A responsive agenda based on business continuity needs to be replaced with a proactive, holistic business transformation strategy based on long-term viability.

The strategy will drive a critical redesign of the business operating model based on digital age factors of disruption and reinvention, which will create a North Star for organizational transformation. Beyond remote working at scale, organizational change will embrace cultural adaptation and plan for iterative waves of new work design and digitally altered work practices. Leaders will need to identify and assess strategic workforce gaps and plan for remediation aligned with their most important organizational capabilities.

The organization transformation plan will provide the business context required to operationalize the strategy and the basis on which leaders will:

Key learnings arise from the current situation that form a foundation for future planning. For example, what did you learn about your organization’s ability to function when unforeseen external factors disrupted day-to-day operations? Were you able to both deploy and reskill your workers at scale without significant detriment to productivity? Were your systems accessible, your bandwidth viable, and remote asset monitoring and data insights helpful? Did you adjust long-standing governance structures and processes to allow the business to make decisions faster and with greater agility?

You can assess your response to the crisis and determine which digital enablers had a profoundly positive impact and identify those that failed to meet expectations. Answers to these questions will be useful as you transition towards the ‘next normal’ and longer-term priorities.

As 2020 dawned, most organizations had a flimsy set of worker profiles, personas, and to-be worker journeys. Now, as we prepare to embrace a new reality, one of the most salient lessons is the realization that it will be our workforce and its performance, resilience, curiosity, and attitudes that ultimately determine our customer experiences. The hyper-focus that we’ve had on understanding our customers in the context of our marketplace goals - their interests, pain points and behaviors – needs to be laser-focused on our workers and their experiences in the context of our business strategies, operating models and organizational designs.

To achieve this goal, it’s important that we anticipate our worker personas in this future state of work. In this state, work will be automated. Work practices will be driven by culture and differentiated by our purpose, and by combined human-machine capabilities that enable the organization to learn and work on multiple timescales.

It is abundantly clear that we will not be returning to “normal” working conditions…or that “returning” is even the primary goal anymore. Virtual work is now a reality for almost every company and distributed workforce planning is a permanent part of new workforce strategies. In the near-term, you’ll want a solid plan to assess and optimize current state working models to address pain points and remove obstacles to remote worker productivity. In the longer term, regardless of when and how people might leverage physical office space, the entire organization and its assets must be designed to flourish in a digital-first, virtual model. This is a big change for most organizations. Prior to COVID-19, even companies with high percentages of non-office worker populations failed to provide them services and support, engagement, connectivity and inclusion on par with their office worker colleagues.

With undeniable forces of digital transformation already in motion, as we create the COVID-induced decentralized work model, we can accelerate the digital-first business ecosystems that are necessary for winning in the digital age. We can engage our workers in shaping a mutual digital future that realizes the goal of becoming digital companies at our core, not at our corporate offices. And, we can prioritize the worker experiences (not the digital tools) and ready the organization ahead of other disruptions and waves of change – predictable or otherwise – that threaten our viability.

The successful transition to a virtual workforce depends largely on a company’s ability to rapidly tap into diverse flows of knowledge and share these in learning loops that continuously gather information from data ecosystems. As we have seen, simply digitizing assets does not allow people to work in a decentralized environment. In other words, the enterprise needs to become both portable and contextual, or risk workers “drowning” in a sea of indecipherable digital information. Existing knowledge stocks must allow advanced technologies such as machine learning to quickly derive insights and share these learnings “on demand” with isolated workers. External and diverse knowledge sources must be tapped to ensure depleted stocks of information are constantly refreshed and applied to strengthen organizational connectivity at this time of unprecedented disruption.