadership commitment is a Must.
How to foster a
velocity mindset
Quiet quitting –
A wake up call to emphasize
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
More Insights