Like most businesses, Covid-19 and the resulting work from home (WFH) environment has forced change upon your business that you never thought you’d face. Many companies are seeking a formalized way in which to capture the internal feedback about this experience so it can be applied against future organizational learning.
Forte is conducting a guided Covid-19 “lessons learned” program for businesses. We have developed a defined process that helps you capture and better understand the human and technology factors that affected your business during Covid-19 work from home. The goal is to learn what worked well so you can do more of it, and also identify opportunities for business process and practice improvement in the future.
Why Do We Need This?
Covid-19 has brought havoc upon almost every business and organization. Most companies have been forced into an unplanned work from home experiment that brought many advantages and disadvantages. A second wave of covid-19 is a high probability and a vaccine is still months or even years away. The future effect on your business and the global economy is unpredictable. Leading companies will use the previous experience as a learning exercise to prepare for the future and seize the opportunity to rethink how they do business to build a more nimble organization with better financial and human outcomes for all team members.
How is This Done?
We’ve developed a program to guide organizations through lessons learned from covid-19 in a structured way. We offer an outside perspective and an impartial view to the organization with the aim of delivering added clarity. By engaging representative stakeholders from across your organization and leading them through a structured conversation we will explore the impact that covid-19 and work from home has had on them, understand positive outcomes that have presented themselves and identify the roadblocks that should be removed in the future. There is a short opportunity for companies to use this unique time to explore how their businesses can be reimagined, and reinforced for what may come.
What’s Involved?
We explore and capture team feedback through several tools and exercises. All of these exercises are conducted through remote video calls and remote activities so that we can capture the broadest feedback possible in the most efficient manner.
Our program consists of the following segments:
Step 1: Anonymous Online surveys
Step 2: Guided Team Discussion using the “lessons learned” Methodology
Step 3: Anonymous Visioning that encourages stakeholders to paint their ideal future state of work.
We explore various technical and human aspects of the work from home scenario with a focus on identifying organizational opportunities and removing roadblocks including:
◦ Risk Analysis - identify the risks profiles of WFH for your business as well as the risks of not effectively transitioning to a WFH environment.
◦ Team Communications - how effective was communications within your teams during the WFH period.
◦ Customer Impact - how did the WFH period impact your customers?
◦ Technology Tools - how did your tools serve you during the WFH period. What tools would help you optimize performance. Which tools worked well for you?
◦ Management Practices - how did management support your performance during the WFH period. What practices worked well, and what new ideas can improve team performance.
◦ Corporate Culture - How was strong corporate culture maintained throughout the WFH period. What impact did WFH have on corporate culture and what practices could enhance/change your corporate culture in the future.
◦ Productivity - Were you more or less productive from home than would normally be in the office.
◦ Business Continuity
◦ Facilities
◦ Future Vision
How Long Does it Take?
We know time is limited these days. For each 15 person working group, we target a half day commitment from your team. We start the day with an introductory call where we meet all participants, review our intent and process and get them engaged. We then ask participants to undertake the anonymous online surveys and visioning tool to capture their individual insights. After we return to the group call, we begin our guided team discussion using the “lessons learned” methodology. The goal of the “lessons learned” approach is to create a safe an open exchange of ideas that seeks to find important take-aways that will improve your business. This stimulates team thinking, dialog and exploration. The format identifies positive and negative outcomes and possible initiatives that will allow the organization to do more of the good and less of the bad.
Who is Involved?
We encourage organizations to invite a cross section of stakeholders to participate. Each working group is made up of a maximum of 15 participants to support effective group work. Your organization may have multiple working groups and their feedback will be summarized into a single recommendations document. By encouraging a broad perspective we can identify opportunities for reinvention at all levels.
Actionable Deliverables.
Upon the conclusion of our information gathering exercises and guided conversations we then summarize findings, opportunities and recommendations into a concise and actionable document that is presented to the your organization’s leadership team. Your organization can choose who this document is shared with. The final document is typically delivered within a week of the exercise day and reviewed in person with the company’s primary contact(s). A supplemental team debriefing meeting may be held if company leadership desires it.
What Does it Cost?
Each engagement is conducted for a single fee of $2,500 per working group. Each working group is a maximum of 15 participants. This fee includes advanced research on your organization, our online survey and visioning tools, our online guided discussions with your working group, and the publishing and presentation of our findings and recommendations.