Friisberg Network Advisory | FNA study finds COVID-19 is changing our networking habits.

Based on recent client consultations on Organizational Development, conducted by our team of experts, including Zoltan Kadar Friisberg Hungary’s Senior Consultant, and our special advisers at BondWeaver, the following clear trends were observed as changes within organizational networks due to Covid-19:

Uncertainty

This has been on the rise within organizations due to the onset of the pandemic, as well as the ensuing economic recession/crisis. It can be seen through the change in communication patterns – in particular there is a higher level of “noise” within the networks as people try to gather information about the company and their tasks from multiple sources. On the one hand this information drought perpetuates the uncertainty of employees, and on the other the effort invested in gathering necessary information results in less energy remaining for work-related tasks.

New ‘key’ people

These are appearing within an organization. This is noticeable throughout unstable situations or as working remotely becomes the norm long-term when new skills and competences are required as well as a greater degree of flexibility. This enables some people to become key players, while others can lose such roles. In such new situations it is important for organizations to identify the key players who managers and colleagues can rely on (such as experts, information brokers, opinion leaders, etc.).

Relationships become more diluted

In the absence of regular physical contact, even those groups with established strong, trusting networks are diluted. Those with weaker links get fragmented / break up, typically cliques of 2-3 people emerge and/or some people break off from the group losing their relationship with the community altogether. This tendency has a clear negative impact on the efficiency of work (numerous studies show that the foundation of efficient work is mutual trust between parties), so leaders have to pay particular attention to strengthening the network of trust and maintaining the personal wellbeing of their subordinates.

Doing the right thing is seldom easy, but doing the right thing is always the right thing.

Political and business leaders face hard decisions and sometimes they will get it wrong - that’s okay. We are human after all and we will all make mistakes – the imperative is not to make the same mistake twice.

After the tragedy of the slaughter of 26 innocent children and adults in Connecticut in 2012 there was a firestorm of controversy which revived the gun control debate in America. President Obama decided that it was time for him to do something even if it was not popular. He said, “We need to do the right thing” even though many in his own party didn’t agree with him. It was a risk to challenge the status quo by taking an unpopular position, but that is leadership.

In the UK our government’s approval rating continues to plummet. Some of this will be down to their handling of Coronavirus and Brexit negotiations (or lack of). The pandemic may be the largest test of political leadership the world has ever seen and every leader is reacting differently, in his or her own style and will be judged by the results.

Jacinda Ardern’s stands out as her leadership style is one of empathy. Her messages are clear, consistent, and somehow simultaneously sobering and soothing - and her approach isn’t just resonating with her people on an emotional level. It is also working remarkably well.

There’s a high level of trust and confidence in her because of that empathy. She doesn’t peddle misinformation; she doesn’t shift blame; she tries to manage everyone’s expectations at the same time as she offers reassurance.

“To me, leadership is not about necessarily being the loudest in the room, but instead being the bridge, or the thing that is missing in the discussion and trying to build a consensus from there…I’m very proudly an empathetic and compassionate leader. I am trying to chart a different path, and that will attract criticism but I can only be true to myself and the form of leadership I believe in.”

Jacinda Ardern

The success, of course, isn’t all Ardern’s doing; it’s also the product of an impressive collective effort by public-health institutions, opposition politicians, and New Zealanders as a whole, who have largely abided by social-distancing restrictions.

Often leaders must make the choice between popularity and to stand for what you believe in - and this is as true in business as it is in politics. Leaders are constantly faced with making tough decisions, but the hallmark of a good leader versus a great leader is courage. Doing the right thing may be as simple as challenging a naysayer, or as daunting as confronting your shareholders on behalf of your employees, customers or the public or fighting for an idea you think matters even if it’s not popular.

I recently turned down a search assignment because I was able to help my client see how to fix a problem without me. In the short term, I lost a large fee, but now and for the long term I have gained immeasurably more in trust.

Ethical leadership is a 'management style' that works everywhere for everyone, in any organisation. Leadership with integrity drives organisational success in some really powerful ways: attracting top talent, keeping people engaged, increasing job satisfaction, improving productivity and profitability, but is, in and of itself, the right thing to do.

Lorri Lowe
Partner UK

It can be difficult to maintain, grow, and develop company culture when most of us are working from home - and will probably be doing so for months to come. Your remote team culture will flourish or fail, purely on communication. Get communication wrong, and you’ll find that your culture just won’t stick.

When we can’t bump into colleagues in the lift, put the world to rights by the water cooler or have an impromptu lunch to chat about life, the universe and everything, teams can become disparate and misaligned. I have been chatting with our clients recently and here are some of their best ideas to keep remote workers feeling part of the wider team:

• Most communication tools can be left open during working hours either as a desktop app or browser tab, with notifications keeping you updated. Something as simple as keeping that tab open will keep the door open for communication, creating a more cohesive and collaborative workplace.
• Host virtual lunchrooms where colleagues can meet, chat, or simply listen to background ambient conversations while enjoying lunch.
• Encourage any new employees to arrange ‘face to face’ virtual meetings with as many of the team as they feel comfortable with; particularly those who are in different departments.
• Create a central hub with company activities so that people can organise and participate in anything from book clubs to happy hours.
• Promote a (virtual) safe space to encourage everyone to contribute, not just the extroverts. Don’t just focus on work-related topics either; asking about general happiness and mood encourages openness - perhaps even pose problems to the wider community which can be tackled together. e.g. how to manage back to back video calls with two toddlers running around?
• Having a distributed team means that your culture is going to be more difficult to grasp for new team members, so involve the entire team to make sure that everyone is on the same page and you are all heading in the same direction and not just putting out fires or dealing with the latest emergency. The resulting document should clearly articulate the company culture to everyone in your organisation, new and old, right from day one. It should be clear about expectations, how performance is measured, how you assess employees for cultural fit, and the like.
• Set a time for a formal quarterly survey to get an update from every team member to gauge the sentiment amongst your team at any time. There are some excellent people analytics tools out there to help with this including our Friisberg Network Advisory software.

Andrea Falleni

CEO of Capgemini Italy

Talks with: Guglielmo Sallustio, Partner, Friisberg & Partners Italy

"Imagination is the Key"

The risks and opportunities during this phase of radical change have been the subject of much analysis, but making forecasts on the future structure of the business is not always easy and trying to draw conclusions about what has changed is potentially premature.

Nevertheless, a key concept is that organizations must question themselves. It is time for creation: big and especially small companies need to use their imagination to think about new models of work. Also, we must be conscious that many of the challenges we are dealing with may not be only transitory.

Technology remains the engine of this business transformation, and it is necessary for enterprise resilience.

The use of collaboration tools is a trend that enables new models of interaction within companies. IT and Intelligent Automation, AI and data analytics are for sure the most influential technologies for helping organisations increase operational efficiency and transform existing business processes while cloud technologies enable and power the other emerging technologies.

Organizations in all sectors should really put themselves in the customers’ shoes, in other words they should reinforce a customer centric approach as their first challenge. They should then develop solutions to improve customer experience, offering digital services primarily but without losing the human connection on their virtual channels and therefore their connection with the client.

This is the best time to rethink our leadership model too. Remote working necessitates being authentic and having the courage to experiment in order to create a real “digital world”, in which it is possible to develop the sense of belonging and share team values and goals. In this context, the harder challenge for organizations is probably succeeding at switching to a model in which everyone can be evaluated only by their achievement of goals that have to be clearly identified and shared.

Until a few months ago ideas came mainly from a direct exchange of ideas, but now we need a cultural revolution. To enable this soft skills, flexible reasoning and empathy are crucial to define a right balance in both customer relations and team coordination.

Finally, organizations need to invest in green transition: I believe that sustainability must be the focus of corporate strategies to create greater value in the long term, radically changing the relationship between companies and customers.

Gartner has identified 5 actions for CHROs in its recent publication "How to Build a Resilient and Responsive Organization":

1. Take a dynamic approach to reskilling
2. Find talent that generates business impact
3. Redesign work to enable employees to be more responsive
4. Leverage hybrid workforce models
5. Adopt agile principles into HR projects and operating models

"Quality of hires directly impacts the business — for better or worse".

"Every hire matters more now".

[ Go to full source report on Gartner.com ]

REPORT

"Women in the Workplace 2020" is a must-read report from McKinsey & Company.

In summary:

• More than one in four women are contemplating what many would have considered unthinkable just six months ago: downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce completely.
• Mothers are more than three times as likely as fathers to be responsible for most of the housework and caregiving during the pandemic. In fact, they’re 1.5 times more likely than fathers to be spending an additional three or more hours per day on housework and childcare. Many mothers are considering downshifting their career or leaving the workforce, and mothers are significantly more likely to be thinking about taking these steps than fathers.
• Senior-level women are significantly more likely than men at the same level to feel burned out, under pressure to work more, and “as though they have to be ‘always on.’” And they are 1.5 times more likely than senior-level men to think about downshifting their role or leaving the workforce because of COVID-19. Almost three in four cite burnout as a main reason.
• Before this year, Women in the Workplace research had consistently found that women and men leave their companies at comparable rates. However, due to the challenges created by the COVID-19 crisis, as many as two million women are considering leaving the workforce. If these women feel forced to leave the workplace, we’ll end up with far fewer women in leadership—and far fewer women on track to be future leaders. All the progress we’ve seen over the past six years could be erased.
• The choices companies make could shape the workplace for women for decades to come—for better or for worse.
• There are two paths ahead. If companies recognize the scale of these problems and do all they can to address them, they can help their employees get through this difficult time and even reinvent the way they work so it’s more flexible and sustainable for everyone. If not, the consequences could badly hurt women, business, and the economy as a whole.

[ Go to full source report on McKinsey.com ]

REPORT

"Diversity is the result, but inclusion is the action."

Over the past 14 years, the Global Gender Gap Index included in The World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report 2020 has served as a compass to track progress on relative gaps between women and men on health, education, economy, and politics. Through this annual yardstick, stakeholders within each country are able to set priorities relevant in each specific economic, political and cultural context.

This year’s report highlights the growing urgency for action. Without the equal inclusion of half of the world’s talent, we will not be able to deliver on the promise of the Fourth Industrial Revolution for all of society, grow our economies for greater shared prosperity or achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals. At the present rate of change, it will take nearly a century to achieve parity, a timeline we simply cannot accept in today’s globalized world, especially among younger generations who hold increasingly progressive views of gender equality.

Lorri Lowe, Chair of Friisberg's Diversity Group, who writes and speaks regularly on employee engagement and corporate cultures, highlights the slow rate of progress being made towards parity between the sexes, particularly in boardrooms:

"Without some widespread recognition that there is a problem to be addressed, these statistics will continue to be disheartening. The acknowledgement needs to made, by employers, that  - as Jesse Jackson famously said - when everyone is included, everyone wins."

The Survey “Friisberg Insights – CTO on SPOT” is part of regular in-depth exploration of different C-level roles aiming to identify respective key trends and findings.

The Survey represents a snapshot of the mission, challenges, motivational factors, compensation terms etc for CTO professionals in Bulgaria.

This article, first published by the leading Bulgarian Business media “Capital”, provides an overview of the Survey results based on the answers from 94 CTOs (Head of Engineering, Head of Development, Technical Director or other similar).

ARTICLE

(in Bulgarian)

#FriisbergSurveyCTOonSPOT