Efficiency in the Next Normal

FountainBlue’s February 5 Front Line Managers’ Online meeting was on the topic of ‘Efficiency in the Next Normal featuring:

• Bruce Berkoff, LCD TV Association
• Kris Kelly, Renesas
• Luciana Vecchi, Amazon Web Services
• Aaron Wruthmann, ROAMSEC

Below are notes from the conversation.

Our panel this week represented a wide range of backgrounds and interests. We agreed that we were all impacted by the events of 2020, and will continue to be impacted in the next normal. Below is a summary of their advice on how to be more efficient, more effective in this next normal.

Be Strategic

• Be Agile with your Strategy, Planning and Execution. Nobody knows what the future will hold, but we know that being agile, plan-ful and flexible will help you better succeed.
• Adopt Collaborative, Ecosystem Approaches to optimize the ability to deliver to the needs of your customer. Having a consultative style of communication will help yourself and your team better understand the problems faced by our customer, and better partner with them to address their needs in the short term and for the long term.
• Manage the risks involved and fund the risk mitigation strategies.
• Do the research and gather the data, the input, but draw a line in the side and make a choice, select a direction, erring on the side of decisiveness. Nobody can predict the future, but making a calculated choice will give you feedback and more information, and can help you better understand what’s next.

Support Your Team

• Empower your team to better communicate, better deliver on measurable goals. 
• Help your team create healthy boundaries between work and life, supporting them to resources and services which would help them better manage their work loads. 
• Engage your team in collaborative projects. 
• Connect regularly with your team members.
• Help your team members address emotional and logistical challenges of working from home. 

Provide a Secure and Efficient Infrastructure  

• Train your team on how to keep work laptops secure and private. Provide resources, including housing so that your junior team for example has private space to perform their work tasks at home in a secure environment. 
• Create an expectation that everyone is responsible for the security of the network and devices and data.
• Leverage bots and devices and processes to efficiently and securely serve our hybrid workforce.

Build Long Term Relationships through Consultative Sales 

• Build long-term relationships with your customers and collaborate with them and with other partners to continue providing exceptional service to these customers – understanding where they want to go, brainstorming how to get there, iterate on the deliverables in getting there.

The bottom line is that we must all facilitate the Thinking, the Planning and the Execution to be more efficient in the next normal.

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