My story of transitioning to Remote working

Challenges and Selection

I work as an operational excellence consultant with a Global Insurance Broking firm and my role  involves working with the business to identify efficiencies, improve profitability and aid  innovation. My role often involves collaborating to change cultures, processes that have evolved  over various mergers and acquisitions, team behaviors and age-old practices. There are various  parties involved mostly with conflicting priorities i.e. stakeholders, subject matter experts,  change champions, project leaders and the overall business team members. I often use  storytelling as a tool to bring out what the studies of these processes reveal, what are the  considerations that lead us towards change, how to implement the change and sometimes why  not to change too. It has now been a practice to see why certain aspects are difficult for certain  members to understand and adapt and accordingly make changes to the story narrative. This  helps me develop strategies for similar situations across the wide array of projects that I manage.

I would like to narrate an example of how I along with two of my peers had to make a  presentation to prospective clients on how we managed the change to remote working  irrespective of the various challenges faced without any material impact to the service delivery  expected of the service center of our organization. This was to be done so that the prospective  clients understand the resilience factor of the service centers among various other parameters  that were to be presented. All this had to be done remotely considering we were amidst the  pandemic situation.

Application

My story started with describing the key aspects on a slide that would help create a visual of what  the center looked like. The key aspects were as follows a) service delivery e.g. quality scores, tat,  productivity, efficiencies realized in previous year, compliance certifications, geographical spread  that we deliver to, etc. b) infrastructure i.e. number of sites, space management policy, IT  infrastructure, transport facility and business continuity c) on the people front we describe  certain aspects of our work culture,  gender ratio and the talent pool of the delivery center. Then  some of the business leaders were invited to describe operation management, certain client  partners were invited to describe the feedback of the services.

I was up next to narrate how we adapted to the pandemic. I had divided my presentation into 2  parts one how did we ‘Adapt and Sustain’ which the client would be able to relate better now  that they knew how the service center looked like and how the operations were managed,  followed by How we have ‘reimagined the workspace’.  With respect to adapt and sustain story  I worked the client through a timeline of how we gradually moved from pilot remote testing, to  full-fledged working, to enhanced due-diligence till remote working stabilized and then gave

them a wow factor of however we could manage it in a matter of weeks. I then described how  we could manage to ship desktops/laptops to 1200+ colleagues who were dependent on office  desktops for working within 1 month in spite of the lockdown situation. I touched upon how we  took efforts to maintain consistent employee experience w.r.t remote joining process for new  joiners, trainings, various employee connects e.g. townhall, reward and recognition, various  virtual team interactions. My story included pictures, short video clippings and colleague  feedbacks on how they were supported throughout the transition, how they were supported in  case of managing work in case of family emergencies, etc. I then briefly talked about how we are  already ‘Reimaging the workplace’ e.g. how we are exploring various operating models (fully  remote, partly remote, etc.) and its impact on service delivery, infrastructure, culture and talent  development in terms of what is working well and what needs to be changed.

Insight and Approach

Our organization follows a specific approach of seeking formal feedback on how the sessions  were w.r.t presenters, content, impact on decision making. I was happy to receive a very positive  feedback on how my storytelling assured the clients about how we can manage change with  minimal business impact. The story telling had real examples, emotional connects, sequence of  events as if we were travelling time describing how we gradually yet effectively managed the  transition. I was satisfied with my presentation, since I could walk the group through the ‘wicked  challenge’ of transitioning to remote working due to Covid-19. I got the positive feedback in  terms of nods, body language, acknowledgment of they know how difficult that can be, responses  to the questions that I probed and someone to one appreciation I got from some members from  the audience.

Having said that, there is always scope for improvement.  I am going to put to practice some of  the concepts this training has emphasized e.g. create the tension, make the story crisp as there  is a very little attention span.

