Shaping culture

How have employee relationships and experiences changed over the course of the pandemic? NTT DATA Romania sought to find out, with results showing a wide range of perceptions: some celebrated the new forms of communication and others were dispirited by the decrease in in-office interaction. This leads to a challenging but crucial question: how can we make sure we all feel included in our organizations?

No matter how you feel about it, remote work is here to stay. As leaders, how confident and comfortable you are with this shift will depend on your own experiences, background, and even your seniority. There are very real changes involved in working remotely or in hybrid teams, but there is good news: when we take the time to be intentional, the proper courses of action become clear.

Our physical and digital working environments are converging at breakneck speed, and few organizations would claim to be ready. Preparedness is often seen as a purely technological responsibility, but a broader set of ingredients is required for a truly successful strategy. As workplaces become more ‘liquid’ and organizations refine their post-Covid working practices, the key lies not just in tools and infrastructure but in behaviors that allow for understanding, organizing and optimizing work within this new hybrid environment.

Successful leadership in today’s world of hybrid work requires a reset in how we manage and empower our teams. Leaders should focus on facilitating social connections and creating a fertile breeding ground for innovation by establishing the structures for employees to communicate and collaborate across boundaries.

Few companies have fully grasped the reality of today’s New Work challenges. The majority seem content to wait and see – but this complacency could mean the difference between moving ahead and lagging behind. There is a lot at stake, and to make a success of the new world of work leaders need to move on from technology and team leadership and focus on strategy at a higher level.

The impact of the pandemic and advancing technologies have made designing the future workplace a complex task. As well as focusing on flexibility and comfort, a good workplace design must support collaboration, interaction and innovation – and have connectivity at its heart. The interoperability and opportunities presented by the metaverse may hold one of the keys to overcoming legacy problems and providing your employees with the best possible experience.

For many years now, there has been miscommunication happening in the workplace. It’s not just about age or technology – it’s because we didn’t have a rulebook for our body language in a digital world. One of the crucial cornerstones of this new way of working is ‘communicate carefully’ and, given how central reading and writing comprehension is to our hybrid work lives, reminding ourselves what good communication looks like is critical to being a conscientious colleague. As our workplaces have become increasingly remote, these principles should be at the forefront of all that we do.

Many businesses are struggling to make the right decisions about how to engage their people in this new, almost unrecognizable world of work. Employee engagement is down, reports of burnout are getting worse and worker satisfaction in many organizations is low. Now more than ever, success for any business lies in creating a culture that helps its people grow. But it’s one thing to say that you want to be people-centric, and another to create an environment where this ethos is upheld. In-depth feedback around employee perceptions ensures companies can walk the talk.

Covid has changed how people view their professional trajectories, as well as the way in which companies perceive their employees. Leaders now have the opportunity to experiment, testing hybrid work formulas in order to secure both the health of the company and of the individuals working within it. At the core is balance, fairness and inclusivity.

Looking back has always been a crucial part of moving forwards. Understanding the history of the workplace can help business leaders to accelerate their path to success in the future. The best advice for delivering a great employee experience, that will attract and retain the best people, is hidden in our past.

Within every organization today, there is an untapped source of advantage, one we all possess but almost no-one is using well: the potential of age diversity. Intergenerational collaborations tap into the different expertise that stems from growing up in different periods of history. To get away from the notion that teams made up of multiple generations will suffer from miscommunication and conflict, leaders must create organizational cultures where generational differences are reframed as a source of strength and opportunity.

When so much is changing in our day-to-day personal and professional lives, organizations need to make sure they are adjusting to the new demands of work whilst being sensitive and supportive of their workers. Automation allows employees to engage in creative, exciting, rewarding endeavors that lead to elevated career and personal satisfaction – as well as delivering efficiencies for the business.

Leaders today face a bewildering amount of change and uncertainty. They are expected to guide others, even when they themselves are unsure of the way forward. Yet diversity, which is often perceived as a problem, is actually a free resource to help leaders to de-risk and calibrate their decision-making.

The pandemic forced businesses and organizations to abandon the physical office and adopt remote working. But with Covid now seemingly behind us, and hybrid practices well-established, is there a danger that without face-to-face interaction, organizations will lose the very thing that keeps them connected?

Executives everywhere are having to re-evaluate their purpose and re-establish their resolve, building a new set of muscles to lead. True leadership is being the author of your own story, whilst staying true to your values. Holding on to that central purpose, that constant in a sea of changes, will allow leaders to thrive, even as the rulebooks are being rewritten before our eyes.

Creating effective cybersecurity systems is about so much more than understanding your vulnerabilities and putting measures in place to mitigate them. It begins with understanding what has made human beings feel safe in the past, and using those lessons and behaviors to build an electronic world they can trust.

Overcoming the traditional mindsets that limit the technology landscape requires a refocus on human needs and empathetic design. With learnings from different cultures, the expertise of working within varied environments and the proven results that such creativity delivers, design-led approaches and frameworks are transforming how organizations tackle legacy challenges.

Being able to recognize a consulting organization’s ethics, reflected in their culture, greatly influences their clients’ ability to trust them. It is therefore the remit of the individual consultant and the organization to ensure they are engaging clients with the best intent, that they don’t falsely represent themselves, that they charge fairly, and conduct their business with integrity.

Employees and customers have new expectations of organizations, not just to speak and understand their language, but ultimately to be human – in the decisions that they make, the values they represent, and the way they contribute to human progress. Trust is the driving force of change and value creation; trust gives us the power to reimagine, rethink and reshape our world, environment and professional as well as personal context.

If the past two years have taught organizations anything, it’s that empathy is an essential part of customer service and engagement. This is the right time for organizations to focus on building a culture of empathy by developing processes that promote empathetic customer experiences and engagements through tailored interactions and smart technology.

On the back of the biggest ever global economic shutdown, organizations embraced empathy and trust as the newest workplace traits. As we begin to experience some semblance of normalcy, there is a window of opportunity to leverage this rediscovered state of ‘humanized connection’ for customer-led empathy to improve people and business performance.

Trust can take years for organizations to build with customers and employees, but only moments to break. How can businesses secure and build trust that can stand the test of time in a turbulent period of economic shakiness, political unrest and a global pandemic?

In a world where skepticism and misinformation have now become the default, trust has become the new currency for business. And those companies that know how to spend it well can create a competitive advantage by making sure that their actions speak louder than words.

In such turbulent times, with a global pandemic and the drive towards the digital world, dependence on cyber safety and consumer trust only becomes increasingly important. Technology continues to develop in complexity, as do our methods to mediate it, but it’s imperative that we don’t forget the human side of risk, too.

In today’s fast-changing markets, where adaptability is key to success, traditional leadership thinking is too rigid to effectively respond to unexpected events. What’s needed instead at a senior level is a vibrant mix of thought and opinions that can deliver creative solutions to unexpected events. This means that organizations with greater gender balance at the highest level are much better equipped to remain competitive.

Today the global operating environment stands on shaky foundations. Technology is changing at unprecedented rates, and with significant political and economic instability, uncertainty defines interaction, experience and strategy. To build a future that can withstand this complexity, organizations need to put trust at the forefront of their engagements and operations.

Getting your EX right has the power to transform, making a fundamental difference to your people, your bottom line, and your organisation’s ability to deliver a positive social impact.

The collaborative approach to leading teams is best suited for today’s complex workplace, where newer, less-defined problems need agile solutions. Through collaborative leadership, executives can create an inclusive environment that energises teams, releases creativity, and cultivates a company culture that is both productive and joyful where information is exchanged organically, and everyone takes responsibility for the whole.

Could it be possible to make your organisation twice as agile? When businesses behave intelligently, they use data science to facilitate a culture of continual, democratised decision-making, which can cut response times in half.

What does it take to build an intelligent enterprise? The combination of human intellect and the computer’s proficiency in performing rules-based tasks creates a hybrid ability far better than man or machine can achieve alone. To become a digitally optimised organisation, and sustain it, companies need a clear understanding of what they hope to gain, plus a cohesive plan to bring technology and people together for the maximum benefit.

Covid has changed almost everything about how we work, and now HR is undergoing a revolution. HR’s most important role, arguably, is improving the employee experience – in turn contributing to profitability, competitiveness and, of course, the happiness of the workforce. Here’s how data and analytics support this aim.

The sudden shock of the changes brought about as a result of coronavirus has passed, and we are now settling into what is likely to be a long period of working from home. Our sister companies, particularly NTT DATA Italia, have been coping with this situation for some time already, and we have benefitted from their experience. We would like to share some of what they have discovered.

There are a number of reasons for the pressure to change that many companies are feeling: economic globalisation, unforeseen crises, the rising complexity of business processes, and digitalisation at all levels to name a few. Companies are responding with new structures and processes. In doing so, management has to rely heavily on HR, because every positive change is built on the willingness and skillsets of employees. HR shapes extensive aspects of change and HR managers, therefore, are increasingly becoming change managers – and have to stand the test of this new role.

Adapt or perish. The rate of change in the post-Covid world is relentless. With the competitor landscape and customer demands changing at speed, the new enterprise must be hyper-adaptive, able to flex and adopt the agile mindset and principles to ultimately achieve competitive advantage and build better relationships with their customers, staff and communities.

The time for command-and-control is gone. To cope with the level and pace of change, the rules of business planning and management must be rewritten – with flexibility, robustness and self-organisation at the root. Rebelling against the norm is not only advantageous; it's critical.

Understanding how best to care for your employees, as we transition into a post-pandemic working environment, stems from a strong company culture. With culture as the foundation, leaders can protect and promote wellbeing, authenticity and effective communication.

By treating staff as customers, letting go of perfectionism and ensuring teams are both empowered and encouraged to make decisions, leaders are giving their organisations the best chance of success amidst this time of great uncertainty. When people feel part of the change, as opposed to subject to it, the true benefits of agility can be realised.

In today’s world in flux, traditional change management is insufficient. Enterprise agility, operational adaptability, cultural flexibility and organisational fluidity all fundamentally depend on a new way of thinking about and relating to change, period. Welcome to a Flux Mindset: an essential tool for leadership, robust organisational culture and thriving talent from here on out.

Change is the only constant, in life and in business. But change isn’t something to be overcome – instead, we should regard it as the catalyst for innovation, agility and organisational resilience. An agile change management approach is the springboard from which businesses can catapult towards optimised processes, better ways of working and a flexible, sustainable enterprise.

The potential for digital technology to revolutionise how people interact with sport has been brought into sharp focus over the last year, with the pandemic forcing the industry to rethink how they provide the best service they can for fans. A German handball club has an inspiring story of how to reconcile old cultural values with new commercial demands.