Innovation Challenge - Remote Work

One of the immediate effects of COVID-19 has been a huge increase in the number of workers working from home. When the crisis ends, more and more companies will permanently shift to at least part-time virtual work. The workplace, as we know it, has changed forever.

One area that will not change is the importance of building and supporting high-performing teams that can thrive, independent of physical location. The rise of the coronavirus emphasized that companies need to increase corporate resilience by embracing virtual collaboration tools and practices that ensure business operations continuity. Companies must provide their remote workers with intuitive collaboration tools that allow them to communicate effectively and access applications and networks in a simple, easy, and secure way from anywhere.

The challenge of creating high performing virtual teams at scale is consist of three major use cases:

1) Measuring Success: As the number of remote workers increases, companies face problems on how to measure their effectiveness, efficiency (productivity), and engagement.

The Challenge: Empower executives and managers with effective tools to set objectives, track workers’ productivity with KPIs, and provide teams with easy ways to obtain immediate visibility of their current progress against business targets – both at the individual and team level.

2) Enhancing Remote Collaboration & Connectivity: Virtual teaming presents a higher risk of misalignment and a reduced level of collaboration. Companies must shift the way they operate to maintain informal connections as well. This can be enhanced by the adoption of technologies that are optimized for virtual experiences, such as how to remotely onboard new workers at scale.

The Challenge: Proactively and explicitly make teams visible to each other in real-time by getting knowledge and conversation into centralized and virtual locations, enabling workers an easy way to communicate with their teams from anywhere and with any device.

3) Support Diversity and Inclusion: As remote teams work globally and bring more of their personal lives to their professional lives on camera, the nature of relationships can change and bonds within teams can strengthen. Leaders must adapt to encourage workers to bring their authentic selves to work and create space to celebrate uniqueness.

The Challenge: Empower executives and managers with tools for remote teams to promote inclusion, celebrate diversity, enhance well-being, and foster a positive team culture.

The Challenge Leadership

Mark Holmstrom,

Principal, Human Capital Practice

Deloitte, US

Laura Shact,

Senior Leader, Human Capital Practice

Deloitte, US

About Mark Holmstrom
Mark specializes in helping companies transform how they work using design thinking methods to rethink the employee and people experience. Solutions typically include new combinations of virtual space, physical space, and practices to unleash new value for organizations, employees, customers, and other partners.

Mark holds a Masters of Management degree from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern and a Bachelor of Arts degree from University of Utah.

About Laura Shact
Laura helps companies align talent strategy to the Future of Work. At Deloitte she helps high-growth technology companies transform their workforce. Laura advises C-suite leaders on the structure of their organizations, redesign of roles, and identification of talent/skills needed to enable market shifts.

She has an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a Bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University. She also serves on the Stanford Pride alumni organization's Board of Directors.