[kictanet] Fwd: [Internet Policy] FW: McKinsey - A blueprint for remote working: Success Lessons from China March 2020 | Article

[Barrack Otieno]

Listers,

This might be of interest to you.

Best Regards

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From: Richard Hill via InternetPolicy <internetpolicy at elists.isoc.org>
Date: Fri, Mar 27, 2020 at 12:22 PM
Subject: [Internet Policy] FW: McKinsey - A blueprint for remote working:
Success Lessons from China March 2020 | Article
To: <internetpolicy at elists.isoc.org>


This may be of interest.


Best,

Richard







*A blueprint for remote working: Success  Lessons from China March 2020 |
Article*

By Raphael Bick <https://mail.google.com/our-people/raphael-bick>, Michael
Chang, Kevin Wei Wang, and Tianwen Yu

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*A blueprint for remote working: Lessons from China*

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As home to some of the world’s largest firms, China offers lessons for
those that are just now starting to embrace the shift to remote working.
Downloadable Resources

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   1. Article (PDF-205KB)
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*From Alibaba to Ping An and Google to Ford,* companies around the globe
are telling staff to work from home 1 1. Peter Campbell, Alice Hancock, and
Daniel Thomas, “Companies from Ford to Unilever send staff to work from
home,” *Financial Times*, ft.com. in a bid to stem the spread of COVID-19.

Such remote working at scale is unprecedented and will leave a lasting
impression on the way people live and work for many years to come. China,
which felt the first impact of the pandemic, 2 2. “Coronavirus,” WHO,
who.int. was an early mover in this space. As home to some of the world’s
largest firms, it offers lessons for those that are just now starting to
embrace the shift.

Working from home skyrocketed in China 3 3. Lu-Hai Liang, “How Covid-19 led
to a nationwide work-from-home experiment,” BBC, bbc.com. in the wake of
the COVID-19 crisis as companies told their employees to stay home. Around
200 million people 4 4. “Spring Festival rework day: 200 million people
work from home,” China News, chinanews.com. were working remotely by the
end of the Chinese New Year holiday. While this arrangement has some
benefits, such as avoiding long commutes, many employees and companies
found it challenging. One employee at an internet company quipped his work
day changed from ‘996’ to ‘007,’ meaning from nine to nine, 6 days a week,
to all the time. On the personal front, employees found it difficult to
manage kids’ home-schooling via video conference while coordinating with
remote colleagues. At a company level, many felt that productivity rapidly
tailed off if not managed properly.

This article brings together our experience helping clients navigate remote
working, in-house analysis, and insights from conversations with executives
in China as they responded to the situation and addressed the challenges.

Done right, remote working can boost productivity and morale; done badly,
it can breed inefficiency, damage work relationships, and demotivate
employees. Here are eight learnings from China that may be applicable
around the world, depending on the circumstances:
1. Designing an effective structure
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Teams or whole business units working remotely can quickly result in
confusion and a lack of clarity. Being isolated leads to uncertainty about
who to talk to on specific issues and how and when to approach them,
leading to hold-ups and delays.

That’s why establishing a structure and architecture for decision making
and effective communication is key. Here, smaller cross-functional teams
can be helpful, each with a clear mission and reporting line, where
directions and tasks are easy to implement. This also simplifies onboarding
new hires, who can integrate faster in a tight-knit group, at a time when
the broad sweep of the organization isn’t visible or easy to feel. With
fewer in each team, there is more time to get to know each other and build
the trust that would grow more organically in the office.

At Ping An Insurance, workers are typically grouped in project teams of, at
most, 30 members, while larger business units are divided up to help them
stay agile.

Strong company-wide foundations underpin this, such as having a common
purpose and unified goals. Providing clarity on what decisions to escalate
and which ones can be tackled at team level helps drive progress.

To mitigate the effects of closed retail stores, one leading fashion
company set up a strategy control room and redeployed staff into four
cross-functional squads to support its front-line. It designed standard
ways for live broadcasting and established internal best practices to
encourage front-line staff to use new retail tools to drive sales remotely.

*The lesson: Setting up small, cross-functional teams with clear objectives
and a common purpose keeps everyone on the same strategic course.*
2. Leading from afar

Managing people is one of the most difficult elements of remote working,
not least because everyone will respond differently to the cultural shift
and challenges of the home-working environment.

Leaders need to energize the whole company
<https://mail.google.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/leadership-in-a-crisis-responding-to-the-coronavirus-outbreak-and-future-challenges>
by setting a clear direction and communicating it effectively. Offering a
strong vision and a realistic outlook can have a powerful effect on
motivation across the organization. It’s essential to foster an
outcome-driven culture that empowers and holds teams accountable for
getting things done, while encouraging open, honest, and productive
communication.

Empowering your team in this way pays dividends. WeSure, part of leading
internet company Tencent, assembled a COVID-19 response team 5 5. “WeSure
Launches Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia Insurance Covering 15 Million People
Against Outbreak of Covid-19,” prnewswire.com. at the start of the year to
offer insurance coverage, free of charge, to front-line medical workers.
Alan Lau, CEO of WeSure, credited his team, saying they had worked nonstop,
many from remote locations while on leave during the Chinese New Year
break, demonstrating how responsive they were to the vision.

For managers, the challenge is to lead, inspire, and direct their team in
their daily course of work, while being physically remote. Upping the
levels of interaction can also work well here.

One chief information officer, responding to a McKinsey survey
<https://mail.google.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/the-cios-moment-leadership-through-the-first-wave-of-the-coronavirus-crisis>,
said he’s texting the entire company with regular updates because it’s a
more human way of communicating than via the official corporate channels.

When working within distributed teams, e-commerce giant Alibaba increases
the frequency of its one-to-one communications with employees to a weekly
basis and, in some teams, members submit a weekly report for their
colleagues, complete with plans for the week ahead. Alibaba’s productivity
app DingTalk (Ding Ding) has features built in to facilitate this by
allowing managers to send voice-to-text messages to their teams, and to
check in on progress.

*The lesson: Determining how you communicate is just as important as what’s
being said, and it needs to be done confidently, consistently, and
reliably.* 6 6. Aamer Baig, Klemens Hjartar, and Steve Van Kuiken, “The
CIO’s moment: Leadership through the first wave of the coronavirus crisis
<https://mail.google.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/the-cios-moment-leadership-through-the-first-wave-of-the-coronavirus-crisis>,”
March 2020.
3.Instilling a caring culture

As companies transition to the new normal, it’s important to acknowledge
that some employees may be facing other pressures at home, including caring
for their children when schools are shut, leading to feelings of isolation
and insecurity. Business leaders need to respect and address these
additional needs.

Empathy is a crucial tool here, offering a way to connect, promote
inclusiveness, and create a sense of community in a void of physical
interaction. Increasing social interactions within the team, particularly
through one-on-one catchups, guards against feelings of isolation and
demoralization and creates space for people to speak up and share their
thoughts. By creating a sense of psychological safety for their colleagues,
being inclusive in decision making, and offering perspective in challenging
moments, managers can stay closer to what is going on, surface issues, and
help their teams solve problems effectively.

A similar approach is important when dealing with customers and clients,
providing valuable stability and enabling them to navigate unknown waters
with confidence. For example, one global bank asked their relationship
managers to connect with small-business customers via WeChat and
video-calls to understand their situation and help them weather the crisis.
To do so effectively at scale, the managers are supported through dedicated
product programs, online articles, scripts for communicating with clients,
and internal trainings.

Inclusion is the ultimate show of empathy. Creating outlets for sharing
best practices, success stories, challenges, and water-cooler chat is vital
to creating a human connection. Giving employees space to pursue personal
or social endeavors, providing a clear span of control, and assigning
meaningful tasks can also spur motivation.

*The lesson: Connecting on a personal level and instilling empathy within
the culture is doubly important when working remotely.*
4. Finding a new routine

Moving to remote working risks disrupting the office-based flows and
rhythms and it can be easy to hit the wrong note or miss important virtual
meetings due to packed schedules. Spend time with your team addressing the
nuts and bolts of how you will work together. Cover the daily rhythm,
individual constraints, and specific norms you will commit to and
anticipate what might go wrong and how you will mitigate it.

How companies plan and review their workflows needs to change to reflect
this. The challenges of the new working pattern and of not being in one
room together can be overcome by creating a digitally facilitated cadence
of meetings. One leading insurance company adopted agile practices across
its teams, with a daily and weekly ritual of check-ins, sprint planning,
and review sessions.

As Alibaba embraced remote working, it also made sure its meetings were
more tightly run. One person is assigned to track time and manage the
outcomes. Team members can rate a meeting’s usefulness using a five-star
system that offers immediate feedback and positive ways forward.

To address the challenge of launching a digital business with a large
remote team, one company created a new workflow for product requirements
that clearly outlined use of digital tools, roles, and responsibilities as
requirements moved from ideation to validation to delivery stages.
Reiteration of decision-making structures like this isn’t always necessary
when people can communicate directly, but their absence can be keenly felt
when remote working kicks in.

*The lesson: Establishing robust working norms, workflows, and lines of
authority is critical, but all too easy to skimp on.*
5. Supercharging ways of communicating

Poor communication is one of the key reasons remote offices are not
productive.

How staff interact needs to be completely rethought using a full arsenal of
channels and tools (Exhibit 1). Getting it right is tricky and requires
experimentation.

Exhibit 1

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Choosing the right channel matters. Video conferences are great for
discussing complicated topics in real-time and for creating a sense of
community, but they require team-wide coordination and focus. Channel
(chat) based collaboration software is great for quick synchronization or
easily answered questions, while email can be used to record outcomes and
communicate more formally. Backlog management tools can be used to keep on
top of tasks and process.

>From McKinsey’s remote work with clients, we know how effective video
conferences can be, if a few simple rules are followed. Firstly, you need a
clear agenda and moderator to keep the discussion on track. Having the
camera turned on throughout the meeting is essential to build relationships
and pick up nonverbal cues. In case the home office is not presentable on
camera, most VC software offer virtual or blurred backgrounds. For joint
problem solving, it is particularly useful to use screenshare or virtual
whiteboards to co-edit documents.

Many teams find it useful to create channels for real-time communication
(Exhibit 2)—for example on DingTalk, WeChat, Microsoft Teams or Slack—with
a simple rule to jump on a video conference if a complex topic requires
face-to-face interaction. However, continuously switching between messages,
tasks, and projects is a productivity killer and team members need to
understand how quickly they’re expected to respond: is it urgent or can it
wait? Turning off notifications and really focusing on one thing at a time
can sometimes be the best way to get work done.

Exhibit 2

We strive to provide individuals with disabilities equal access to our
website. If you would like information about this content we will be happy
to work with you. Please email us at:
McKinsey_Website_Accessibility at mckinsey.com

*The lesson: Choosing the right channel is critical to getting it right. If
you pull your employees from topic to topic, you’ll interrupt their
workflow and drive down productivity.*
6. Harnessing the power of technology

Effective remote working starts with the basics—including a fast, stable,
and secure internet connection, as well as setting up an ergonomic home
office environment. Expanding VPN (virtual private network) access and
bandwidth is one of the first steps many CIOs took to enable their
employees to access systems remotely. Remote working is also empowered by a
suite of SaaS (Software as a Service) technology tools that allow teams to
effectively co-create, communicate, share documents, and manage processes.

A single, digitally accessible source of information—be it a performance
dashboard, sprint backlog, or business plan—keeps everybody aligned.

Many Chinese companies have rapidly adopted local productivity solutions
such as Alibaba’s DingTalk or WeChat Work to communicate and deliver weekly
meetings, training, and lectures. For example, as COVID-19 spread, monthly
active users of DingTalk jumped by 66 percent to more than 125 million.
Many multinational firms accelerated roll-out of productivity solutions
they were already using elsewhere, like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Zoom.
Effective use of these tools required a change management effort including
training teams on how to use them and defining new ways of working.
Defining new ways of working with digital tools by collating best practices
from various teams in the company can help to speed up adoption. At
McKinsey, we created an internal portal on great remote working that
brought together learnings from across the firm, from how to run
collaborative problem-solving sessions to effective decision meetings with
clients while on VC.

In addition, many companies created special applications to allow their
front-line teams to remain effective during remote work. For example, one
big-four bank created a special WeChat mini-program to enable their
relationship managers to interact with customers and generate leads. They
then used bank-approved programs to engage with customers, and access bank
systems from their laptops.

Trip.com, China’s largest online travel agency, has long enabled its
contact-center staff to work from home, which paid off in the recent crisis
as it was able to deliver a high quality of service during widespread
travel disruptions.

*The lesson: Using technology can be vital in keeping everyone on track,
but it’s important to get the basics right.*
7. Taking security seriously

Security concerns add a layer of complexity to the technological side of
remote working and can have serious consequences, in particular when
employees are not aware of safe practices or switch to unauthorized tools
to get their work done.

Adopting a strong yet practical approach is not easy. Doing it right
requires giving employees the tools they need to be productive while
managing data confidentiality and access.

Leading players such as Ping An have addressed the security issue head-on
through a set of mechanisms: establishing a confidentiality culture,
mandating awareness training, and limiting data access to a need-to-know
basis. For example, sensitive information such as customer data can be
displayed with watermarks so that any leaks are traceable. Alibaba uses its
own software Alilang to manage network and device security.

*The lesson: Make it easy for employees to comply with security
requirements while investing in strong safeguards.*
8. Adopting a ‘test and learn’ mentality

The final lesson: Being ready to recognize what isn’t working and changing
it fast.

Leadership teams that continuously learn, actively identify best practices,
and rapidly set up mechanisms to share ideas across the organization tend
to be most successful in the long run. R&D teams at one leading high-tech
manufacturer created a productivity target for remote work by estimating
their productivity each week relative to onsite work and identifying levers
to improve it. Within four weeks, they had progressed from 50 percent to 88
percent of their baseline.

As China’s workforce begins to return to offices, these lessons from some
of its leading companies help to illustrate how—with the right structure,
culture, processes, and technology—working remotely can boost productivity
and morale. Employees who spend less time travelling or commuting and have
a better work-life balance are likely to be happier, more motivated, and
ready to mobilize in extreme situations.

Embracing remote working allows companies to define a new normal that
drives productivity and employee satisfaction into the future. Alibaba
launched TaoBao, by now the world’s biggest e-commerce website, while staff
were working remotely on quarantine during the 2003 SARS outbreak. For
Trip.com, a remote working experiment in 2014 7 7. Nicholas Bloom, “To
raise productivity, let more employees work from home,” *Harvard Business
Review*, hbr.org. established the foundations for great customer service
and flexible working culture. Hence, bringing together all the elements can
enable a new way of working that will make your company fit for the
future—whatever that may hold.
About the author(s)

*Raphael Bick <https://mail.google.com/our-people/raphael-bick>* is a
partner in McKinsey & Company’s Shanghai office, where *Tianwen Yu* is an
associate partner. *Michael Chang* is an associate partner in McKinsey’s
Beijing office. *Kevin Wei Wang* is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Hong
Kong office.

The authors wish to thank Lihong Pan and Glenn Leibowitz for their
contributions to this article. They’d also like to thank Enoch Chan,
Natalie Chu, Desiree El Chebeir, Karel Eloot, Jeff Galvin, Alexei
Korkmazov, Xu Lei, Nick Leung, Liesje Meijknecht, Kate Smaje, Hugo
Sarrazin, Anand Swaminathan, Sha Sha, Gregor Theisen, Joe Zachariah, Rodney
Zemmel, and Haimeng Zhang for their insights.
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-- 
Barrack O. Otieno
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Skype: barrack.otieno
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