Leading with Influence and Impact During Times of Crisis

What surprising impact has COVID-19 had on productivity? And what leadership decisions have proven most effective as organizations manage projects during the sudden shift to remote working?

In this episode of Navigate Disruption, we speak with Milan Dave, Associate Partner at Infosys Consulting. Milan has been working closely with a client on a major transformation effort as they transition to a remote working model in response to COVID-19. Milan shares his learnings and observations from his daily experiences and discussions with his clients, as well as the surprising impact the sweeping change has had on productivity. Milan also addresses important opportunities and risks that leadership should monitor in the weeks and months ahead, and reports on what decisions have proven most effective.

Transcript

Narrator
Welcome to Navigate Disruption, an Infosys Consulting podcast that shares insights on digital innovation and market disruption. In each episode we cover trending topics that help business leaders navigate their transformation journey in an age of constant change.

Eric Krell
Hello, it’s Eric Krell. On this episode of Navigate Disruption, I speak with Milan Dave, associate partner of business consulting with Infosys Consulting. Milan has been working closely with a client company on a major transformation effort. As the coronavirus COVID-19 expanded its impact, the company, like thousands of others transitioned its massive staff to a remote working model. Milan has been monitoring what’s working and what’s not, designing adjustments and providing ongoing guidance all while continuing to advance the transformation effort.

In our conversation, Milan shares observations and learnings from his daily experiences and discussions with client leaders. He talks about the surprising impact the sweeping change has had on productivity, highlights technological and change management challenges, and reports on what leadership decisions and moves have proven most effective. Milan also addresses important opportunities and risks leaders should monitor in the weeks and months ahead. Let’s get to it.

Milan, let’s start with your current client experience. Like thousands of other companies, your client flipped the switch, moving to a remote working model and virtual teams. Highlight what’s occurred so far and make sure you tell us about the unexpected productivity impact you observed.

Milan Dave
Yeah. Well this has been pretty interesting. So my client is in the retail industry and a couple of weeks ago now, especially with the kind of be the current situation in the world with COVID-19, we required everybody to start working remotely. That includes not only just the client working remotely, but all consultants like myself that do have to commute to some degree have to also now work remotely. So once that took place, the immediate assumption was, well great, what’s going to happen to our productivity?

So we actually measured our productivity the first week of the remote working and notice that it was significantly higher. That was strange. Nobody expected a significant improvement in productivity primarily because people just didn’t have to commute in anymore. Local people didn’t have to take the hour and a half commute each way to the office and those that are traveling didn’t have to travel for three to five hours trying to fly in and go from the airport to the client office. So once that was eliminated, it opened up much more room to get certain activities done, get those tasks done.

Eric Krell
So what happened? You measure the first day, and you’re surprised productivity increases. How did productivity fare as you measured again, day two, day three? What happened?

Milan Dave
So if we look at it by week, the first week we could measure solid productivity, an increase from previous weeks. Now the second week of remote working, that kind of gave us a different eye opener was that productivity actually dipped compared to the first week. And we were trying to figure out what was going on there and we started to realize that individuals across teams, whether consulting or within the client side, everybody was starting to schedule virtual meetings. And these virtual meetings were just going back to back to back and people simply just didn’t have actually time now to be productive anymore. It’s essentially human nature, when we see a void for something, we try to fill it up. And so as a team started filling up the voids of open time slots just to ask simple questions just to get certain clarification items taken care of. So it was very unique to see what had happened. Our productivity dropped.

Eric Krell
Excellent, I want to come back to that. First, what, if any, other challenges cropped up that you observed and that affected productivity, morale or anything else?

Milan Dave
I think we’ve got a couple of key items in there. One is technical challenges. You can imagine as a company, clients, we have certain phone teleconference capabilities. Those teleconference capabilities were just flooded with people trying to dial in. So I remember just trying to dial into a meeting that uses a phone bridge with a pass code and the phone number was just constantly getting a busy signal. And it took 10 minutes to dial in, happened with numerous other people in the same meeting. The second one is the meeting size. Now what happens if you’re on a large global transformation project, you have these weekly large team meetings trying to get status reports of what everybody is trying to do. These large team meetings just weren’t effective anymore. Trying to get everybody to collate into a virtual room just wasn’t working and we actually took some actions to try to improve that. And I think they have started to improve, but we have lost some of the people connect capability of these larger meetings.

Eric Krell
So, some technical challenges, meeting size needs to be addressed. Anything else related to engagement, especially with regard to video? We’re communicating on audio and video right now, but it certainly lets us — if we want to — do some multitasking, which may or may not be beneficial to our meeting. What engagement issues cropped up, if any?

Milan Dave
It’s something to do with, if I’m a leader in the program or a project within the organization, I started to notice that, you wouldn’t even necessarily notice it, but you would certainly feel are people actually paying attention to the meetings? Even with having a web camera being virtually face to face with folks trying to read their facial expressions. It’s quite easy in fact to just get away with using their phone because people really can’t even see if you’re using your phone or doing email. I mean I’m still staring at my laptop screen so to you it may just look like I’m paying attention to what you’re saying but in reality, I’m probably multitasking. That’s a high probability scenario and it’s just because we are so busy for those of us that are within certain areas that does require them to be busy at the moment. But that is something that I think will take time to really build that trust. I don’t think that’s going to come across right away.

Eric Krell
You talked about the technical challenges, meeting size, the productivity dip that was unexpected and some of the engagement challenges. What have you found so far that’s worked well? And maybe touch on the response that you’re helping the client company that you mentioned put into play to address their productivity challenge.

Milan Dave
A couple of things that we started to notice was we don’t need to set up a meeting just to have a couple of questions answered. It’s really something that we need to maximize the use of these virtual teams. A lot of this virtual software that we’re using, especially like a lot of folks use Slack, MS teams, there is Zoom, is out there, Google has quite a bit of productivity tools. Any of the tools, they come with messaging features, so just message directly to the person that you have questions for and use text messaging, we’ve recommended that.

And for some of the larger meetings where we had 45 people in a room, people were all providing updates. We actually ended up breaking those sessions out by particular work stream. So for a large program you’re going to have kind of a functional work stream, a testing work stream, a data work stream, an organizational change management training work streams. We broke out the overall status meetings now by work stream where the project management office would connect directly to the work stream and be done with them in about 10 to 15 minutes rather than having a whole hour session just for that work stream times 10, 12 different work streams on a project. So that allowed us to be productive and trying to get the information we needed, but it’s actually hindered the ability for us to hear what other work streams are providing as far as updates go.

Eric Krell
What are you doing about that — or, what are you planning to do? How are you going to address that challenge?

Milan Dave
So interestingly, what is taking place is we’re trying to set up in every other week, almost an informal session with the larger team that used to meet weekly and provide the updates. Instead, we’re just going to take what are the top three to five headline items that the larger team needs to know. And we’d only scheduled within about a 30 minute timeframe every other week and make it actually pretty casual. Everybody says, hey, bring your coffee, bring your tea mugs to the meeting. We’re going to talk about the top three to five headlines so it actually makes it a little bit more enjoyable, a little bit more relaxed. Not everybody has to be on their toes ready to kind of chime and talk about their key updates because they’ve already done that. This time it’s more about a listening approach. You can hear the top three to five items.

Eric Krell
We’ve worked through some of the challenges, some solutions and some leading practices. I’m curious if you’re detecting any issues that are lurking or lingering right now that could potentially cause bigger issues three, six, nine months down the road. What, if any, risks should leaders recognize?

Milan Dave
Well this is kind of funny because you may remember former Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer, right? She had requested all of her employees to show up to work.

Eric Krell
Right. About 10 years ago, right?

Milan Dave
Yeah, yeah, that’s right. About 10 years ago or so, and it was in the news and a lot of the Yahoo employees were just pretty stunned that wait a minute, now I have to take this hour and 45 minute commute into the office where I could’ve just been productive at home. Well, we could say, well look at Yahoo now. I mean did it really make a difference or not? It’s hard to tell and in fact, did it even really make a difference at the time when they were forced, everybody show up face to face? Whereas the other side of the story is we look at certain types of tasks that can be done face to face are getting done. I mean just it’s evident by just even the project I’m on with my client, the results are showing that people are getting and being productive with what they need to accomplish. That’s a huge piece of it there.

Eric Krell
That’s a good thing. What could potentially be a risk about that? Any type of work that might not quite translate now or maybe we don’t know yet but might translate to issues down the road?

Milan Dave
Oh yeah. I mean first thing right off the bat is when we meet face to face, we’re able to feed each other’s energy that’s in the room. I can see your expression, especially when it comes to like, how do I be innovative? How can I problem solve better? The dynamic of having let’s say three to four people in a white boarding session in a room where I’m walking up, I’m standing up, I’m sitting down, I’m using my hands to help express what I’m trying to convey. Just working through almost like a design thinking type of session where we have items that we touch and we feel. We don’t have that right now with a hardcore virtual working environment.

Eric Krell
What are some areas that leaders should be monitoring for potential strategic insights and lessons that they can apply?

Milan Dave
In this scenario, you think a lot of organizations are going to want to look at for remote working environments, what are the types of processes that can be done remotely? I mean, in fact if you think about it, if I am the CFO for a large organization, a lot of fortune 500 companies have pretty much taken parts, big chunks of their back office and put it to kind of a managed services model or an outsourced model. And if you look at just from that perspective, it’s really kind of remote work at the same time that’s happened.

The challenge to a lot of leaders across companies now is to say, well, if that remote working approach has worked where they took big chunks of the back office, put it, let’s say in a different country and it’s working effectively there. It’s remote to everybody who’s onsite. Why not look even deeper at the same types of processes that they’re doing today? Maybe it’s from sales for the lead generation processes. Maybe it’s qualification activities on the sales side or maybe it’s on the financial side, there could be other back office processes that also could then be pushed remotely. And I think in this case it’s going to make us look at what other remote solutions can help us do this at the same time instead of really just relying on that constant face to face.

Eric Krell
It sounds like there might be a bunch of kind of bizarro Marissa Mayers out there in the future saying, “Don’t come to the office so much. We can do this with just as much productivity, at a lower cost, from a remote structure.”

Milan Dave
Right, here’s the other side that could be looked at this too is if I’m a CXO level individual within an organization, I know that let’s say I’m about to spend $50 million on a large scale transformation within my project. I’m bringing in consulting folks who will be traveling in. For certain sets of activities, maybe it’s beneficial then that those consultants could also just be remote at the same time because by default we know these activities have been successful given the current working environment. They should also then be successful in the future for future types of tasks. So that maybe all the budget I have for travel doesn’t necessarily need to be there. The consultants can come in when it’s really face to face required type of sessions. So maybe that kind of changes how I look at travel related budgets. It would help tremendously. The consultants can be more productive, it lessens the pressure of traveling each week.

Eric Krell
Milan, thanks a lot for talking today. It sounds like today’s leadership decisions and learnings could have potentially major implications on future organizational structures and even workforce management strategies. Thanks for your time and I look forward to hearing and seeing more from you on this and related topics.

Milan Dave
Yeah, thank you. I appreciate your time too.

Narrator
Thank you for listening to the Navigate Disruption podcast. To find out more about how Infosys Consulting is helping some of the world’s most recognizable brands transform and innovate, visit us at Infosysconsultinginsight.com, or follow us on LinkedIn.