Supporting Workforce Amid COVID-19

As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads around the globe, organizations across all sectors have struggled to stabilize operations and put in place new guidelines to protect the health of their employees while maintaining service to their customers. CORONA pandemic has both immediate and long-lasting implications for how people work and participate in society. Also, it is critical to assess how organizations are creating ways to assure their customer base that service delivery operations will continue with the necessary quality, productivity, security, and compliance aspects in place.

BPOs created resilient, coordinated business continuity plans to reflect the new reality and moved with unprecedented speed: for example, within days, we enabled thousands of workers to work from home, shipping & installing desktops and other enabling infrastructure

Now comes the challenge of making it work as a ‘Business as Usual’ practice. Contemporary BPO operations are now located across a significantly larger geography, in many more locations. Lower levels of direct supervisory control…. but with the same resources to manage

BPOs are dealing with immediate imperatives of support for workforce during these times which include:

·       Looking after the health, safety, and well-being of remote working personnel

·       Reinforce culture and connection with employees

·       Scale an effective remote-working model

·       Ramp up workforce flexibility

New systems of engagement for employees are being put into place. What was once a fringe, nice to have employee monitoring and engagement platform has now suddenly become a critical must-have tool for a geographically and individually dispersed workforce. Collaboration platforms are now driving new levels of supervisory monitoring and coaching efficiency. These platforms and associated practices have been largely derived from consumer technologies to which certain pockets of the world are already addicted. This obviously alleviates the problem of training the already collaboration savvy (e.g. WhatsApp users in their personal lives) users to adapt to very similar-looking technologies now slowly spreading into the enterprise world.

Of course with BPOs being dependent heavily on ‘tribal knowledge’ for achieving efficiencies and economies of scale, this presents a slightly different problem towards taking this knowledge amongst a dispersed workforce.