For Nigel Waters, Customer Business Executive, APAC, Amdocs, many people have been forced to work from home because of quarantines, lockdowns, and self-imposed isolation. This has accelerated an office experiment that was just beginning to gain traction before COVID-19 struck.
“The virus broke some cultural and technological barriers that previously prevented people from working remotely, causing a structural shift where people are working. To some extent, the ability to work remotely is determined by the combination of activities performed in each profession and by the physical, spatial, and interpersonal context in which those activities take place,” he said.
This is why Amdocs has worked with a wide range of customers and partners to document best practices and is continuously sharing the business continuity learnings to back the organizations in the new normal.
“We helped some organizations move their customer functions (like call centers) into their home for front-line customer care agents. As a result of the recent collaboration between Amdocs and AWS, communications service providers (CSPs) now have the ability to provide remote working capabilities to contact center agents via cloud solutions that utilize Amdocs technologies and Amazon Cloud Connect capabilities. With our Contact Center-as-a-Service Business, CSPs can now provide their contact center agents with a work from home option.”
Waters gave three tips on how companies should deal with newer challenges.
For one, “to develop a conducive hybrid work culture, organizations need to develop a post-pandemic business continuity plan putting people first. This would also require them to reimagining employee engagement and experience policies in the virtual environment, such as virtual team catch-ups, reskilling/upskilling opportunities, offering online courses and trainings that are flexible and can be of the employee’s choice, amongst others,” he said.
Secondly, “leaders need to be proactive in bringing the teams together periodically and aligning them to common goals. This would help in keeping a connection and a sense of belonging, by communicating clear-cut cultural values.”
And lastly, “establishing effective communication and collaboration tools for remote setups can go a long way in addressing this challenge.”
