Compliance, digital transformation, and the employee experience will be key going forward
Some like it, some are indifferent, while others dread it like a root canal. Without anaesthesia. We are talking about working from home (WFH), perhaps the biggest behavioural change wrought by COVID-19 this side of mask-wearing and social distancing measures.
After six months of Zoom calls, being contactable on WhatsApp/KakaoTalk/Line/WeChat 24-7, and generally having negligible work-life separation, Damien Cummings says it is time to go from ‘Work from home light” to ‘Work from home right’.
“Compliance is now driving the next level of work-from-home management,” explains Cummings, who is CEO of Peoplewave, a blockchain and cloud-based software company in the HR space. As opposed to unplanned WFH stints that were forced upon organisations by COVID-19, HR departments are developing protocols to establish WFH arrangements and compliance procedures.
“You've got to call up your manager or better yet, going onto the HR system and take that day off sick,” Cummings elaborates. “You can't just kind of take that day off and not tell anybody. It has to go through a system with your manager’s rubber stamp of approval.
“The same thing is about to hit us with work from home [where you will need to tell] your boss, ‘I want to work two days a week from home for the rest of the year’ or ‘I want to work from home while I'm doing this particular projects.’”
Key to all this is transparency where “everyone knows where you are and what you’re doing”.
“There are managers out there on the phone to you every day saying, ‘How's it going? What's going on? What are you working on?’ and I think we all hate that,” Cummings elaborated at a recent SMU Centre for Marketing Excellence virtual seminar “Digital Transformation in a post COVID-19 world – The future of work is now”.
“So what we're now saying is, ‘How do you link the work that you're doing every day back to the performance goals that are going to get you a pay raise and a promotion?’
“My bet is you're going to see technology implemented in your workplace soon…to make the work that you do transparent, including to the point of clocking in clocking out, using GPS tracking to find out where you are. It’s also about making the status of the goals and the work you're doing transparent to not just your manager, but probably everyone else in your team.
“If you're not doing this at the moment, that’s what's coming next over the next three to six months.”
The building blocks of digital transformation
All this is part of the digital transformation journey, which Cummings boils down to five crucial building blocks [and the result if any one of them is missing]:
- Strategy [without which you get digitisation]
- Engagement [resistance]
- Innovation [incoherent action]
- Technology [frustration]
- Data & Analytics [stagnation]
As companies are forced to organise WFH arrangements, employees and employers might feel that COVID-19 has delivered the long proselytised digitisation that had heretofore failed to materialise despite never-ending calls and efforts from HR experts and government agencies.
Cummings is keen to disabuse folks of that notion.
“What you’re seeing is the small digital transformation projects i.e. ‘Can we all get Zoom coming over the laptop’ being pushed through and they've been wildly successful. On the other hand, the big ones, which is ‘Should we replace that ERP (enterprise resource planning) system? Should we put in place a Salesforce CRM to track leads?’ have either been put on hold, or have not succeeded.
“[I think it is] just the patterns of work that have actually changed, and most people see a framework like the five building blocks of digital transformation, they kind of get it in theory but they haven't executed it well.”
That said, Cummings stressed that companies are working to build a culture of trust, and that human capital management (HCM) tools such as Workday and SAP’s SuccessFactors are available to facilitate efforts to that end. Other tools such as Kronos have GPS tracking and login/logout feature, Cummings noted.
Understanding the employee experience
Even so, employees and employers often have different views on what constitutes good HR management. Cummings points out the organisations and employers tend to focus their attention on the recruitment process and learning & development (L&D), but they often reduce the onboarding process to “a buddy who will take you through where the bathroom is and where they make coffee”.
In the time of COVID where all that might be virtual, onboarding is more important than ever.
“30 percent of the new hires are looking for a job in six months,” says Cummings, adding that 46 percent leave after 18 months or less in a job. “It's a huge kind of engagement and productivity drain for your organisation.
“If you've got almost one in three new employees looking for a job, maybe they don't like the manager. Maybe they've been made to feel unwelcome or maybe they've been dropped in the deep end, because they have to work from home in a post COVID-19 world and they can't meet anybody. They have no idea what the systems are and they've got a real challenge.”
Cummings points to the example of companies such as Uber and Facebook, who welcome new hires with company-branded merchandise, as employers who have set the bar for employees’ onboarding expectation.
“Is this onboarding? Well, the short answer is yes of course it is. It's absolutely important for onboarding but this is more of a marketing and a brand exercise. This is what every company and every employee expect nowadays.
“Whether they verbalise it or not they're expecting to see a desk set up, the computer ready to go. If you've got a company T-shirt, umbrella, or a book, they're expecting it to be on the desk, particularly if you're an MNC.”
He concludes: “If you've not done that, you've actually lost the employer brand and you’ve probably put this employee into that 30 percent category that's started looking for another job pretty much immediately.”
Damien Cummings was the speaker at the SMU Centre for Marketing Excellence webinar "Digital Transformation in a post COVID-19 world – The future of work is now" that was held on 25 September 2020.
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Last updated on 29 Oct 2020 .
