The leadership teams of organizations up and down the country took swift and decisive action.
After all, nothing drives agility quite like urgency. And nothing enables agility quite like technology. Now business leaders need to make a different type of decision. How to get back to work and what that should look like.
Getting back to business
Leaders find themselves at an unusual juncture in time, facing extraordinary obstacles but at the same time, opportunities. To navigate a successful path back to a profitable business will be tricky. But those who embrace the challenge and take a bold approach could stand to gain significantly.
Why? Because merely going back to ‘business as usual’ could prove to leave them dangerously behind a quickly developing future business curve. An accelerating curve is driven by technology and both employee and customer expectations.
So leaders need to make their plans now in order to shape their organization’s potential future. The eventual strategy will need to move their business forward to where they believe it should be. But what should that belief be?
Rising to the future of work
Leaders should seek to harness and cultivate the new mindset their organization has adopted and displayed during the recent crisis. It was a willingness to embrace change that enabled organizations to move to mass remote working in such a short space of time.
This same mindset can, therefore, be the enabler for new initiatives and opportunities. As the future will require a workforce that is agile, flexible and adaptable.
An opportunity to re-imagine
So what is the future? Well, the thought of everyone travelling to and from an office daily already seems like an idea from a bygone era. Similarly, the suggestion that managers need to see people at their desks to believe they are working is redundant. We’ve moved beyond these traditional views. It’s time to reimagine how we work. And that probably starts with our traditional office workplaces.
The office no longer needs to be a location, visited daily with one specific function. They’ll become more fluid, smarter offices which act as a hybrid space designed to unify people under your brand. A destination where people want to go, but don’t need to. They will be places where your purpose is omnipresent and your people, partners and customers come together to pool and create ideas before heading off to work remotely. They will be a place of inspiration, imagination and learning.