Tag: corporate culture

COVID-19 continues to re-define the way we live and work. Over the past few months, organisations have had to re-imagine the way they work and embrace a fundamentally different approach to operating in this ‘new normal’. Remote working at the current scale became a necessity, and for the most part, it has worked.

Almost a year into the global COVID-19 pandemic, most organisations have settled into new, more digital ways of working and collaborating. Even though the crisis is not yet behind us, businesses should seize this chance to evaluate their performance through a new lens – and to reshape themselves into more resilient, flexible and productive organisations.

In 1994, I wrote an article in which I stated that ‘the ‘eggshell issues’ of racial discrimination, bias, prejudice and stereotyping, until now far too sensitive to discuss openly, needed to become the subject of continuous debate at all levels of the organisation.’

It’s been six months since employers sent their teams home and now it’s time to put their companies back together. The forced work from home experiment appears to have been quite successful. Work is getting done, everyone is proficient at online collaboration and video meetings, workplace politics is at an all-time low and teams are less stressed from the daily commute.

Our recently released study takes an in-depth look at the state of innovation in South Africa specifically, however the study indicates that even though the majority of South African companies are expecting to be disrupted by innovations in their industries over the next three years, half of them are not prepared to cope with it.

The human resources (HR) challenge for this new world of work will be that best answers for dealing with these tectonic changes will likely come from employees, and not from an HR or change expert. Remember our mantra here: we’re in uncharted waters. After five months of this pandemic, we hope we’ve all torn up our company policy documents.

COVID-19 creates a moment of truth for corporate culture. Cultural change is essential in this era of pandemics and business transformation. It is the invisible glue that holds the organisational organism together. It is also a large amorphous cloud, which gets its shape from beliefs, norms, values and behaviour.

Prior to the pandemic we were seeing the usual scams impersonating banks, telcos, and shipping companies but now a portion of them have switched to using the pandemic, the World Health Organisation, the American Centers for Disease Control and various international and local charitable organisations as bait.

The world we left behind when we entered lockdown will be very different to the world we walk into after the devastating effects of COVID-19. The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented test of our resilience and demands during these uncertain times that we find ourselves in.

Every family has a culture. That culture is reflected in the way that communication takes place, how they dress, what they eat and the type of humour that resonates for them. Any stranger entering that home for more than a few hours, will need to make it their business to read the environment so that they don’t offend anyone at worse case, or look strange at best.