Leading through a crisis for a healthier future

Getting ready for the future

The pandemic has shown us that we need to be more prepared with crisis management to ensure a healthier business future. Drawing on years of helping our clients build business agility and resilience, Enlighten has created a toolkit to help leaders navigate through COVID-19 and create stronger businesses as a result.

Learn more

Enlighten’s Crisis Management Guide

Crisis leadership. Learn more on Enlighten.

Enlighten has prepared a framework for leaders to help simultaneously navigate the crisis and focus on the future.

Download the guide

Getting ready for the future

The pandemic has shown us that we need to be more prepared with crisis management to ensure a healthier business future. Drawing on years of helping our clients build business agility and resilience, Enlighten has created a toolkit to help leaders navigate through COVID-19 and create stronger businesses as a result.

Learn more

Enlighten’s Crisis Management Guide

Crisis leadership. Learn more on Enlighten.

Enlighten has prepared a framework for leaders to help simultaneously navigate the crisis and focus on the future.

Download the guide

4 ways leaders can create a healthier future for their business

The key to any crisis response is having the right team to help roll out changes, mitigate challenges and ease the transition for the entire workforce.

Here are three areas your RRT will focus on:

  1. Making the appropriate decisions for immediate action
  2. Empowering the responders to face minimal resistance
  3. Creating a framework for managing future crises

To get ready for the future and quickly action the learnings from this experience, leaders have to define the data that is meaningful and generate relevant insights.

Here are three areas to frame parameters around:

  1. Understanding the roles that will be affected
  2. Identifying measures for broader change
  3. Adopting and integrating the right technology

Before leaders transition the workforce back to the new normal, it’s critical to develop a road map and establish ways of engaging the workforce in the new vision.

Here are three ways to get your team on board:

  1. Defining the checkpoints on the journey towards achieving the new normal
  2. Giving employees supported ownership over their contribution to the future vision

  3. Provide tools and training in shaping the new working model: a hybrid workforce

Leaders must now position their organisations to be fit for growth post the crisis and decide on a framework for managing the new normal to ensure a healthier future.

Here are three ways to learn from the crisis:

  1. Use this as an opportunity to highlight preparedness
  2. Dedicate resources for future crisis management
  3. Analyse the current response and adapt the future plan

5 minutes with Nathan Graham - driving results in a time of crisis
Nathan Graham interview

5 minutes with Nathan Graham - driving results in a time of crisis

We speak to Nathan Graham, the Executive Manager for Client Support at Enlighten who works in the Partnering Team to ensure our clients maximise their benefits from utilising our Operational Excellence software and following the Single Source of Truth methodology.

Learn more
Jeremy Birt
Jeremy Birt interview

5 minutes with Jeremy Birt – A roadmap to a healthier future

We speak to Jeremy Birt, CEO at CX Ops Design, a strategic partner at Enlighten that works help us unlock and manage the business potential of our clients. CX Ops Design uses a unique operational approach and market leading technology to drive improvements with tailored customer experiences.

Learn more
About Us - Helen Mackay
Helen Mackay interview

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 this crisis. The conversations revolved around their greatest challenges and their outlook for “the new beginning” post crisis.

Learn more

Get ahead with the right partner

Explore how Enlighten can help you manage your crisis response and get ready for the future with a free consultation. Contact us now to book in a virtual coffee chat with one of our leadership team and find out how to build your business agility.

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How Enlighten will enhance your Business Continuity Plan

Problem Statement/Hypothesis: Your entire workforce has to work remotely from tomorrow.

How would you manage through an overnight disruption of your business given:

  1. Decreasing off-shore operations to depend on
  2. Increasing mission-critical volumes
  3. Negatively impacted the quality of your output
  4. Reduced productivity with unengaged teams


Enlighten partners with Managers to offer support with their business continuity plans and work side-by-side with teams on how to retain control during a business disruption. Here are the four key areas we are partnering with businesses to manage in the current climate:

SEAMLESS INTEGRATION

Undertaking business continuity planning is complex. Organisations need to be able adapt quickly and integrate systems and existing platforms to gain a single view of operations. Enlighten has rapid response teams available for immediate remote implementation to gain this view.

The Enlighten Software® is a cloud-based, comprehensive SaaS operational excellence platform that can be seamlessly integrated with any registry, workflow or peripheral systems. It is fully scalable and will suit various business functions.

Wherever teams are dispersed, on or offshore, home or in the office, Managers need robust visibility into their organisations’ key operational metrics to enable proactive decisions and interventions to be made quickly and stay in control.

VISIBILITY

The shift to remote, decentralised work comes with new challenges and uncertainties. There likely has never been a more critical time to have access to accurate and timely data on operational capacity and workloads. The Enlighten Software® creates one single source of the truth, one common language and consistency throughout the enterprise. At the click of a button, your business will be equipped to understand where capacity exists to undertake business critical activities.

Especially during these disruptive times, Executives can rely on customised dashboards providing insights into the key performance indicators for your business and crucial performance data, whether teams are onshore, offshore, in the office or working remotely. These dashboards will be based on measuring productive outcomes with a balanced scorecard including:

  1. Work in Progress levels in both volume and hours at activity, team and business unit level
  2. Capacity and highlighting the ability to undertake critical activities
  3. Productivity levels of teams and individuals across all locations
  4. Transparency of critical work items and how effectively teams are achieving customer outcomes
  5. Ensuring the quality of work and performance through customisable questionnaires as pulse checks
  6. Customer Satisfaction surveys to ensure customer outcomes are being met
  7. Skills management by activity ensuring the right people perform critical tasks
  8. Knowing where your skill gaps are so you can address training plans
  9. Employee Engagement through checking in with your team
 

FORECASTING & PLANNING

Planning for the unexpected is critical – managing in uncertain times is essential. Organisations must model the effect of changes in business volumes and the availability of staff. Enlighten will support Managers in understanding how to maximise their people’s utilisation in order to:

  1. Increase capacity to focus delivery on critical outcomes
  2. Become proactive to changing SLAs
  3. Prioritise work on hand to elevate pressure of backlog
  4. Load balancing between teams by loaning team members, maximising resource utilisation by moving work where there is capacity regardless of location


Whilst we can’t predict the future, we do bring science in planning on how businesses will react to the changing scenarios.

CONNECTIVITY

Connecting workers and the operational expectations to the work at hand to effectively service customers in unusual circumstances is vital. Creating a virtual operating rhythm using Enlighten’s methodology centred around communication is a key foundation in business continuity. Enlighten enables virtual daily huddles focused around meaningful metrics which facilitate Managers to be proactive, balancing critical tasks to meet customer demand whilst engaging their teams, whether that be face-to-face or working remotely.

Feedback loops supported by objective reporting and an inclusive approach to waste identification and reduction are designed to make employees feel like they’re physically connected. The Enlighten Software® dashboard provides this lens of what has been achieved and what is the right outcome for the customer.

Client Testimony

“Throughout Quarter 1 2020, we have multiple events that have caused disruption to our operations in the Philippines and Australia, including extreme weather and pandemic situations. It has been invaluable to have a global view of all of our offices and manage workloads.The ease of having Enlighten available to our staff has meant, regardless of where they are working from we can keep track of both performance and forecast volumes and make the appropriate decisions accordingly.”

Let's start a conversation

Contact Us
Crisis leadership. Learn more on Enlighten.
5 minutes with Nathan Graham - driving results in a time of crisis
Nathan Graham interview

5 minutes with Nathan Graham - driving results in a time of crisis

We speak to Nathan Graham, the Executive Manager for Client Support at Enlighten who works in the Partnering Team to ensure our clients maximise their benefits from utilising our Operational Excellence software and following the Single Source of Truth methodology.

What was been an interesting outcome of this current crisis?

We’ve observed that data at all leadership levels has been more important than ever. The insights our clients have gotten from our Operational Excellence software has played a large role in helping them manage the crisis swiftly and efficiently, allowing crystal clear pin-point solutions for action across even the highest levels of management.

They’ve been able to shift capacity effectively, redeploy staff and even see a dramatic increase in workloads (fig. 1), with one example in the finance sector achieving a spike in work from an average of 75 hours for a particular team to 747 hours – a nearly 1000% increase within this period.

Fig. 1 Clients are seeing similar patterns of greatly increasing capacity

How does the Single Source of Truth ideology enable these results?

It’s allowed our clients to very quickly understand what are the meaningful metrics for this period and then take the data to look internally for the skills and tools they need. This means they’ve been able to learn from this experience in a way that’s going to help when we shift back to a more traditional form of working, having uncovered opportunities that may not have been as obvious before.

Our clients are moving through the phases of crisis management really quickly and there’s definitely a sense of readying for a return to business as usual. Initially, it was about exercising their business continuity plans and focusing on critical activities but they were able to transition rapidly into the second phase and look at identifying and upskilling staff and now, the data shows that for most cases, we’re well into the third phase where clients are stabilising the newly expanded workforce and delving into performance and quality metrics.

What are some critical lessons from this period?

We’re hearing from our clients that having been able to explore in-depth the impact of the new working model, this increased workplace flexibility is here to stay in many industries. Business metrics have become more targeted rather than overcomplicated and a lot of senior leadership has become more involved in operational management, giving them better context for high-level decisions.

Following the crisis, from the feedback we’re getting, I expect to see a period of growth in the use of Enlighten’s Operational Excellence software as clients put a greater emphasis on leveraging the results and having better visibility on true business performance, especially in identifying exactly where capacity has to be allocated (Fig. 2).

Fig 2. Clients are seeing a better spread of resource hours across non-processing activity
Jeremy Birt
Jeremy Birt interview

5 minutes with Jeremy Birt – A roadmap to a healthier future

We speak to Jeremy Birt, CEO at CX Ops Design, a strategic partner at Enlighten that works help us unlock and manage the business potential of our clients. CX Ops Design uses a unique operational approach and market leading technology to drive improvements with tailored customer experiences.

What is the biggest challenge you are anticipating leaders will need to deal with?

As distributed teams become more prevalent, one of the greatest challenges within distributed operations is identifying best practise and then sharing that with the broader organisation. Ensuring business process consistency and maximising business process improvement is difficult enough with teams situated together in one location but adding the complexity of working from home can magnify gaps that companies have in their processes and communications in general. These gaps can be simple to fill but if they’re not addressed quickly, they could lead to losses in productivity.

What are some of the ways leaders can look to mitigate this?

There are three really important things here – communication, data and the right tools and training. As highlighted in Enlighten’s roadmap article, everything starts with outlining the process, breaking it down and getting people onboard. The more connected employees feel with the organisation’s new vision, the better the employee engagement and the happier staff will be once we make the transition. We’ve then got to support that strategy with the access to really strong data. You looked at meaningful metrics in your previous piece and here’s where that really plays a role. Granular operational data will provide visibility on activities and behaviours down to an individual level it and highlight any team variances that may exist. Companies that have one source of performance data ensure data consistency and reliability. And finally, we’ve got to enable the human element with the tools that they need, such as the access to that single source of truth and the training to use it effectively in decision-making at the individual and departmental level. This will help to ensure consistent performance irrespective of the actual location of the team members.

How can leaders engage people in the journey with a productivity management program?

I’ve used the Enlighten Productivity Management in the past with teams that I’ve managed at different organisations to fully understand operational performance at a granular level in large teams, and in each case the team has been able to improve performance by over 20%. The way to get the best from the tool is to share the data you get from the system with your team. You’re showing trust in their capabilities, a need for their unique contribution and a willingness to hear their voice in shaping the future. But this also needs to be managed properly.

Sharing good information is easy, it boosts confidence in the team, builds morale and fuels team performance. Interestingly I’ve also found that sharing poor performance metrics with the team to be almost as effective in improving performance.  It allows collaboration in a way that gives teams the opportunity to own the data and the results, and to workshop and develop ideas on how we can improve performance. A lot of the time, people actually doing the work understand company processes better than anyone and they’re often very well placed to suggest effective performance improvement initiatives to improve output.

About Us - Helen Mackay
Helen Mackay interview

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 this crisis. 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 this crisis. 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 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.