Lucía Muñoz
Human Capital Leader Deloitte Spanish Latin America
From an organizational point of view, the response to the pandemic impacted the different dimensions of the company, like a few other events. The disruption it produced brought out the strengths and problems at different levels of the organization.
At the individual level: affecting the workplace, routines, and even the tasks of each organization member and at the team level, requiring more vital collaborators in ambiguity, who connect and work closer than ever, despite being at a distance.
Perhaps one of the most challenging dimensions at the leadership level, it demanded resilient leaders, capable of reading a diametrically different context, adapting and leading it, with almost no margin for preparation. In contrast, at the organizational level, it changed the way we work, placing the following questions on the agenda of many executive committees today:
What messages did these last months leave us, what’s next and how to prepare ourselves to lead the future, what transformation does our organization require to continue being relevant? Accompanying many organizations at global, regional, and local levels, we visualize that such questions become recurrent, delineate and give meaning to a unique opportunity to anticipate what is to come, responding to the fundamental changes and opportunities brought by 2020 and 2021, creating the possibility to rebuild and empower the organization to lead the future.
To respond to the impact generated by COVID, organizations had to change the way they worked, impacting where the work is performed (virtual, hybrid, and face-to-face appointment), who performs the work (new coordination to respond to particular situations, new technology implemented, AI, RPA, etc.), and what work is performed (changes like the work to respond to new demands and market realities).
During the pandemic, organizations have focused their efforts, to a greater extent, on responding to where we work, accommodating their work modalities to continue operating beyond face-to-face. However, they have also timidly begun to explore the dimensions of who and what (who does the work and the value of the work itself).
The past few months have shown that organizations need to transform themselves to adapt to the various emerging disruptions successfully.
Thus, organizations adaptable to the new contexts show a fundamental transformation in the management of their organizational design, which enables any organization to operate with a start-up mentality and drive modern practices with a focus on people to achieve agility through networks of empowered teams.