The unrelenting COVID-19 pandemic has forced companies of all types to implement full digital presence and shift most if not all their workforce into a remote working model that relies on digital productivity tools. This remote working model has been the norm for the past seven months and is likely to continue into 2021. Companies that had a digital presence could make this transition relatively easier for their corporate functions and employees than companies with a brick and mortar presence. 

This series's previous blogs discussed why employee experience is vital for an organization and discussed key drivers for success to enable a digitized work experience and environment. This blog examines how digitization can help companies become more resilient and flexible in dealing with a pandemic or any other business continuity event.

Digitization opportunities for a company can be divided into two areas. The first is ensuring that required corporate functions are operating at maximum efficiency and ensuring employees are not engaged in unnecessary activities. Secondly, all IT functions supporting the company should help employees do their job more effectively and efficiently. Highly effective corporate and IT functions that are digitized optimally will engage employees to have a meaningful digital experience, ultimately resulting in higher productivity. 

Corporate functions and processes such as talent management, contract management, and payroll are crucial in times when business continuity is at risk. To enable these functions and digitize them, it is important first to identify the corporate processes that are strong candidates for digitization and automation. Some examples include:

• Employee timesheets that are completed every week - one can explore an auto-approvals' concept to save managers time
• By digitizing recruiting during a pandemic or a crisis, it can help streamline the process. This process can evolve to include adopting digital interviewing (quick win), automated resume screening tools (quick win) and digitizing the onboarding and procurement process to enable faster day one productivity of new hires
• You can digitize business continuity of client-facing processes, such as creating a guided digital experience, enhancing telephony call procedures, digitizing client-side status tracking, and more, to enable a streamlined and transparent support process. This will also provide employees with stronger case management and work orchestration

IT functions that support a company in executing tasks like spinning up servers for new services or tracking events and incidents, or provisioning new devices (mobiles and laptops) are also candidates for digitization. When concerning business continuity events occur, such as COVID-19, the volume of IT incidents and requests increases; thereby, raising the importance of faster and accurate resolution. Digitizing incident management by adopting smart filtering and smart correlation tools to identify the important incidents and filter out the noise can help employees better focus on the critical task at hand and improve their overall digital employee experience.

At Capco, we have helped our clients digitize and enhance their employees’ experience and automate numerous corporate and IT functions. 

We recommend these three simple principles to enable digitization as a tool for business continuity.

1. Be open to change and respond quickly – whether it is the way we work to how we run the company, be agile and iterate on processes that work and address those that do not work

2. Set up a plan of attack and determine success metrics – identify key factors to measure how successful the plan will be and develop an implementation and change management plan depending on the process

3. Establish a short-term plan to address tactical issues and overall long-term strategy to align with the overall company goal