How to Drive Operational Agility in the Enterprise

Financial services organisations across the world are dealing with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. It has accelerated the need for an agile way of working – particularly for Operational departments – in order to navigate successfully during these challenging times.

The blended workplace is now becoming the new norm. In order to keep pace and succeed, business leaders must focus on transforming three critical business areas across the Enterprise: technology, workplace people. The workforce is now more distributed therefore they need to become more collaborative, more connected, and more customer-focused.

Technology

Keeping up with fast-moving technology trends is critical to survive. According to Bain, companies are adopting the latest technology, with the use of collaboration platforms up an estimated 30%.

Emerging technologies including AI and automation offer the ability to increase productivity among the workforce and significantly improve customer experience by learning from the intelligent data captured in the platform. The insights gained from an Intelligent platform can inform the business on direction and strategy and importantly, transforms costs.

Banks and insurance companies expect an 86% increase in AI investments by 2025, according to The Economist Intelligence Unit.

Workplace

A question many business leaders are asking themselves is “Can I make a hybrid work model work for my enterprise?” According to McKinsey, the virus has broken through cultural and technological barriers that prevented remote working in the past, setting in motion a structural shift in where work takes place.

About 20 to 25 percent of the workforce in advanced economies could work from home between three and five days a week. This represents four to five times more remote work than before the pandemic and could prompt a large change in the geography of work, as individuals and companies shift out of large cities into suburbs and small cities.

Gartner predicts by 2023, fewer than one-third of digital workers will select the corporate office as their preferred place to work.

People

Relationships between managers and agents has changed since the pandemic has hit. PWC has stated that employers need to have conversations with their staff now and bring them along their plans. Workers need to be happy with the technology they have at their fingertips and up-skill as necessary for any changes coming down the pipeline.

Organisations will seek to fuel this productivity by facilitating better remote work experiences. One of the main reasons employees have been more productive from home is their improved work-life balance.

After nearly a year of remote work, organizations are now positioned to fine-tune organizational processes and digital strategies, creating a future of work that better supports both the employee and the enterprise.

Intelligent data for Intelligent work

Zarion Intelligent Work is a core business platform, built for managing people, teams and work. We help business leaders to drive productivity and performance of remote teams with visibility and flexibility to support people to work from anywhere.

Check out our workplace trend predictions in Financial Services, developed back in 2017.