Productivity in Uncertain Times through the Elastic Digital Workplace

How to Manage Now

With COVID-19, the time to act is now. Deferred decisions and delayed actions have immediate and longer-term business continuity impacts. To minimize business disruption and protect employees, organizations must take steps now – starting within the next 24 hours – to start creating an Elastic Digital Workplace. Accenture’s Elastic Digital Workplace solution enables a highly extendable workplace environment that allows you to quickly scale and dynamically adapt to changing business needs based on global and local conditions.

• Within 24 hours – Assess your current state:
  Analyze your current technology capabilities and your ability to scale out internally, including your current communications plan and support structure.
  
  
• Within 72 hours – Identify how you can leverage existing technologies more effectively
  
  
  
• Within 5 days – Develop a leadership and culture awareness and change plan:
  Design a change management plan, including leadership communications that encourage employees to adopt key technologies that will facilitate connections to their team members and leaders in this new environment, internal meetings and even large-scale external events.
  
  
• Within 2 weeks – Rapidly modernize and scale your collaboration capabilities as well as your workforce engagement plans:
  Identify how to expand your workplace to the periphery, including a focus on home networking, broader networking, security, upgrading other tools and capabilities and helping your people learn and embrace new ways of working with each other.
  
  

What’s on the Horizon

While COVID-19 is the catalyst for an immediate implementation of an Elastic Digital Workplace, we anticipate that the crisis will fundamentally alter how we work and engage. Leaders should develop a comprehensive Elastic Digital Workplace implementation plan, focusing on 6 key dimensions.