COVID-19 has forced many organizations to turn to remote working. While this has been working keeping the workflow going, organizations are constantly faced with the challenge of achieving similar levels of productivity remotely as before. Faethm addresses the productivity challenges faced by companies during and post COVID-19. The infographic above looks at some key highlights from Faethm’s latest report Harnessing Emerging Technology to Enable the COVID-19 Taskforce Response.
For many organizations, the return to productivity requires a closer understanding of the workforce, and a mapping of the exact tasks required by different jobs to be productive. As such, Faethm provides a sophisticated and detailed mapping of the workforce along both remotability and technology dimensions. Different job families have a different measure of remote productivity dependent on the amount of time spent on tasks for each job. The top 5 remotable job families include financial, executive, marketing & design, legal and ICT. The bottom remotable job families involve more tasks with on-site interactions such as medical, sales, education, arts & entertainment and scientific. Further drilling in the job families by job roles shows the productivity loss in each role and the percentage of tasks that can be managed by adopting remote technology (video conferencing, VPN, etc), adopting emerging technology such as Robotic Process Automation, or should be restructured. For instance, in the finance job family roles such as Actuaries/mathematicians/statisticians have only 13% productivity loss. 82% productivity is achieved through adopting remoting technology like video conferencing while 5% is achieved by adopting emerging technology. The non-remotable 13% leads to productivity loss and should be restricted/rearranged. A closer look at roles within a bottom remotable job family such as the scientific job family, shows a higher percentage of productivity loss. For example, in an environmental scientist role only 48% can adopt remoting technologies and 2% adoption of emerging technology to achieve productivity. The role suffers a 47% productivity loss that requires restructuring.
Looking ahead, the economic backdrop for the coming years is one of muted growth with heavy government interventions. Past COVID-19 years, companies will continue to face challenges in productivity. The return to productivity will not only become a tactical response to a pandemic situation but also transform into long-term structural improvements to business operations and the workforce as a means of delivering value.
Faethm suggests the following approaches to respond the challenges of a new workforce shape. Senior HR leaders and people managers should: map their teams and organizations’ jobs into tasks and measure productivity differently for different tasks, quantify impact of remotability on different jobs, and the possibility of augmenting non-remotable tasks with new technologies, and consider restructuring and planning for those tasks that are not remotable and require on-site presence.