How Leaders could Solve Business Challenges?

5 in 5 exclusive interviews

5 minutes with Helen Mackay – The beginning of a new era

We speak with Helen, Head of Sales & Marketing at Enlighten, who has held a vast number of virtual coffee chats with global leaders about their outlook for the future. Helen was keen to understand how leaders, who often check in on others and rarely get checked in on themselves, coped with the business challenges. The conversations revolved around their greatest challenges and their outlook for “the new beginning” post-crisis.

What are some of the key themes you observed from these conversations?

What has been interesting during all of my conversations is the enormous resilience and optimism shown by global leaders in dealing with the business challenges. They are all very proud of how their teams have pulled together in adapting to a new way of working, despite all the challenges and hurdles they faced. There is an undeniable sense of culture and people as the root of success during this time, and the leaders who focused on their people are really seeing the results as they get ready for a smoother transition than perhaps others are.

What are some of the key areas of focus for leaders going forward?

There are definitely some big changes coming for most organsiations, largely revolving around leaders now looking to define what the new hybrid workforce looks like for them. There’ll be greater flexibility, new tools and innovation at play, and even a new style of management. Some of the main areas would be:

Culture. With the new hybrid workforce management, leaders will be focusing on visibility on performance from a point of view of support, checking in rather than checking on their teams and working to help increase productivity and operational excellence regardless of location.
Capacity. A big shift will be in how we look at capacity management, with leaders now seeing opportunities to increase capacity on-shore and balance what gets sent off-shore. The flexibility in location has opened us up to consider how remote working can even allow capacity redeployment in other regions, regardless of the asset’s actual location.
Tools. The key to the above is building up their operational resilience, especially for remote working teams, and leaders will be investing in new tools and management styles to accommodate that. A part of that is a focus on data, looking at the results around productivity and using the insights to develop a healthy operating rhythm.

What are some of the critical lessons you’ve seen your clients take from this period?

Enlighten’s Single Source of Truth has been pivotal in this period to help our clients shift their thinking. Being able to see the business challenges like how busy specific employees are, how productive they are, what issues they might be having during this time has pushed them from thinking about just the data in productivity to really understanding capacity.

Our team takes the feed from the client’s platform, looks at the data to identify spikes in demand and helps paint a clear picture of workloads and capacity to see if tasks can be reassigned. Clients can also put their data into our forecasting model to really understand the more customised functions, such a cash payment or corporate action, to manage how they shift a resource to deliver on that. We’re definitely seeing these visibility metrics, as Nathan previously said, to be tapped on more frequently as we prepare for the next phase.