Technology Pivot Essential for Survival

Around 67 percent of the companies expect work from home to become permanent or long-lasting claims a report, while another study finds that 82 percent of company leaders plan to allow employees to work remotely some of the time. With employees fixing, adjusting and gelling well with their new work normal, even companies need to reframe its HR policies. From hiring to onboarding, training and learning & development, the companies have to revisit every aspect of their work policies to make necessary amendments. 

I questioned Aditya Arora, CEO, Teleperformance India, on this to understand how companies are preparing for this change and how are they using technology to keep the learning curve uninterrupted. Aditya, who holds over a quarter-century of experience in the industry, is highly revered for his strong deployment practices and deep thought leadership. He during the interview has spoken at large the new work-culture and the way to connect with employees and customers.   

Virtual work environment will see a rise in the coming days due to the increasing pandemic impact. With people continuing to work from home, how will the companies change their policies for their employees? 

We are clear that having long-term processes and practices in place to support a distributed workforce will be pivotal to business resilience. Most leaders will use the lessons from this work-at-home experiment to extend their remote working arrangements until the middle of next year at the earliest. Deploying various hybrid policies, which allow for flexible working hours, split shifts, and part-time options, will serve as a foundation for a robust operating model that suits the needs of the post-pandemic workforce. 

Onboarding freshers/graduates will remain a challenge for many companies, especially for SMEs and MSMEs. How can technology help them in dealing with this? 

Technology has become companies’ primary, if not totally exclusive, means of improving the onboarding experience for fresh talent. Organisations have to sidestep the unique challenges posed by the dispersed working environment, to continue to support and manage graduate hires as normally as possible. Cloud-based platforms have flourished as the newfound enabler of expanding talent pools from across the globe and removing the professional development barrier to remote work. Additional support channels, such as gamified training workshops and self-learning modules, allow those starting their careers to exchange ideas and deliberate on learnings. This level of interaction makes new hires feel included, leading to enhanced retention and superior performance.  

Training and L&D will move online and with employees still continuing to work from home, this trend will remain intact. How can companies ensure that their employees’ learning doesn’t halt? What role will cloud platforms play in this?

Leaders can’t afford to bring critical capability building to a halt in the new normal. To enable both instructor-led and self-learning, companies have no choice but to adapt virtual learning programmes and delivery, and depend on cloud networks. Cloud-based platforms have become one of the critical means of building employee connect with their organisation. Enabling seamless and effective learning delivery, cloud platforms facilitate learning-based games and virtual training rooms to create a socially-enriched working environment for new employees. Gamification will be particularly suited to those new hires who are perhaps finding it difficult to learn from colleagues virtually, and is actually a resource-efficient alternative to conventional learning programmes. 

Employee results should then continue to be monitored through the same, if not more advanced, performance management tools, to inform appropriate coaching and feedback whilst instilling a culture of continuous development for their grooming and growth. Companies can then measure efficacy and return on investment of such learning platforms. 

How can the industry create real-time connections between customers and employees? 

More and more businesses are deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) – enabled tools to keep up with the real-time revolution and meet the increasing need for instantaneous responses. Automated chat services, leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP), are dominating as the preferred channel of interaction globally by customers who crave immediacy. Capable of sensing and addressing customer pain-points without human intervention, chatbots are effectively allowing companies to do what was once impossible – supporting customers 24/7.

In the virtual environment, where most interactions are taking place with bots, it remains imperative that employees are able to create instant, human connections with customers. A huge focus on emotional intelligence and people skills remains the key to making deeper, real-time connections with customers, and retaining them.