Sectors

Technology organisations often have a very connected workforce, strong culture and are leaders in employee experience. It will be interesting to see how easily the culture can be maintained if collegiate offices with free gyms, free coffee and an army of chefs doesn’t cut-it in a post Covid world.

We have seen uber-fast growth lead to confusing and overlapping organisation designs meaning productivity suffers.  We would also like to see technology companies take a more pioneering approach to People Strategies. Who will be first to offer a 4-day week as a standard working option?

Digital advancement, automation, remote monitoring, smart-metering are revolutionising this sector. The challenge is for People Strategies and policy to keep up. Traditional cultures and long tenure workforces need to adapt, and quickly. The large opportunities here are for significant restructures, cost reduction, big moves into flexible working and a revolution in workforce planning – with new skillsets and new labour sourcing models. The opportunities are big. The leadership required to design and build the operating model and culture changes are even bigger.

This sector is in a perennial state of flux and must become adept at building flexible ways of working into organisational DNA. Recent years have seen interest in building more adaptable organisations – networks of multi-skilled, cross-functional teams. Workforce agility will continue to extend way beyond internal organisational boundaries. The operating model for Consumer Business involves a complex ecosystem of specialists, freelancers and flexible workers. Widespread restructuring and redundancy programmes may be inevitable for some.

On the other hand, the core business of relationship-based sales remains and the basics of cost-leadership, clever adoption of technology and strong operational effectiveness will continue to be important. There is still scope for large scale digital adoption across all roles, processes and customer relationships. Strong leadership, some re-imagination, backed up by a sound core business principles and investment in the right people initiatives will bear fruit.

In short, Consumer Business needs to be expert in leading and managing a wide range of change. 246 Consulting has the experience to help.

This sector, more than any other, has seen the Coronavirus pandemic as a watershed moment for instigating culture change across organisations. We are seeing accelerated digital transformation, re-thinking of workforce strategies and large-scale operating model change across many Government Departments. This transformation activity is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.