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Innovative Healthcare: Why there is still time to fix burnout in the NHS 

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Pressures on clinical teams across the NHS have never been higher, but it’s not just the pandemic that is to blame.  

Last year, one NHS worker resigned every five minutes* due to burnout, post-traumatic stress disorder, or the need to restore their work-life balance. As a result, one in ten nursing posts is now empty, and there are almost 100,000 total vacancies across the NHS, with an even higher number in social care. 

After two difficult years of battling the pandemic, it’s understandable why people are leaving the NHS, but this exodus is also having a detrimental effect on the quality of care — more than a quarter of UK adults say they or an immediate family member had received poor care as a result of the workforce problems, according to The Guardian. 

While direct pressures from the pandemic appear to be easing, the NHS is now facing a backlog of 6 million elective procedures that brings its own set of challenges. Still, looking outwards, the UK’s healthcare sector can benefit significantly from new technological innovations that other industries use to solve similar crises. Let’s explore this idea in more depth.  

* Based on the weekly total sourced from this article, divided by 5 days, 7.5 hrs a day and 60 mins

How did the NHS get here? 

A critical factor behind staff burnout is work-related stress and poor mental health, which can be linked to a lack of flexibility in work patterns. Poor work-life balance is increasingly being cited as a reason for leaving the NHS, accounting for 10% of leavers in 2019, compared to just 4% in 2011. 

In a typical NHS Trust prior to March 2020, you would have expected an average staff absence rate of between 4% and 5%, which is equivalent to everyone taking one sick day a month. However, in some areas, such as maternity, there’s a disturbing upward trend, with rates now averaging 7.1%. 

Almost one-third of NHS staff often think about leaving the organisation, according to this year’s staff survey. The Nuffield Trust also reported a 50% increase in the proportion of doctors considering leaving the NHS this year compared to 2019. 

With workforce management and organisational development teams under immense pressure to stem this exodus and support clinical teams, the NHS must look at other ways to solve the challenge beyond the usual performance management strategies.  . 

Proven initiatives to alleviate burnout 

Repairing the damage done by the lack of national-level workforce planning and investment is no easy task — for example, the Health Foundation estimates the NHS would need more than 300,000 more full-time equivalent staff by 2031 than in 2021 just to deliver the level of care seen in 2018 and 2019. 

So, what specific things can we do to alleviate burnout in the short term? For starters, there are already examples of NHS providers placing significant organisational focus on a range of support strategies, including: 

  • Health and wellbeing champions 

These are people from all demographics and roles who work at all levels of the NHS to promote and identify local or national health and wellbeing support programmes for colleagues.  

  • Nurse retention programmes 

One such programme in Lincolnshire led to the identification of rotational posts for a set of roles within various disciplines. The team introduced a legacy nurse initiative to support newly qualified nurses with information sharing, a mentorship programme, and a buddy system. They also introduced insight days to allow staff to spend time working on different wards before opting to make a permanent move.  

  • Improved e-rostering and effective job planning 

By enhancing existing WFM platforms and processes, NHS providers can ensure the proper staffing at the right time, boost productivity, and encourage shift patterns with a steadier workflow to create a calmer working environment. However, the benefits are lost amidst ever-growing vacancy pressures.  

While these strategies and tools can alleviate some of the pressures of a dwindling workforce, the improvements still do not go far enough to solve the broader burnout crisis.  

That’s where innovation and outside inspiration come in.

Looking outwards for an innovative source of help 

Traditionally within the NHS, it can take a long time to accept and roll out innovations at scale, but when the solutions are already out there, with proven seismic impacts in other sectors, adoption should become an easier pill to swallow.  

One unlikely area we can look for inspiration is the fast-changing world of social media and the content moderators who assess the videos, photos, live streams, and other content being shared across these platforms. Content moderators share much in common with A&E staff, working long hours on antisocial shifts and dealing with distressing incidents, including witnessing harm and injury. Over time, too much exposure to these incidents can significantly affect mental well-being.  

The social media sector has taken this issue to heart and harnessed the benefits of machine learning — a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) — to solve the problem. At Gobeyond Partners we have worked closely with one of the leading social media platforms to develop machine learning to support their teams.  The project involved using technology to help identify team members who might be at risk of burnout, and to act before it happens.  This approach resulted in reductions in sickness and absences across 2021, with further reductions in the numbers of content moderators choosing to leave the organisation. 

This machine learning involves analysing many factors linked to a person’s wellbeing. In the context of the NHS, these could include measures such as a person’s tenure in the role, the number of night shifts worked in a set period, the number of deaths or emergency escalations they experienced during their shift, or the time since their last holiday, to name a few. By analysing factors like these over time, it is possible to develop a predictive model that learns which factors — or combinations of factors — are most closely linked to a team member needing to go on sickness leave.

Applying machine learning tools and principles to the NHS 

The big question is, can AI tools like those used in social media help the NHS achieve its own reduction in sickness absence days and staff attrition?  

The availability of key metrics will determine how effective machine learning can be, but early indications suggest that NHS providers have enough information available to obtain greater insight and accuracy than other sectors could achieve. However, providers should offer a clear opt-out to all staff and ensure that the process is run entirely separately from existing performance management initiatives.  

The critical takeaway for NHS providers is to leverage AI for its live, continuous learning capabilities, allowing it to continually improve its ability to predict where, when, and who is at greatest risk of burnout. This automated learning should be directly supplemented by individuals providing input about their wellbeing via a straightforward app if they wish to do so. Specialist-trained professionals can then offer and instigate care conversations with individuals who may be at risk, with psychologist input where required

Fix burnout; Support the NHS, its people and its patients

While a high proportion of turnover will always be driven by age-linked retirement and geographical relocation, if the NHS could achieve even half of the retention improvements seen in social media, it would result in a seismic slowdown in national staff shortages over time, providing renewed hope of achieving workforce sustainability.    

People in the NHS are working as hard as they can with the resource they have to address staff wellbeing and increasing burnout, but by looking beyond traditional means to find a solution, we can take care of our staff on a whole new level.  

So let’s take bold steps, embrace proven success stories, and consider the benefits of machine learning and AI to help us improve the NHS and give its people and patients a better and more caring experience.

 Tom Houston has over 20 years of consulting and transformation leadership experience, 12 of which have been exclusively supporting the NHS.  He helps healthcare organisations to plan for and deliver sustainable services and to transform experiences for patients and staff. 

To learn more about our project to bring world-class machine learning (AI) driven staff wellbeing support to the NHS, please get in touch 

Moving at pace while delivering value

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This was first published as a guest article in partnership with Netcall, read the original piece here

Our previous interview with Dave Pattman, MD for Solution Development and Richard Farrell, Chief Innovation Officer at Netcall titled Shifting automation up a gear, focused on technology as the central key to unlocking efficient digital transformation with Richard and Dave exploring how customer support service levels can be maintained in these uncertain times, while accelerating change.

Continuing the conversation, we discuss how organisations can drive and improve customer service levels while driving digital transformation at pace. Knowing how tough it is to deal with the continuous uncertainty that the pandemic has caused, we ask how can organisations work through the changing policies and processes and get to the value quicker?

When you are working at pace, how is it possible to design processes which are going to be adopted and successfully meet the needs of the customer?

Richard: It’s a human-centric issue. The key to getting the processes right, is using your customer-facing people as a major part of the building process. They have amazing customer insight and also understand where the issues are with your current systems which prevent work from flowing effectively.

With Liberty Create, your customer experts can collaborate with IT to develop solutions to common customer experience issues. We call them citizen developers, as anyone can be taught to build with our drag and drop tech, they don’t need to be a seasoned developer.

By working together, they can build applications quickly and easily with IT controlling the secure and compliant environment and approving the build. Our studios within our low-code software create a nice line of demarcation between building, coding and testing.

Dave: When working at pace, it’s really important to have the right level of expertise to fall back on. While internal teams may have a strong grasp of the problem to solve, finding a suitable delivery partner who understands the technology and can deploy in appropriate areas is key to maintaining momentum.

The teams I lead hold a great degree of experience in technology deployment. When partnered with a client team who are able to bring their deep knowledge and proximity to the customer together, we’re able to both move at pace. This ensures that all-important scale and longevity of impact. Without that critical partnership, there’s too many false starts, single point solutions that only serve to move demand downstream or are unable to reach the scale required to realise ROI.

It seems automation isn’t simply about automation. People, process and technology are at the heart of it. So, how do organisations shift gears to adapt to this way of digitising?  

Richard: I’d say the first objective is to opt for tools which allows you to add and prove value, quickly. That means that you can demonstrate the improvements and return on investment or efficiency savings, fast. You can show how reducing mundane tasks and refining the processes improves staff job satisfaction, making them more engaged and efficient, and also the positive impact it has on customer experience. Then, the next project gains momentum and you can work through several change projects, at a great pace.

Dave: Many examples of automation projects to date have seen large centralised functions created, who then hunt for opportunities to deploy automation. We’ve found that engaging colleagues much closer to the customer and providing easy tools to support has an evangelising effect, being an active part of change and transformation. This must continue to be grounded by, and supported with a clear strategic rationale, with a universal understanding of the customer service and wider brand proposition, and ultimately the customer journeys that deliver it. This avoids the nightmare ‘wild west’ IT scenarios that shutter initiatives and provide a framework for knowledge sharing.

Low-code provides many advantages for accelerating change in business led automation, can you outline the key rewards?

Richard:  Aside from the collaboration between IT and business-people, it’s the pace at which you can make changes to systems adaptations, it allows you to work through the customer journey and resolve issues one process at a time. This means regular operational UK wins and as well as CX.

These changes are business led, and often automating mundane processes, so it can result in higher satisfaction for employees as it removes many of their mundane tasks. So rather than fearing job loss due to automation, they can deliver better service to customers and be more productive. For the employer, they are getting to the value of transformation much quicker – customer issues are reduced and staff have time to deal with the problems.

Dave: Where low-code is facilitated and encouraged by central teams and specialists, there’s huge opportunity to be more ‘fleet of foot’ in developing, deploying and iterating ‘best practice’ across functions and geographies.

When governance requirements are carefully balanced with the freedom for those closest to customers to develop innovative solutions; standards, particularly for heavily regulated businesses can be maintained and even improved while channelling the enthusiasm of colleagues to bring forward their deep understanding and co-create impactful solutions, leveraging internal expertise as required.

Shifting automation up a gear

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This was first published as a guest article in partnership with Netcall, read the original piece here

We are moving away from firefighting mode and thoughts have turned to future planning, though it feels a little like we are all planning for the unknown. Agility and the capacity to adapt rapidly are high on the agenda. The challenge of switching to digital, automated journeys remains a key part of the bigger picture. But economic challenges, staffing decisions as the furlough scheme comes to an end and the need to drive out costs are likely to be fighting for focus.

Technology will be the central key to unlocking focused and efficient digital transformation. But the question is, how do you retain customer support service levels in these uncertain times, while accelerating change? We spoke to our Solution Development MD, Dave Pattman, and Richard Farrell, Chief Innovation Officer at Netcall for their perspectives on how organisations can move at pace with their digital transformation, balancing the need to optimise the efficiency of interactions, with driving and improving customer service levels.

In this post-COVID era, can automation provide a solution to reduce headcount without reducing customer service capacity?

Richard: There’s no doubt that Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and self-service are powerful tools to utilise in your operations. They offer excellent options to reduce simple, repetitive tasks which your staff may be currently handling and they can even improve efficiency as human-error mistakes are limited to the customer’s side. But, your people are vitally important. By moving the mundane tasks into automation, you can elevate the value that your staff provide. They’ll get some extra capacity which can be spent dealing with customers on the more complex transactions.

Dave: Automation certainly has the capability to deliver this, however there must be careful consideration as to where technology is deployed throughout the customer journey. As journeys and processes become far less linear, careful mapping and planning to avoid dead-ends and automation loops, while providing the ability for customers to deal with a person where required can reduce unnecessary friction and service need faster, reducing demand further down the chain as customers become ever more frustrated.

We view automation not just as a cost-reduction tool in it’s own right but as a vehicle to redistribute demand, which can either reduce headcount or place people in roles that add greater value to the customer thus boosting profitability. Taking the right approach means that cost and customer experience levels don’t always needed to be traded off against one another.

What sort of simple transactions can be automated successfully – can you offer an example?

Richard: As millions of people come off furlough and our unemployment rate rises, defaulting on bill payments has never been so high, it’s surely set to continue to increase, sadly. Therefore, for many organisations, bad debts and defaulted payments were a relatively minor issue before the global pandemic, but the situation has now got worse. It’s causing issues with debt recovery which produces a huge amount of work to process. And also extra demand into your contact centre. 

Traditionally, back-end systems are not known for flexibility. At Netcall, we’ve shown how low-code can automate back-end processes, building a self-serve portal for customers. Building applications in low-code is fast. 

In fact, at a recent innovation event, our team created a working prototype in a hackathon in the duration of the event, specifically to demonstrate the speed of designing and building in Liberty Create, our low-code solution. This application captures the customer data and provides an optimal user journey. This reduces administration work and speeds up the delivery of the debt recovery process for the organisation.

It’s a perfect example of how something which was “on the list” has just leap-frogged in importance post-COVID. It’s now needed immediately to deal with the new normal. Low-code has enabled a very fast solution which resolves the issue and also refines the customer experience at the same time.

What advice do you have for businesses seeking to accelerate adoption of automation technologies? 

Dave: A culture of ‘test, learn and scale’ is critical to successfully accelerating the automation agenda. By engaging colleagues much closer to delivering for customers, providing them with tools such as low-code and supporting them with a clear governance framework, problem statements are easier to identify, solutions delivered, iterated and scaled. With the growing democratisation of tools, automation can be seen by colleagues as another powerful enabler, not a harbinger of cost-reduction through mass layoffs.

More insight into successful automation

For further insight on accelerating change, join Richard and Dave on a 15 minute webinar on 8th October, sharing an agile automation framework and explaining how to effectively prepare your organisation for uncertain futures.

Reimagining service for the new world

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In just a few weeks, the pandemic has forced shifts in behaviour that may otherwise have taken years. It has forced organisations to question whether digital transformation programmes are moving with enough pace, or in many cases whether they are even fit for purpose at all.

Working practices and expectations have changed, and many consumers have been forced to adopt channels that they are now unlikely to abandon. It is clear that as organisations, we all need to think differently about the future if we are going to survive and succeed.

Alongside Craig Gibson, Chief Commercial Officer at Webhelp UK; we have drawn together our knowledge across business operating models, end-to-end customer journeys, and customer engagement to provide our views on how organisations can shape the future.

More than that, we have then tested these views with senior leaders across a variety of sectors, developing four vital characteristics that we believe will help us all to be fit for the future:

More adaptable
Possessing inherent agility that can rapidly course-correct and flex to shifts in demand across channels, geographies, and customer needs


More focused
Using limited resources wisely, setting clear priorities that deliver rapid, effective change that is focused on reducing the number of initiatives to the vital few


More digital
Delivering easy to access service which is technology enabled, rather than technology-led, across multiple channels and touchpoints

More human
Demonstrating transparency, empathy and an ability to form deep emotional connections with both customers and colleagues

For organisations there is an opportunity to build afresh, using the same core capabilities that have helped many of us during this crisis: a strong sense of connection between colleagues, a common purpose, and the coming together of human ingenuity with technological innovation.

Our latest whitepaper ‘Reimagining service for the new world’ explores these themes in more detail, and how we might harness them to build the resilient, customer-focused businesses of tomorrow.

Explore our latest whitepaper - reimagining service for the new world

Achieving data-driven performance management

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Recent events have accelerated a topic that has long been debated in global, dispersed operations. How do you drive performance in a consistent and data-driven way? And how do you make sure it is personalised, targeted and human? Most importantly, how do you deliver it in such a way that it is moving the needle on your day-to-day metrics, strategic goals, and your customer experience?

In this article, key members of the Gobeyond Partners team give their views on how this can be done holistically, by leveraging our Achieve Performance Management analytics tool.

New challenges  

With very different and unsettling realities previously unthinkable for many now the norm, two major challenges have presented themselves.    

1. Dispersed teams need a fresh approach to work management 

How teams communicate and the rhythms they use to deliver work will both need adaptation. With the near removal of opportunity for spontaneous conversation, ideation and collaboration commonplace in physical environments, the dispersed nature of operations for the foreseeable future will require far more structure to function effectively. 

With 48% of leaders believing their current performance management processes are weak at driving business value, structure and discipline matters now more than ever. Whether conducting purposeful virtual meetings, acting on Key Performance Indicators or utilising intelligent analytics to highlight trends and outliers, there must be a considered adjustment of plans and priorities to reflect reality.  

As we continue to support clients, we’ve observed that teams with strong operational discipline already in place are finding it easier to transition and adjust, with the learning curve much steeper for those with less mature approaches. 

While we may not see quite the same levels of volatility and change as we did at the outset of the crisis, an ability to review, interrogate and drive action based on real-time data is paramount.  

2. Colleagues need tailored support  

Relative performance between colleagues can and will differ. In some cases, performance may improve due to home circumstances being more conducive to their personality types; for others, declines can be expected. This should influence the management focus individuals should be receiving, and the coaching style that is most effective.  

With 37% of colleagues currently unhappy with the support and coaching received as they adjust to new ways of working and expectations, there is still much more to be done here. 

Employee profiling can help explore the drivers and preferences of team members, and better distribute work according to ability; however, caution should be applied to ensure people aren’t placed into arbitrary categories. 

By understanding behaviours and performance for each individual, you can establish actionable recommendations and tailored coaching to provide timely support. When this can scale across organisations, blending operational data and predictive analytics to model the impact of change and incorporate real-world performance in shorter loops, you empower everyone in your business to deliver improvements.

Our solution, successfully deployed in multi-site and virtual operations – empowering managers, team leaders and advisors to take control of their own performance

As understanding of drivers and outcomes increase, this may require teams to be reformed, based as much around the qualities and characteristics of individuals as it is around their professional skillset and functional responsibilities, with organisational design operating models adapting and flexing to enable this.

An opportunity to become better

While these challenges can seem like another problem to address alongside the changes in customer demand and logistical or technical hurdles of working differently, we should view them as a unique opportunity to reset and deliver a strong sense of value for everyone in your business.

We believe three significant opportunities should be recognised:

1. A focus on outcomes, not tasks

Clear, defined outcomes that are understood by all become more important than the ‘to-do list’. There is often a tendency in remote environments for teams to become more focused on tasks to complete, with interactions becoming more transactional in nature.

To align teams, embed disciplines and maximise connection are important bedrocks. However, delivering these in the context of ‘principles over process’ where possible will deliver the real transformation and performance gains.

Becoming more outcome driven drives further focus and scrutiny on the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Where dashboard reports are typically packed with multiple metrics and visualisations, now is the time to ask whether measures such as Average Handling Time or more transactional based satisfaction measures are really the right way to assess how effectively broader customer need is being met?

2. Balance frequent interval controls with a view of longer-term goals

With a focus on outcomes and a slimmer set of measures comes a broader understanding of how every colleague brings value to the organisation, increasing their ability and propensity to deliver during critical moments.

It is important, though, to strike the right balance between maintaining a manageable cadence, keeping energy levels and focus up, while reflecting on wider business objectives. Regular ‘social time’ for teams to decompress, reflect and realign their focus should feature in calendars, with more structure and frequency needed in remote working scenarios.

3. Use data more effectively

Combining disparate data sources, understanding end-to-end performance and identifying remedial action was an increasing priority pre-COVID. As teams are increasingly dispersed, this need becomes ever-more critical.

Combining key operational metrics into a high-level dashboard alone is no longer enough. We must also overlay customer and colleague engagement metrics including sentiment and emotional analysis, with algorithms highlighting overall trends and outliers, to drive further investigation of future roadblocks or areas of untapped opportunity.

While better use of data will play a huge role in building understanding and delivering improvements, it should never wholly replace ad hoc human interaction and more anecdotal sources.

Our key recommendations

The potent combination of uncertain global economics, rapidly shifting customer demand and reduced interaction, particularly between front-line colleagues and leaders, is creating a need to double-down on key operational disciplines.

In summary, our recommendations to ameliorate the challenges and seize the opportunities we discuss above are:

  • Maintain focus on the core KPIs that are closely entwined with your organisational objectives. Not every manager is comfortable analysing data, but there are now lots of new ways you can introduce real data into 1:1 performance discussions
     
  • Acknowledge any issues and communicate them broadly to build trust, camaraderie and a sense of everyone pulling in the same direction
  • Take a whole company approach with consistency across all functions, aligned to strategic objectives

While micromanagement may be required in certain situations to manage performance and maintain focus, this should be done by exception only. Empowering colleagues to understand their own performance and drive improvement will help sustain highly motivated, adaptable teams for the future.

A new race to evolve and thrive during COVID-19

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COVID-19 is having a profound impact globally. Not only is it affecting our health, but it is fundamentally challenging and altering our political, social, and economic norms. This unprecedented situation requires us all to take an exemplary approach to protect the most vulnerable people and do everything we can to limit the spread of the pandemic, whilst working, where possible, to  mitigate the long-term economic impact.  

There is a growing acceptance amongst the business community that we are slowly moving towards a ‘new normal’. Whilst the COVID-19 pandemic has fast turned this term into a modern cliché, it is also likely to be proved a truism.

Although the impact of the crisis, and this associated shift, will vary across country, industry, and organisation, we are seeing a distinct phasing of business and operational responses as we slowly make this transition. We call this ‘The Crisis Curve’.

The broad phases we see and anticipate are as follows:

Rapid crisis response
Take back control
Business as unusual
Transition to new normal
Crisis futureproofing 

Rapid crisis response  

This is the phase immediately after initial World Health Organisation and Governmental interventions, where business priorities were as simple as keeping employees safe and ‘keeping the lights on’. This response has seen most businesses move to a home working model wherever possible, putting strain on IT, logistics, and operations. In the UK and other European countries, we are thankfully coming out of the shock of this initial phase. 

Take back control 

Many countries and businesses are currently at this phase, where Governments have started to move to more severe social distancing measures and initial phases of lockdown. At this point many sectors, such as hospitality and travel, start to be severely impacted. Other sectors, such as grocery and DIY are seeing significant growth in sales. 

Regardless of the ‘boom or bust’ being experienced, almost all business operations are placed under significant stress as they try to adapt to employee sickness/self-isolation, ways of remote working, and changes in supply chain. Many are also experiencing an increase in ‘contact’ as anxious customers try to ascertain what these changes mean for them. 

Business as unusual 

Some countries and businesses have started to reach this stage. There is clarity and recognition that this situation is now only going to be resolved over the medium-to-long-term, with some form of lockdown continuing for weeks or months.  

For some business models (particularly those built around costly fixed assets that are lying dormant) this point will prove catastrophic unless they have an exceptionally strong cash-based balance sheet.  

Others will have been agile enough to pivot, finding new markets or rapidly developing new products/services that are relevant to society’s needs and challenges. At this point, new revenue streams start to become a medium-term reality. This means that the processes, people, technology and supporting functions need some additional thought and design.  

In short – this is the point at which operating models start to permanently shift.  

In the majority of organisations, leadership teams will need to recognise the requirement to optimise the performance of this current phase. This will mean restarting relevant transformation programmes as well as making targeted investments that will be relevant in the medium term. 

It is critical to start to consider the transition to the new normal; capturing knowledge and data on where successes and failures have occurred during the crisis and preparing for the future. 

Transition to new normal 

We have all heard a great deal of speculation about a new normal, from an economic, business, and social perspective. From our own experiences with clients, we do not believe this will be a complete and total change, with nothing existing as we know it. In fact, history tells us that these scenarios are not usually as extreme as predicted; for example, following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, many predicted that levels of consumer credit and borrowing would be much more cautious. That has proved not to be the case in many countries. 

However, it is reasonable to assume that the depth and breadth of this pandemic will cause some fundamental shifts in the way we live and work. We have all seen the positive impact on the environment, and some of our clients have reported improved satisfaction and reduced attrition in operational teams, having adopted and optimised a working-from-home model. 

Organisations will need to cut through the hype and start to anticipate what these shifts might be, how they may adapt to them or even influence them. By doing this, leadership teams can understand what the future blend should be between ‘pre-crisis’ ways of operating, and certain key elements of the ‘business-as-unusual’ phase. For instance, a business may ultimately reduce their estate footprint significantly and service more customers using a work-from-home model, but not at the 100% level that we have seen during the crisis. 

For some businesses this critical restocking phase will be about strict financial management and controls to avoid insolvency. For others, it will be about whether their adjusted or ‘pivoted’ business model could, and should, withstand the transition. 

Whether a company’s position is as extreme as either of the examples above, or more nuanced, all organisations of any scale are going to have to consider whether their current operating model is fit for purpose. Unfortunately, in the majority of cases the answer will be a resounding ‘no’. 

We are also likely to see another period of significant investment in digital transformation as many businesses reflect that their operational exposure could have been limited if there had been latent capacity in digital channels and AI tools. 

The final challenge will be the fact that this transition is likely to be slow and clumsy, so the transition to a new operating model needs to be considered carefully.  

Crisis futureproofing 

Certainly, we’re not expecting this phase anytime soon, particularly in European markets, but there will come a point where there is a clear exit strategy, and the economy will start to improve. 

The senses of business leaders around the world are now heightened to the impact that a global crisis might bring. One thing COVID-19 has certainly exposed is the relative fragility of the economic system and the ability for many businesses to effectively respond. 

As business models and operating models have evolved during this period, so will the need for revised scenario planning, business continuity plans and an investment in operational resilience.  

This won’t mean merely preparing for another pandemic (although clearly that will be front of mind) it means considering all threats at both a holistic and a detailed level. For example, do I have the right quality and quantity of key technology and outsourcing partners in order to limit my risk and deliver effective contingency plans in the event of a cyber-attack? 

In conclusion, this pandemic will be a challenging time for many organisations no matter what sector and what response they adopt. It is vitally important that we learn from the crisis, and also that we ensure steps taken now enable us to provide continued value to our customers, and employment for our colleagues; whilst paving the way for sustainable success in the future. 

As David Turner, CEO of Webhelp UK, shared in his blog “It is now obvious that a seismic change is being experienced by our industry, the ramifications of which will be felt for years to come. This will alter the customer experience landscape forever, and we must be both responsible and responsive in meeting this challenge.” 

In the coming months and years, I believe we will see a trend towards more resilient, efficient, agile operating models. Those organisations who can make this transition successfully, will be those who achieve sustainable, competitive advantage.  

Certainly, a ‘new normal’ is coming and those that prepare now will be the best placed to thrive.