6 Most Important Things to Regain Competitive Advantage
By: Dr Michael Heng
Tags: Leadership, Management, Business Strategy, Covid 19, Human Resources

A research by Bersin Academy concluded that “work is making people sick.” Employees need a more intimate connection to co-workers and the workplace for meaning in life and a sense of social purpose.

The employee workplace experience within a corporate culture which empowers satisfying work and social bonding will foster active engagement, boost morale and joyful engagement with customers and co-workers. The critical role of the human talent as the highest form of technology providing the decisive sustainable competitive advantage has never been more important for business survival and success.

The basic focus of an effective strategic solution post-pandemic is strategic transformation. It is to embolden and empower organizational readiness for the inevitable recovery. Culture and strategy shall define the crux of the strategic people response in the past-pandemic future. Companies need to maintain job security by retaining jobs, engage employees, unpack and embolden communication, balancing the needs of the employee and business to inspire morale with empowerment.

There are 6 important “must-have” things in order to regain competitive advantage in the post-pandemic era:

1) Thinking the Unthinkable.

“Business-as-Usual” is gone and will never return. Organisations must embolden and empower strategic reformulation for the re-engineering, re-wiring and reconfiguration of the Company’s business and value offerings canvas, review its critical staff profile, redraw manning levels and reconstruct structural configurations, work systems, technology deployment, people policies and practices such as staffing, performance management, rewards and compensation, working hours and supervisory management practices for the benefits of doing and getting more from a much leaner workforce.

In the post-pandemic era, successful organisations are those who initiate opportunities for ideas exchange as part of talent management to generate “unthinkable” and “impossible” innovations for all types of risks associated with a sustaining business continuity. Scenario planning for executives across all mission-critical functions has become compulsory to assure and ensure that the 2020 disruptions to logistics, supply value chain, markets, customers’ satisfaction, people and production would be promptly engaged and remedied.

The playbook for many companies in their many disaster recovery and business continuity exercises quickly became obsolete in the onslaught of the current pandemic whose scale was unthinkable and deemed improbable. “Never Again” should companies be caught flat-footed and unprepared by other unseen and unforeseen assailant.

For sure, the coronavirus will return again but would organisations also be prepared for others deadlier and more sinister? The strategic implications for management in 2021 has never been better defined and described in more graphical terms.

2) Redesign Work Systems

Post-pandemic, many organisations will realise that they need less or no office space, fewer on-site employees and discover many jobs are actually redundant or unnecessary. Tele-commuting and teleworking, as well as outsourcing HR, finance and non-operational tasks, employees sharing with neighbouring non-competing companies can be part of a “Distributed Office” strategy, whereby workers telecommute and telework from home or wherever whenever. Re-design business and work processes. Deploy suitable technologies, upgrade technical capacity and human capability to obtain better efficiency and greater productivity. Review/Rewrite job descriptions to merge or eliminate jobs, creating new ones, as well as construct/design fresh online and experiential learning programs and delivering them in time and before for the inevitable recovery.

Re-engineering the organization is an essential task of people and business managers in the post-pandemic times. The new digital HR Business Partner (dHRBP) must quickly become familiar with the company’s business and marketplace if he/she had not already done so. The task of future disaster readiness in pandemic proportions now lies in the hands of the dHRBP who has often avoided his/her critical role as the corporate strategist in continuous monitoring and scanning of the operating environment.

3) Total Employee Experience

Sporadic employee engagement is no longer sufficient to maintain trust and cohesiveness for empowerment. Organizations must work towards getting the pulse of employee experience on a real time basis across all touch points. Creating a delightful total employee experience is the emergent goal of people management through data analytics, empowered by technology. Know that employee personal well-being, financial health, mental health, social health, physical wellness, social engagement and overall satisfaction all impact the emotional state of an employee and should therefore be tracked and monitored by employers, to be analysed using people-centred insights. Strategic proactive and predictive actions can be leveraged to creating “wow” employee experience, in the same manner as creating that awesome “wow” customer experience.

The impact of critical leadership on driving the total employee experience remains paramount. The only viable and key effective leadership strategy for an awesomely “wow” employee experience is to “Communicate, Communicate, Communicate”.

Employees are entitled to personal appreciation, respect and recognition beyond work-related matters. They rightly expect to be developed for rewarding role and responsibilities, as well as intentional career development. Organisations need to motivate and embolden growth mindsets at the individual levels across all departments and divisions to empower a holistic mobilisation for competitive organisational and business success.

4) Digital Transformation

According to Gardner, over 60% of companies by 2025 will deem networking as core to their digital strategies, up from 20% today, deeming networking as a strategic enabler. The massive acceleration of digital transformation means that entire businesses and their stakeholders need to operate digitally in a collaborative manner. Their people talents would have to embrace the efficiencies demanded of people services, people operations as well as talent selection, onboarding and development.

Digital transformation in the People Function of organisations have to be suitably optimised in relation to remote work, mobile work-life, social media, ecommerce, team management, employee feedback,, employer branding and connecting the internal and external communications information flow.

Information technology is certainly useful for sophisticated data processing and statistical analysis. However, its attempts at creating predictive models from often inadequate or insufficient data and/or data uncertainty as well as unrelated data beyond the operational levels so as to be relevant at the strategic decision-making level is at best a daunting task. It risks ignoring the active but dominant role of human sense-making and instinct for truly effective and well-informed management actions. The dHRBP can influence attempts to remove human dependency altogether from predictive digital heuristic models. A key question is whether digital decision-making models can provide a sufficient foundation to build an important business decision, since they mostly do not incorporate the actual unpredictable dynamism of human creative processes. The business context is critical for effective digital applications in any kinds of enterprise analytics, including people analytics.

5) Personal Data Protection

Capgemini reported that “compliance with data protection and privacy regulations can be a source of competitive advantage for organizations”. Organizations are making significant investments in advice and technology upgrades to ensure compliance with existing data protection regulations. It discovered also that more than one in three consumers (39%) will spend more with an organization when convinced that the organization protects their personal data. At the same time, 35% of employees also reward their employers with higher loyalty and positive word-of-mouth when they are convinced that their employer is protecting their personal data.

Personal data protection is essentially about trust-building. Building trust relationships with customers, public and employees will translate into sustainable competitive business advantage, from being entrusted with personal intimate data as inut into valuable insightful business decisions.

Swiss Bank USA was quoted saying that “Our goal was to have a sophisticated system for protecting customer data that can also be used as a way of differentiating us from our competitors and of attracting new customers.”

The protection of personal data is clearly an enabling opportunity for business. The immediate task is to bridge the gap between the preparedness of organisation in compliance with the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) and the expectations of employees and customers. It involves educating consumers and employees, to foster and win their trust. For the organisation, the challenge in the post-pandemic era is to build a culture of respect for personal data within the organisation.

6) Leadership Over Fear

In the midst of the pandemic crisis and after, leaders need to learn new competencies to unlearn from past legacy successes and relearn to embrace, update and be equipped with more appropriate leadership competencies. Leadership during these abnormal times is most challenging. It is also the decisive success driver. Revisit your vision and mission. Are they still relevant and inspirational to your employees? Be courageous to review, update and revise your mission goals and priorities.

Employees live with an unprecedented state of fear — fear for their own lives and their love ones’, followed by job loss and income insecurity. Some CEOs boldly stated their “duty of care” to employees and enacted “shareholders come last” policy; others quickly retrenched and laid off workers to feed their hungry self-interests. Exceptional leaders cut their own salary/perks and promised job security. Employee safety and well-being become topmost corporate priorities through social distancing and health monitoring measures.

Employees and stakeholders demand a new playbook for sustainable business continuity. Compassion and charity will not last. A renewed corporate vision for sustainable business recovery is also needed to provide direction, focus and to inspire, motivate and embolden employee commitment in the present for the future.

Business leaders must redefine a holistic context for business performance given their current crisis experience in a CORVID19 crisis world. New leadership models are needed for more sustainable growth in the future from innovative leadership with breakthrough innovations with regard to people management, stakeholders and the post-pandemic marketplace.