November

DIGITAL WORKPLACES IN THE AGE OF THE CORONAVIRUS

Everyone is freaking out about the coronavirus. It is better to be safe rather than sorry and we need to take this global pandemic seriously.

Health officials globally have recommended we practice social distancing. This week many large corporates have started to close down their offices; allowing or mandating that staff work from home.

In HK & China schools have been operated through virtual classrooms since the start of the year. In Australia, we now see at-risk schools close, inevitably with more to follow. If our offices close, we are asked to work from home how do we keep our workforce productive in this health crisis that has no definitive end date.

The 1918 influenza pandemic also known as Spanish flu lasted around 2 years infecting around a quarter of the world’s population. All happening in an era with very limited global trade and travel when compared to today's social and economic environment.

Currently, our government's public health goal is to flatten the coronavirus spread curve. This is an attempt to contain or lessen the risk of spread to the vulnerable members of our community while the world works on a vaccine.

The SARS vaccine took around 20 months, and once the vaccine is developed it still needs to be mass-produced, so early recipients will be high-risk members.

As the PM said the coronavirus pandemic isn't something that we deal with by all going home for 2 weeks then picking up where we left off.

Social distancing and the resultant remote schooling and work will the new-normal.

There's a chance that even when the pandemic subsides, people may not give up the flexibility benefits offered by remote work. After all, most people will save around 2 hours daily from not having to commute to and from work.

For companies vying for leadership or survival in the digital age, remote-end-user productivity is a competitive differentiator.

Is your company ready to fully transition into a virtual workspace where employees work, collaborate and build rapport remotely on an industrial scale?

Below is Cognitivo’s Digital Workplace capability model. The workplace services your company will need to strengthen and deploy in a holistic manner to optimise productivity and minimise software license and digital hosting costs.

You will immediately notice that there is a vast array of software providers competing for your monthly subscription dollars. Each with their respective strengths and weaknesses.

List of applications / tools referenced as follows:

Messaging, Voice & Video Conferencing: Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp (Install the desktop version!), WeChat, Slack, Discord (for gamers but is the most feature rich alternative to Slack)
BI: PowerBI, Qlik, Tableau
Document / Knowledge Management: Microsoft SharePoint, Atlassian Confluence
Ways of Working:
Task / Project Management: Trello, Asana , Microsoft To Do, Azure DevOps (Project Management), Atlassian Jira, Harvest (Timesheets)
Slack (Messaging, Tasks, notice board)
Desktop Publishing, Co-Authoring: Microsoft Office 365, Google Docs
Digital Whiteboard: Microsoft Whiteboard (free to use)
PDF Markup: Drawboard PDF
Corporate Social Networking: LinkedIn, Sitrion, Jive (intranet), Microsoft Yammer
VPN / Remote Desktop: Citrix, ZScaler, F5 Networks, Akamai
Cloud Hosting: Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS
Authentication & Identity Management: Okta, onelogin, Auth0

The key point we would like to point out here is that how your teams are trained and organically develop their ways of working to leverage these tools in a unified way will be the key to achieving optimal virtual workplace productivity.

Most people who work in project delivery will be well versed in using most of the tools we have highlighted and familiar with terms such as Google’s OKR management technique (objectives and key responsibilities), agile and kanban delivery methods.

If you run a BAU team, how you manage non-project work in a coordinated manner without spending all your time now managing a remote team. How do you build a BAU work-break-down structure?

Watch this space for more articles on on-line teaming and productivity and if you want to speak to one of our experts on virtual workplace solutions drop us a line in the form below.

Above all else, we wish you the best of luck. Take good care of your teammates, family, and community as we will need to support each other to get through these challenging times.

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DIGITAL WORKPLACES IN THE AGE OF THE CORONAVIRUS

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