COVID-19 has had an incredible impact on the economy and financial services sector.
What will the future of work look like post COVID-19 Pandemic? How will it impact on our employees, operations and business landmarks?
These are the most common questions relating to how the industry has to be positioned to benefit from the rebound, capitalising on these opportunities to understand the changing post-crisis demands - since out of every crisis come opportunities for competitive reinvention and differentiation.
With the new normal challenges, employees work from home, more people work remotely, interacting digitally, harnessing emerging technologies to innovate.
Most meetings could be replaced by email and IM. Workers are becoming more efficient. A generally more agile way of working and communicating with colleagues is expected.
More meetings will become emails, and more emails will become instant messages. Video could be used to build trust among workers or with customers who can’t interact in person. A different type of intimacy is formed when an invitation for a video chat at home is a faster way than would happen in a traditional working environment.
Mandatory on-the-job medical screening could become the norm. Working for a company with a physical location, could become a status symbol, boost brand awareness and overall influence within the industry.
As a result, co-workers could become even closer. Automation could be accelerated, the opportunities for strategic thinkers accelerating operational transformation, developing new business models and connection more closely with customers and employees arise.
Financial Services Union national assistant secretary Nathan Rees commented that COVID-19 was a “game-changer” for businesses. The speed of technological advances and post-crisis challenges have already created significant demands for up-skilling your workforce.
In order to accelerate the businesses’ growth position especially when running a digital enterprise, it is critical to have the right strategies to ensure the human capital within the workforce have the right skills, competencies and willingnesses to embrace changes.
Up-skilling your workforce is not just a matter of pushing out technical training to your employees, rather, it requires careful assessment of desired skills and competencies to be targeted, function by function, reflects individual needs, aspirations and job demands.
Initiatives such as investment in a learning environment, assessment of the impact of change, identify a systematic way across the sector to measure the return on your up-skilling investments on track, comparing training effectiveness with respective objectives and design the infrastructure for those skills be portable across the sector are suggested to be revisited ongoing basis by businesses.
These initiatives also require significant leadership commitments and a push from the top in order to derive the targeted sector outcome of strengthened productivity, sharpened innovation, enterprise agility, enhanced human capital engagement, satisfaction and retention.
References
Connley, C., Hess, A., Liu, J (2020, April 29). Re: 13 ways the coronavirus pandemic could forever change the way we work. Retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/29/how-the-coronavirus-pandemic-will-impact-the-future-of-work.html
O’Hearn, S., Bichard, J., Mukhopadhyay, A (2020). Re:Beyond COVID-19: Five key strategic priorities for a post-crisis world. Retrieved from https://www.pwc.com.au/insurance/pwc-beyond-covid-19.pdf
