A resilient return for Asia’s manufacturing and supply chains?

Asia shows an early glimpse of how manufacturing and supply-chain leaders are responding to disruption caused by the pandemic.
A resilient return for Asia’s manufacturing and supply chains?

Iterating With Remote Work

We are living a new COVID-19 world of work — and this new world did not take shape gradually. It didn’t wait for us to line up the processes, the technologies, and the people. It happened almost overnight, with little warning. It has meant that connectivity designed for a few is now placed under the strain of catering for much greater numbers. It has meant an explosion of workspaces at home, often shared by multiple family members.

Please join Kristine Dery as she examines the ways companies are iterating, learning, and adapting on the run to enable their employees not just to continue their work but to excel in a dramatically changed environment.

In this webinar, you’ll learn about:

• The two interdependent areas of digital and behavioral capabilities required to deliver an effective and meaningful employee experience.
• How to lead effectively in a remote organization.
• Building broader digital capabilities so that those with deep skills can flourish and thrive, particularly in a more virtual world.
• Enhancing virtual space so that people can collaborate effectively to add value.

Iterating With Remote Work

Lessons in Rapid Innovation From the COVID-19 Pandemic

Image courtesy of Sam Falconer/theispot.com

The coronavirus pandemic is one of the most difficult collective challenges facing humanity since the last world war. In the midst of the turmoil, national health authorities, pharmaceutical companies, universities, and research institutes are racing to find therapies to save lives and contain the grave social and economic consequences of the pandemic. As organizations and experts scramble to innovate therapies, they are also redefining innovation.

The conventional approach to innovation in the pharmaceutical industry is to conduct a lengthy process that starts with the discovery and generation of potential drug compounds and moves through a meticulous refinement and selection phase toward gradual development, clinical testing, and market approval. Although this model will continue to be the most effective in future drug development, it is now being complemented with an ultrafast approach to innovation centered on the repurposing of readily available ideas, knowledge, and technologies. In this article, we present five core principles of repurposing and discuss the lessons they hold for managers across industries and organizations that need to rapidly innovate in the face of crises.

The Relentless Search for Therapies

Because drug repurposing (also called drug repositioning) seeks additional therapeutic uses of existing drugs with known safety profiles, it potentially allows developers to circumvent costly and time-consuming safety trials, thus greatly reducing the time, risk, and cost compared with de novo drug discovery and development.1 Many groundbreaking drugs were initially developed for other diseases (most famously the cardiovascular drug that became Viagra), but researchers stumbled across alternative uses. In recent years, the pharmaceutical industry has honed its methods to systematically repurpose drugs. These methods prove to be highly useful today and aim to find links between a drug and a disease by applying automation technologies (such as high-throughput screening) or computational biology.

Given that a vaccine will likely take months to develop, repurposed drugs that can alleviate patient symptoms and prevent deaths are urgently needed. Today, many drug-repurposing initiatives are underway. In recent months, the World Health Organization (WHO) has launched clinical trials involving four promising candidates: remdesivir (an investigational broad-spectrum antiviral), chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine (used to prevent and treat malaria), a combination of lopinavir and ritonavir (an HIV therapy), and the lopinavir-ritonavir combination with interferon beta-1a.2 With few exceptions, most major pharmaceutical companies are currently working on repurposing projects to rapidly bring treatments to market. For example, as of early April, ruxolitinib, a Novartis drug that received Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval in 2011 for treating myelofibrosis, was moving to clinical testing in patients with severe COVID-19 symptoms.3

Ultrafast Innovation: The Advent of Knowledge Repurposing

While repurposing is common in the pharmaceutical industry, it now constitutes the cornerstone of ultrafast innovations to cope with the pandemic crisis in other industries too. For example, rum and whiskey distilleries have started producing hand sanitizer and disinfectants. Similarly, cosmetics producers such as Nivea, L’Oréal, and LMVH also started manufacturing hand sanitizer to meet the soaring global demand. Dyson, a household appliance manufacturer, is developing ventilators using its air-compression technology. Both Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk repurposed manufacturing capacity and expertise from their respective rocket enterprises, Blue Origin and SpaceX, to 3D-print face shields for health care workers.4

The specific repurposing logic underlying these ultrafast innovation initiatives can be summarized in five principles: Grasp the innovation problem, map resources, use emerging technologies, encourage collaboration, and integrate end users.

1. Get a grasp on your innovation problem. First, managers need to quickly assess and understand the problem that the innovation should target, be it tackling the ventilator shortage, supporting health care personnel, or developing a vaccine for the coronavirus. This is key to matching the problem with existing resources, ideas, knowledge, and technology. Looking at your existing technology as a potential solution may give you a new sense of the problem too.5 If your goal is to prevent people from getting infected, you need to gain as many insights about the virus as possible — its DNA, its replication, and the process of transmission. Note that the most valuable knowledge about the problem you are facing may originate outside your organization.

2. Make a rapid inventory of your knowledge and resources. To make repurposing work, you need to rapidly develop an inventory of “useful stuff,” including existing products, facilities, databases, software, talent, and expertise. As uncertainty and urgency increase, repurposing is most successful when organizations draw on readily available resources and knowledge, some of which might be seen as unattractive side effects or by-products. For example, the off-label prescribing of marketed drugs is a common approach to treating diseases where anecdotal evidence exists about the potential efficacy of a drug developed for another indication and no other treatment options are available. Indeed, the FDA recently approved the off-label prescription of chloroquine for COVID-19 despite weak evidence of its efficacy, given the lack of better alternatives.

Other recent repurposing examples include Hospitainer — an organization that converts storage containers into mobile hospitals that can be dispatched to crisis areas for rapid health care — and L’Oréal, which repurposed its facilities to manufacture hand sanitizer. While the process for making hand sanitizer is relatively simple, scarcer resources, such as L’Oréal’s hygienic manufacturing facilities and a bottling infrastructure, offered synergies for the production of this widely needed good.

Thinking creatively about by-products can be another valuable approach to repurposing. For example, in recent years, dairy producers have increasingly targeted health-conscious consumers with new protein-rich products enhanced with milk whey — once regarded as a problematic by-product in cheese making.

In all of these examples, a product’s complexity and proximity to a new product feature play an important role in repurposing effectiveness. As the gap between existing and target knowledge domains widens, knowledge repurposing may become less effective.

3. Use emerging technologies. Cloud computing, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies offer two benefits for ultrafast innovation. First, digital platforms enable key actors, such as users, experts, funders, and public and private organizations, to share information and collectively create knowledge. For example, WHO initiatives to develop a vaccine are drawing on an extensive online community of experts from many different types of organizations that plan and coordinate their work, and share protocols, insights, and research-based knowledge.

Second, machine learning coupled with big data can rapidly identify promising links between needs and solutions. Drug repurposing today benefits from computational biology and automation technology that help researchers identify existing drugs that could be efficacious in treating a specific disease. Although the use of computational biology has limitations within drug discovery, it is very effective for initially identifying feasible ideas rapidly.

When problem information and solution inventories are available digitally and shared on platforms, it takes less effort to find attractive matches. For example, Alibaba Group’s Academy for Discovery, Adventure, Momentum and Outlook developed an AI-based COVID-19 diagnostic tool that can detect the disease in 20 seconds in patients’ CT scans, using a guideline provided by a leading radiologist. The tool helped doctors in 26 hospitals rapidly review more than 30,000 cases during the outbreak in China.6

4. Encourage open and cross-disciplinary collaboration. To quickly grasp the innovation problem and identify possible solutions, it is crucial to encourage and support open and cross-disciplinary collaboration. In drug repurposing, a number of thought leaders have become very influential within their patient and treatment communities. Similar developments are unfolding in the COVID-19 crisis. For example, philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates and the experts in their foundation are hugely beneficial to crisis response. While their financial support is important, more crucial is the expertise that such foundations bring to the table when it comes to understanding how to orchestrate global and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Given the urgency of the situation, managers’ openness to and support of the global community of researchers and scientists in pharmaceutical companies are central success factors in identifying treatments for COVID-19. As companies open up their internal assets, repurposing opportunities for scientific communities multiply.

Crowdsourcing is a well-known way to respond to crises including the testing of contaminated drinking water to the coordination of disaster relief. The idea behind crowdsourcing is to submit problems to experts across organizational and functional boundaries and ask these experts to generate alternative solutions. Dealing with the current pandemic, organizations may increasingly launch open calls or innovation contests to discover new ways of using their existing products, services, and facilities as solutions in the coronavirus crisis.

Several “coronathons” have been set up: For example, Mobility Goes Additive, an international network of 3D printing organizations, launched weboostam.com, an online platform for 3D printing that features COVID-19-specific use cases, including face shields, masks, and hands-free door openers, that are submitted by its members.7 In the spirit of openness and collaboration, managers can use such platforms to find new ways of meeting societal needs by proposing crowdsourcing challenges that invite new solutions using the organization’s existing resources.

5. Rapidly integrate end users. To meet the urgent needs of end users through ultrafast innovation, you cannot wait for market research to tell you what these needs are. You must promote communication channels that make it easier for end users to voice these needs themselves, and managers must rapidly address them in the innovation process. Indeed, integrating patients’ knowledge is a key factor in tackling diseases, particularly ones requiring ultrafast innovation.8

Information from patients about disease symptoms, which they may share freely in the form of YouTube videos and Google searches, is a highly valuable source of knowledge about the disease and its evolution, and thus critical for achieving ultrafast innovation. Likewise, health care workers are at the forefront of medical device innovation in the current pandemic. For example, engineers from Vanderbilt University developed a prototype ventilator in collaboration with physicians from the university’s medical center. Without input from those physicians, some essential features, such as pressure sensors and alarms, might have been overlooked.9 Integrating health care workers and their patients into the innovation process in this way is crucial not only for quickly identifying needs but also for saving time in the design process.

Outlook

In the midst of the current coronavirus pandemic, there is considerable uncertainty about if and when we will have a vaccine and effective treatments. Still, there are good reasons to be hopeful. Having honed the key principles of repurposing, the pharmaceutical industry and its partners already have testing well underway. Now, as managers in sectors far afield from health care grapple with the significant and likely long-lasting social and economic consequences of the pandemic, that industry’s lessons of ultrafast innovation based on repurposing can help us rapidly develop new solutions to our current challenges and those that lie ahead.

Lessons in Rapid Innovation From the COVID-19 Pandemic

Rethinking Performance Management for Post-Pandemic Success

Will dispersed, distributed, and remote workforces become the post-pandemic new normal? It may be too soon to say. Much clearer is how misleading and unhelpful legacy metrics are for assessing work-from-home performance. Pre-COVID-19 workplace analytics are no longer fit for purpose. They don’t capture the disjointed realities of digital workflows. Stressed, separated, and challenged to do better with less, people need greater insight into how they’re doing. Productivity now demands more aggressive and actionable measures.

Recalibrating key performance indicators (KPIs) is essential to ensuring that remote work actually works. Enterprises that want the best from their workers — and for their customers — innovatively invest in digital accountability, but these efforts must acknowledge and respect newly blurred distinctions between work and home life. Digitally colonizing people’s homes is not an option; workforce mood and morale matter. Thoughtful leaders grasp the need for a healthy coexistence.

Without trust and transparency, remote workforce monitoring appears intrusive and exploitative. With transparency and trust, tracking can authentically be branded and experienced as data-driven workforce support. Increasingly, monitoring and measuring morale — qualitatively, as well as quantitatively — matters. But soft skills deserve hard numbers, too. Emergent post-pandemic dashboards embrace affective metrics as firmly and fairly as effective ones.

That means that leading companies must renovate their data-driven dashboards to better inspire people and project teams and promote positive outcomes. They must automatically capture and analyze, and explicitly communicate, their high-performance criteria. The most important takeaway: High-performance management depends on high-performance measurement. The digital future of one depends on the digital future of the other.

Redefining and remeasuring high performance may prove to be the true disruptive opportunity for post-COVID-19 growth.

At one global professional services company, for example, top management dramatically accelerated project delivery schedules for its newly remote teams. This forcing mechanism deliberately inspired greater communication, coordination, and collaboration expectations for team members. At the same time, however, the company created a complementary buddy system to help ensure that more isolated and/or introverted employees felt connected. Tech support migrated from a back-office help-desk function to a digital project facilitator and enabler for global teams with demanding deadlines. The number of pulse surveys monitoring employee engagement and morale increased from fortnightly to every few days. Top management is tracking what‚ and who — delivers value well.

A senior global research project manager at Adobe programmed his laptop to display a personalized end-of-day dashboard visually summarizing — with pie charts and graphs — how he spent his time, whom he contacted, messages sent and received, documents exchanged, appointments scheduled, commitments made, and to-do list items accomplished, along with the top three items for the following day. He started sharing this dashboard with his team and is now wondering whether he should nudge — or require — colleagues to create comparable dashboards. “Should we be visible to each other in this way?” he asks. He says that such “dashboard transparency” has sparked cross-functional exchanges he’d never had before.

At least two global banks seek to capture remote-working lessons and best practices for internal discussion and sharing. Looking ahead, they’re rethinking whether they really need all the commercial office space they currently possess. They’re now reviewing with IT how significantly having a dispersed workforce alters their process automation road maps. Consequently, IT and its business process owner counterparts now track and map dispersed workforce workflows with a new remote automation strategy in mind.

Using Data to Better (See and Communicate) Performance

Mandatory remoteness quickly obsolesced executive truisms like “management by walking around,” and “under management’s watchful eye,” along with the concept of an “open-door policy.” Disrupted organizations soon learn just how little they know about how well — and how poorly — their people and teams work together. Virtually every serious organization now grasps that some meaningfully measurable form of real-time monitoring is essential to value orchestration and oversight.

For some, this quest for transparency translates to “Trust but verify”; for others, the mantra is “Verify but trust.” Either way, trust is core. “Do I trust my people? Yes,” says one investment banking lead. “Do I now need to be able to see how they spend their time? Yes. They need to trust me, too.”

Proactive enterprise communication is central to this cultural shift. When a Fortune/Adobe survey asked CIOs what has proved to be the biggest challenge in facilitating their companies’ remote work, only 20% said hardware, and 21% tech tools. Over half — 53% — said the hardest issue was getting employees to effectively communicate with one another. Why is that so seemingly hard? There’s certainly no shortage of smart messaging tools. As the COVID-19 crisis reveals, companies overwhelmingly depend on them.

Yet, most companies lack real-time metrics or measures assessing team and/or process communication effectiveness. Typically, those indicators are bundled into performance management reviews. That helps explain an accelerating managerial trend: greater reliance on performance management systems to better orchestrate and upgrade team performance. This emergent application of performance management systems ensures more communication and conversations about performance.

Unsurprisingly, next-generation performance management depends on digital monitoring and tracking platforms to generate real-time analytic insights. Those workflow and process insights can be prescriptive and predictive, as well as descriptive. High-performing leaders embrace this practice. Dispersed, technologically enabled enterprises seamlessly converge people, process, and technology into performance management systems.

With improved dashboards, leaders can see which teams best add value to what processes. They can observe which workflows invite consolidation, automation, and/or professional development. Leadership now has the data and analytics necessary to refine what high performance should mean for people and what it could mean for machines. These insights are indispensable. The more repeatable, replicable, and scalable the high-performance workflow, the better its candidacy for automation and/or machine learning. Correlating and connecting instrumented workflows with KPIs lets organizations turn the “remoteness from COVID-19”-imposed bug into a high-performance-enabling feature.

We see this in law firms, logistics providers, customer contact centers, and even health care providers. From telemedicine to texts about a customer’s arrival for curbside pickup, organizations are repurposing and instrumenting their performance management platforms in ways that measurably redefine high performance.

For example, colocated contact centers have been forced to geographically disperse. This has brutally disrupted legacy work patterns and forced a performance management reevaluation. Chatbots prioritize and route inquiries; support workers more easily message or transfer callers to colleagues; automated follow-ups with relevant links attached are readily sent. Response time, Net Promoter Score, and customer satisfaction KPIs retain pride of metrics place. But better analytics orchestration lets management track the digital blends of process and performance ingredients best correlated to desired outcomes. The resultant data highlights touch points best suited for automation and those where human contact best improves outcomes. The new constraints and opportunities imposed by remoteness and automation have transformed how the contact centers have chosen to align performance assessment, efficiency, and customer response.

Similarly, a “remote-ified” Silicon Valley law firm quickly and effectively deployed transcription-as-a-service to convert every Zoom-based client and partner meeting into editable documents. Instant transcripts dramatically changed how legal teams collaborated with each other and with clients. Measuring value-added revisions to those documents — and how those revisions were included in filings and client communications — immediately emerged as an essential workflow monitoring challenge. Version management governance became a new driver for decision-making. Partners now track their time-and-version ratios between simultaneous and asynchronous review. For some partners and associates, ROI effectively means return on iteration — in other words, which lawyers and legal teams have the biggest productive impact editing, annotating, and converting transcripts into desired client deliverables.

These examples show that successful leaders can use performance management analytics as portal and platform to convert new capabilities and constraints into new value. Data-informed performance management invites and inspires more productive workforce exchanges.

These interim COVID-19 findings represent genuine business applications of conclusions reached by our 2019 research report “Performance Management’s Digital Shift.” That report anticipated the disruptive dominance data-driven workforce communication would enjoy. “The biggest cultural and organizational impact of next-generation performance management systems,” we observed, “will be feedback time, tempo, and impact. Instead of annual, quarterly, or impromptu reviews, talent- and accountability-oriented enterprises will encourage and enable near-constant feedback.”

Feedback — actionable, constructive, trackable, and influential — is the informational and motivational coin of the digital realm in the post-pandemic distributed workforce. Feedback — data-enriched, KPI-aligned — simultaneously promotes situational awareness and self-awareness. Feedback is how people get better at getting better. High-performance systems require high-performance feedback. Better-quality feedback means better-quality outcomes. This simple management — and leadership — truth is being rediscovered and reconfigured in light of COVID-19.

To cultivate healthy returns from a healthy — if remote and distributed — workforce requires leaders to treat data and analytics as nutrients for people, not just fuel for economic growth. That means leaders need to do the following:

Commit to a continuous feedback culture. Much as individuals use Google Maps or Waze to manage expectations around travel, employees and associates need dynamic visualizations to manage their expectations around work. Performance management platforms must facilitate ongoing feedback on professional progress, growth, and development opportunities. Executives must define the feedback experience for their people. Doing so forces leaders to define and develop a shared perspective about what high performance means.

Commit to clarity between assessment and development. Managers should make clear when feedback targets performance assessment versus cultivating new capabilities and skills. Development matters. Especially for remote workers and distributed teams, human resource policies must balance assessment and the safe cultivation of new skills and capabilities.

Commit to transparency. Post-pandemic performance management credibility and trustworthiness depend on transparency. People must be able to see that their contributions to meetings are recognized and/or that their blown deadlines cost the company a big client. This requires significant shifts in data governance: Connecting and aligning feedback transparency to data collection must become a core cultural value and practice. In short, transparency is the foundation for a performance culture that can also literally be seen as a fair and equitable culture.

Commit to performance management and KPI alignment. Aspiration and expectation require quantification. There is no meaningful performance management without measurable KPIs. High-performance accountability requires clear and concise KPIs or key results. Linking performance management to KPIs or objectives and key results is the strategic duty and obligation of serious leadership. Managers, not HR, ensure that performance management activities support measurable, valuable business outcomes.

There will always be tensions — and opportunities — between managing high-performance people, high-performance machines, and high-performance systems. Innovatively confronting those challenges will be the most important leadership challenge this global pandemic creates.

Rethinking Performance Management for Post-Pandemic Success

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