Working strong: Embedding resilience across your organisation

In a bid to understand what work will look like in a post-COVID-19 world, DocuSign recently asked 2,008 Australian office workers about the impact that the pandemic has had on their working lives. Three key themes emerged, one of which is the idea that businesses need to be ‘working strong’.

Here, we explore what ‘working strong’ means and what businesses can do to prepare themselves for a potentially uncertain future (we’ll explore the other two themes – ‘working anywhere’ and ‘working smart’ – in other blog posts).

Resilience is the key to the future

The businesses that have really thrived this year are those with the ability to adapt fast when things around them are changing even faster. Not only have they adapted, but they have been able to maintain productivity at the same time. This resilience, or adaptability, is the idea behind ‘working strong’.

Even though the eye of the storm has passed, businesses should still be focusing on building resilience. Because, if there is one lesson we can all learn from COVID-19, it’s that absolutely anything can happen – and we have no idea what’s going to hit us next. To recover and thrive in a post-COVID-19 world, businesses need to work stronger than ever.  

Motivating Australia’s remote workforce

The move to remote working literally happened overnight. One day hundreds of thousands of staff were working in offices around the country. The next they were at home. While it was certainly impressive how quickly people adapted, it wasn’t without its challenges.

According to survey respondents, the biggest hurdles they faced were:

• Maintaining motivation (44%)
• Ensuring work-life balance (41%)
• Feeling part of the team (34%)
• Getting the right set-up at home (26%)
• Setting up the correct technology (22%)

Employers play a key role in mitigating these challenges – from providing tools and resources to help staff find and maintain motivation and work-life balance; to setting up regular check-ins with the team. In terms of technology, they must enable employees to access corporate networks and data securely and reliably; and they must equip teams with the hardware they need to get the job done.

Overall, Australian office workers feel that employers did a pretty good job on the tech front, with 75% saying that their company provided IT software (like cloud-based collaboration and productivity software) and 67% saying they got the hardware (like laptops and monitors) they needed to transition to remote work during coronavirus.

Yet, there remains work to do. Almost half of Australian office workers reported that their company had not updated or trained staff on new ways of working – including a majority (56%) of workers aged over 55. 

Working strong: how to do it

With all of the above in mind, it’s clear that bigger picture themes around motivation, productivity and collaboration are going to resonate the most into an uncertain future. Building strategies and implementing resources that support these themes will help set organisations up for success, whether their teams are in-house or at home.

Here are some ideas for how to achieve these goals:

• Commit to a collaboration channel like Slack or Hangouts, and encourage open dialogue amongst staff
• Establish daily and weekly team check-ins to keep everyone engaged and on-task
• Support those who are working remotely by giving them the tools they need to create a productive work environment
• Train older employees on new ways of working so they learn how to use technology to engage with the team, no matter where they are working

It’s all part of building a culture in which the ‘home enterprise’ is valued as much as the traditional offices of days gone by. With the right policies and procedures in place, workers and businesses will have the opportunity to thrive, no matter what tomorrow brings.

Download our eBook on the home enterprise to learn more.