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后疫情时代,向混合型办公转型

后疫情时代,向混合型办公转型

特刊 2021-05-17
领导者需要意识到混合型办公将会带来的挑战与机遇,虽然有其局限性,但也有显著的优势。

在我多年的 IT 行业从业经历中,曾帮助过很多国际企业成功实现关键的数字化转型。从早期实施帮助企业端对端运营的ERP系统,到工业 4.0 时代对分布式供应链及自动化生产的数字化,这些转型都为企业带来了新机遇,也为企业创造了显著的竞争优势。然而,如果缺乏一些最基本的核心要素,企业也无法取得成功。

所有成功的企业都拥有一个共同的核心要素:「有效沟通」。

把「有效沟通」数字化

在商业世界中,有内部沟通,也有外部沟通,有效的沟通构成了一个成功的循环。高效的内部沟通可以提升员工的参与感,从而更好地协作,共同实现公司愿景。有效率的外部沟通则能带来合作伙伴和客户,创造营收。这就形成了一个循环:协作良好的员工可以为更多客户提供更好的产品和服务,而客户的高满意度将有助于员工更深入地参与公司的愿景建设,为公司的持续发展做出贡献。只有实现有效的内外部沟通,企业才能循环的获得成功。

RingCentral 铃盛软件正是一家提供可靠的云沟通平台的公司,旨在通过高效灵活的沟通,为全球企业以数字化的形式实现这一成功的循环。

后疫情时代的工作模式

随着突如其来的疫情,整个世界在发生飞速的转变,传统的沟通方式正面临挑战。在新冠疫情前,几乎 100% 的员工都在办公室工作,面对面互动是主要沟通方式。疫情期间,由于隔离及其他原因,员工只能在家或在其他安全的远程地点工作,并通过线上工具进行交流。由于大家都面临着同样的情况,所以没有人感到不便,况且当时也别无选择。随着疫苗开始广泛接种,我们终于看到了曙光。全球各地的企业正在计划恢复正常办工,但你是否意识到疫情后的工作环境面临着哪些新挑战?

许多人认为,疫情结束后,生活会重新回到 2019 年的状态。但遗憾的是,许多研究表明,结果并非如此。疫情后的世界商业生态更像是疫情前 + 疫情期间工作模式的混合。有人称其为混合型办公,即由在司办公和远程办公组成。

以我们中国的办公室为例,因为中国的疫情较早就得到好转,2020 年中我们已经开始回到公司上班,但是公司仍然容许员工可以选择继续远程办公。尽管有些员工经历了长时间的在家办公后,迫不及待地想回公司,但实际上,我们发现了一个稳定的趋势:大约 1/4 的员工仍然选择长期在家办公。这个结果让我们深入的了解到员工在混合型办公环境中的偏好与工作习惯。

混合型办公环境下的有效沟通

如何在混合型工作环境下保持有效沟通是当今世界面临的全新挑战。尽管存在不确定性,我们的中国团队依旧取得了更好的业绩,表现出了更高的员工敬业度,甚至还获得了 2020 年亚洲最佳雇主奖以及 2020 – 2021 年中国卓越健康领袖奖。在此期间,我们新产品的发布速度更快、质量更高。这其中的许多实践都值得研究。

我们的团队并未把复工简单地当成“回到过去”的过程,而是当成一个以更好方法进行转型和协作的良机。使用可靠的 RingCentral 通讯云,线上和线下的同事都可以无障碍地参与会议,这是我们的新常态。有些项目的团队利用 RingCentral Rooms的领先技术设置了敏捷的虚拟作战室,同事们想要讨论或聊天时,无需一直待在会议室,可以用移动设备加会,实现无缝连接,在任意地点继续参会。这一新常态不仅使远程办公和在司办公的同事得以在线上相聚,也帮我们一并解决了一个老难题,把不在同一办公楼或者不在同一楼层办公的同事快速聚集在一起。

一些员工反馈,他们原先在经过走廊或者在咖啡间时会和其他同事聊天交流。现在的混合型办公环境可能会减少偶遇的机会,但借助科技,你会发现自己更容易找到想要聊天的同事。使用RingCentral Glip 应用,兴趣相投的人得以同气相求。无论你是在喝茶还是等电梯,动动手指就可以进行语音或者信息沟通。我们的中国团队不仅使用 Glip 进行项目讨论,还开设了很多有趣的兴趣话题组,如厨艺美食、周末活动或者育儿技巧等等。这里还有一个由所有员工组成的大群,里面常常会有独具创意和搞笑的内容分享。这些实践的结果,收获了更强的士气以及团队凝聚力。

变革需要领导力

像其他转型一样,领导力对转型成功至关重要。领导者必须承认,是否允许员工远程办公不再是个选择。你不允许不代表其他公司不顺应潮流。领导者需要意识到混合型办公将会带来的挑战与机遇,虽然有其局限性,但也有显著的优势。接受差异是转型过程中的重要一步。如之前提到的,技术提供了有效沟通的可靠方法,但要形成一个新的工作模式,仍需领导者制定出相关政策并加以鼓励。复工初期,希望继续远程办公的员工不太确定“远程办公”的政策是否会继续,也不确定自己如果长期不在办公室,会不会变得边缘化。而另一方面,决定在司办公的员工也会担心,有些团队成员不在身边的话,是否还能有效协作。此时,如果领导者能提供强有力的支持来使公司政策保持稳定,员工就会更有信心在这个新时期中取得成功。

转型的过程中会产生大量反馈。我们在中国的管理团队公开收集员工的建议,来更好地支持新的工作模式。我们成立了一个员工沟通委员会,由在司和远程办公的员工自愿组成。委员会定期开会讨论大家的反馈意见,商议可以改进之处。没有一个放之四海而皆准的政策,所以我们需要边实施边调整,而员工也可以看到过程中的优化与改进。如何打破地理距离隔阂,更好地提升团队参与度,委员会提出了很多创新的想法。引导这些反馈到正确的渠道,并制定相关工作政策予以支持,是领导者实现转型成功的关键。

改变或被改变

有些公司进行转型是为了在大潮流下得以生存,有些则为了抓住新机会把业务提升到新的高度。其实这是个鸡先蛋先的问题,何时开始转型决定了企业将处于哪种情况。

最后,我想以我最喜欢的作家之一马尔科姆·格拉德威尔 (Malcolm Gladwell) 的一句话作为总结——“转型不是改善,而是重新思考”。希望我们的经验可以帮助你在后疫情时代更好地筹划,并取得成功。

本文作者Marc Chan, IT行业全球五百强跨国企业资深高管,现任RingCentral全球副总裁及大中华区总经理。

关于RingCentral

RingCentral, Inc.(纽交所代码:RNG)是全球领先的云商务通信——消息、视频、电话 (MVP)、客户沟通和联络中心解决方案提供商。相比于传统的本地PBX和视频会议系统,RingCentral以更灵活、更节约成本的方式,使现代移动和分布式工作人员可随时随地、通过任何设备和任何模式进行沟通、协作和连接。RingCentral的开放式平台与领先的第三方商业应用相集成,支持客户轻松定制业务工作流。RingCentral总部位于加利福尼亚州贝尔蒙特,在全球各地都设有分公司。目前在中国厦门、杭州及香港均有办公室,支持全球范围内云面试、云入职, 部分职位开放长期远程办公。

In many years of my career in the IT industry, I have helped numerous global enterprises crucial and successful Digital Transformation. From implementing ERP for governing end to end corporate operations in the early time, to digitalizing distributed supply chain and manufacturing execution in the era of Industry 4.0, transformation brought in new opportunities and provided these enterprises distinct competitive advantages. However, none of these enterprises could have been successful in their field without the most fundamental core value they all share.

Successful enterprises share one common ingredient of success – Effective Communication.

Digitalizing Effective Communication

In the world of business, communication happens both as Internal and External, and the effectiveness of them constitutes the cycle of success. Good internal communication can engage your employee and facilitate them to collaborate towards your corporate vision. Efficient external communication brings in partners and customers and directly contributes to your revenue. This turns into a cycle as engaged employees can deliver better products and services for more customers, and high customer satisfaction will engage your employees deeper to the company’s right vision. No enterprise can be successful without being effective in this cycle. RingCentral is a company that aims at providing a reliable cloud platform to digitalize this cycle of success through effective communication.

Post-COVID Work Model

As the world is transforming under the unexpected pandemic, the traditional way of communication is being challenged. Before COVID, employees were almost 100% in office making communication primarily in the form of direct physical interactions. During COVID, due to lockdown and other reasons, employees have to work from home or in a remote and safe location. Communication is limited to online tools but since everyone is in the same situation, no one actually feels disadvantaged or honestly has alternatives. As vaccination begins to be widely adopted, we are finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel. Many companies have started planning for RTO (Return To Office), but are you aware what new challenges may come in a Post-COVID work environment?

Many believe that after COVID is over, life will be back to what it exactly was in 2019. Unfortunately, many studies show a different result. The Post-COVID business world will likely be a mixture of Pre-COVID + During-COVID work models. Some call this a Hybrid Workplace, composed of employee on-site and remote.

We did a study in our own offices in China. Since the COVID situation there was eased earlier, RTO was started in mid 2020 but employees could choose to continue working remotely. Despite the first few days where we saw employees suffering Work-From-Home (WFH) fatigue rushing to office, we saw a stable trend that approximately 1/4 of employees chose to work remotely consistently. This allows us to understand the mix of employee’s preferences and habits in a hybrid work environment.

Communication in a Hybrid Workplace

Maintaining communication effectiveness under a hybrid work environment is something brand new to the world. But despite the uncertainty, our team in China came out of this with higher productivity and employee engagement. The team was even awarded Best Company to Work For in Asia 2020 and China Healthiest Workplace 2020 - 2021. New products were released even faster and in higher quality during this time. Some practices there are worth studying.

Our team did not see RTO as the process of returning to how things were done in the past, but instead, an opportunity to transform and collaborate in a better way. Based on the reliable RingCentral communication cloud, meetings involving colleagues online and offline are scheduled as a normal practice. Some project teams even setup virtual scrum rooms leveraging state-of-the-art technologies like RingCentral Rooms, where colleagues can hop in and out physically in the office or anywhere via the mobile app, whenever they need to discuss or chat with someone. This new habit not only brought our WFH colleagues virtually together with the folks in office, but it also helped us address an old headache of bringing employees from different office sites or different floors of the office building together instantly.

Some employees provided feedback that they used to have casual chat with other colleagues while they walked down the hallway or in a coffee corner. Hybrid workplace may have reduced the chance that you accidentally bump into someone for a chat, but with the help of technology, chances that you discover someone you want to have a chat with are much higher. Leveraging the Glip by RingCentral app, people with common interest can be pulled in a team easily. Whether you are having a cup of tea or waiting for an elevator, you can chat verbally or via text messages at your fingertips. Our team in China not only uses this for project discussion, but also for any interesting topics like cooking ideas for dinner, weekend suggestions, or childcare tricks, etc. There is also a large group involving all employees and that group is never short of creative and hilarious content. The result is an even stronger morale and sense of together-ness established.

Leading the Transformation

Like any transformation, leadership plays a crucial role in success. Leaders must acknowledge that it’s not their choice whether they allow people to work remotely. If they don’t, someone else will. Leaders should also understand the challenges and opportunities a hybrid work model can bring. There are hard limitations in a hybrid workplace, but there are also distinct advantages in it. Embracing the differences is an important step in the transformation process. Technology, as mentioned above, provides reliable ways to deliver effective communication, but it requires work policies and encouragement from leaders to form a new work model. At the beginning of RTO, colleagues who planned to work remotely expressed feelings of uncertainty on whether the Work From Anywhere policy will continue and whether they will be left behind by not being in office. Employees who decided to work in office, on the other hand, have concerns about how effective the collaboration can be when some team members are not in their sight. As the policy remains stable through strong leadership support, employee’s confidence level of being successful in the new world increases.

Throughout the transformation process, there was a vast amount of feedback flowing around. Our management team in China openly collected them as a way to adapt to the new world. An Engagement Committee composed of voluntary employees in office and remote was formed and they meet regularly to discuss the feedback and improvement areas. There is no one-size-fits-all policy, so adjustments were made as we go, and employees can see improvement and progress along the way. Creative ideas are constantly generated from the committee on how to engage the team better without a physical boundary. Channeling these inputs into a right direction and form related work policies to support them is exactly how leaders can make the transformation a success.

Change or Be Changed

Some companies go through transformation in order to survive from an unwanted situation, some do it to harness new opportunities and take business to the next level. Whichever situation you are in depends on when you start the transformation.

Let me share a quote from one of my favorite authors Malcolm Gladwell – “Transformation isn’t about improving. It’s about re-thinking”. I hope our experience can help you better plan for and be successful in the Post-COVID new world.

Author: Marc Chan, VP and General Manager of China at RingCentral.

About RingCentral

RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE: RNG) is a leading provider of business cloud communications and contact center solutions based on its powerful Message Video Phone™    (MVP™) platform. More flexible and cost effective than legacy on-premise PBX and video conferencing systems that it replaces, RingCentral empowers modern mobile and distributed workforces to communicate, collaborate, and connect via any mode, any device, and any location. RingCentral offers three key products in its portfolio including RingCentral Office® , a Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform including team messaging, video meetings, and a cloud phone system; Glip ®   the company's free video meetings solution with team messaging that enables Smart Video Meetings™; and RingCentral cloud Contact Center solutions. RingCentral’s open platform integrates with leading third party business applications and enables customers to easily customize business workflows. RingCentral is headquartered in Belmont, California, and has offices around the world. In China, RingCentral has offices in Xiamen, Hangzhou and Hong Kong.

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