Covid-19 – a Digital Change Pandemic

By Adam O’Hare, Business Director and Co-Founder of CloudStratex 

It is clearly not “business as usual”

The impact of COVID-19 on the global economy and business community has been catastrophic, even being described as the biggest challenge the world has faced since the Second World War. As the shock  waves resulting from the pandemic continue to reverberant, businesses are already bunkering down, restrategising, and reassessing their operations. The key for them is to weather the storm caused by the disease, and to come back stronger, often by utilising cloud technology and remote working.

Unfortunately, their haste to do so has resulted in many employees being left out of the loop, and not consulted on the decisions being made that affect them professionally. Businesses are forgetting that their success is built upon people, not capital, and any changes made to an organisation during this time, needs the support and understanding of employees to work.

Instead the typical response to the pandemic has been for businesses to instinctively adhere to a robust financial resilience strategy by cutting back on cash burn to ensure liquidity. This is to be expected given the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has stated that, “50% of firms do not have sufficient cash to cover total debt servicing costs over the coming year.”

This may explain why global research and advisory firm Gartner, reported that global IT spending is expected to decline by $3.4 trillion in 2020, a decline of 8% from 2019. Despite this alarming figures, CEOs and CTOs are investing heavily in remote working, with spending in cloud-based telephony and messaging expected to increase by 8.9%, and cloud-based conferencing by an enormous 24.3%. In fact, such is the demand, that cloud spending levels projected for 2023 and 2024, have been brought forward to 2022.

Things may take time to fix

Adam O’Hare

Those working in the technology, scientific and financial sectors will naturally be very familiar with remote working, but for many businesses it remains far from the norm. Currently there are only 1.7 million people in the UK working from home out of the 32.6 million in employment, according to figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS). While it is clear that embracing digital technology is a natural evolution for businesses looking to enhance their offering, and improve the efficiency of their operations, the transformation process itself should be handled with care.

After all many companies have operated successfully for years utilising a business model and strategy that had little use for cloud services such as remote working, and only paid lip service to it, if at all. Now the pandemic is forcing them to adopt a new business model built upon technology and home working.

Unfortunately, 70% of “large-scale” digital transformations do not reach their stated goals according to research by management consulting firm McKinsey. Typically, this is the result of employees not seeing the benefits of the change and therefore not engaging with it. With COVID_19 many people understand that working from home is not only keeping them in work but also vital for their own health and safety. Still the situation is very alien to employees, and it is likely they will feel disconnected when working outside of an office environment for a protracted period of time.

Empowering people, empowering change

It is concerning to think that many businesses may be haphazardly fast-tracking digital transformation because of the duress they have been placed under as a result of the pandemic. Equally worrying is that the huge sums suddenly being invested in remote working technology and cloud services may indicate a desire to simply throw money at the problem, in the hope that everything will work out okay.

It is important to remember that success in business relies on people first and technology second. Any change to your business whether digital or otherwise should always have the input and buy in of your employees. It also must be overseen by a management team that knows what success looks like, and the incremental steps needed to get there.

Most importantly employees need to feel like they are part of the process, so they have a sense of ownership in the proceedings. It is therefore critical that they feel empowered to drive transformation from the bottom-up. This can be achieved by asking them to think, discuss and feedback about the problems they encounter when working from home, and to consider how technology can help overcome them. This will ensure that any potential problems that arise can be dealt with quickly and any missed opportunities can be released. Doing will help ensure a successful change adoption. After all, organisational change can only occur when employees feel they are part of the solution to improve their working lives, which in turn ensures the success of the company.