Corporation Organization Development: A new Reality

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The organization engaged in business, or any other endeavor, has changed forever. The quarantine era has taught so many lessons that will not be unlearned. First, most employees can do their jobs at home. Second, most employees rediscover the skills and talent to thrive on their own. Third, as some of the more social jobs become home-based, people discover how hard it is to execute. Sales calls are no longer important when there is no one officed at the customer’s offices. Customer relationships disappear. This leads to the most important aspect of a new reality. The executive leadership has to reconstruct the company from the ground up.

What has become important is to define how things will be accomplished in the future. Allowing a natural progression without leadership will ultimately result in lost productivity and decline in performance. More importantly, the workforce synergies will start to fall away. Imagine that right now most work at home employees are building relationships with those in their personal lives. That is a good thing. However, they have flatlined the relationships they have with their workmates. Worse yet, how is a new employee indoctrinated when they might only meet their work colleagues from time to time on Zoom.

At Advok8, we have been focused on the COVID world and how it changes an organization and how it changes strategy. On the flip side, we are also keenly interested in helping our client within the sales and marketing disciplines. Yet, there are a number of things that leadership must accomplish. At this point, we will use the McKinsey reference and base our own recommendations on this.

Advok8 Process Sample for Organizational Configuration

  1. The most important thing is a detailed review of the organization chart. It is important to create a rating system.
    1. 1 to 10 (10 being work from home) – what jobs can be accomplished in a “work from home” scenario?
    2. 1 to 10 (10 being least) – what jobs will suffer the most from loss of face to face interaction?
    3. 1 to 10 (10 being engaged) – will this employee fade from view or overcome technology to remain engaged
    4. Advok8 builds an entire rating grid to help walk through this process of gauging “work from home” success.
  2. Secondly is to create a plan for the adoption of technology, systems, and process associated with the new organization. The point is to adopt new systems that create a sense of high availability. Skype, Salesforce.com, Zoom, WebEx all have these features, but there has to be a useful policy to ensure this goal.
  3. Employees will lose and gain value from both hidden and obvious characteristics.
    1. For instance, a person’s work environment is suddenly at home, and perhaps the person has three toddlers.
    2. For instance, an introverted engineering manager has been tasked with the architecture of a new software system. With respect to the software and the additional engineering projects, the manager now blossoms as a creative and productive contributor.
  4. The development of a revised Corporate Strategy and Mission is essential, even if this is simply to challenge yesterday’s notions. For instance, it may be more practical to high contractors and third-party firms to complete tasks that would otherwise be deemed “work at home.”
  5. Advok8 has more to this list, that we are happy to use with our client executives in helping them look at their organizations. However, a lot of it is intuitive and can be accomplished. We simply facilitate the work with our own system.

Advok8 thoughts on product portfolio and development

It is a still tougher arguement to think that our new reality will change our products and our portfolio. Yet, this is going to be the case. The simplest way to put it is “less touch and more punch.” Less touch is the idea that a customer will be more and more interested in plug N play solutions. The idea of customer driven, built to order products will be harder to sell. First, it will be harder as the customer employees are no longer jetting around the country, visiting vendors and suppliers, meeting on-site of a project and so forth. The intimacy will start to fade. As this happens, the value of structured configuration will replace individual customization.

The second descriptor is more punch. More punch means that customers will most certainly value the qualitative aspect of product life cycles, product maintenance cycles, and automated monitoring. Customers will need to have the assurance that a product is durable and long-lived. Customers will need to have the assurance that the product, AND the system it lives in, can all be monitored and managed remotely. This will dramatically change the portfolio and design of a great many B2B products.

In the B2C space, the product portfolio issues are obvious. Products will more likely be purchased on-line. As this is said, it sounds fairly harmless. However, if a shirt is manufactured to have relatively short shirt tails and sleeves. If this shirt were to experience shrinkage upon first wash. The expectation is that a very high percentage of buyers will return it. That could be a disaster. Revenues lost. Used inventory returned. High postage costs. Poor online reviews. Conversely, if this was sold in a store, it would have not experienced many of these problems.

At Advok8, we do a fairly detailed competitive analysis as an early step of each engagement. Our goal is to look for these value points, to map out strengths and weaknesses, and to create proper definitions of the product portfolio, product definition, and expected outcome.

In conclusion, corporate leadership is taking hard looks at the aspects of their organization that are being changed. Everything from culture to strategy to product to workforce. This hope that we will return to the way it was is not realistic.

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