When the pandemic started to spread all over the world, the entire corporate world was forced, all of a sudden, to find a solution to survive, since they weren’t able to gather their employees and managers in the same place. At the time, the remote working phenomenon was still considered one of the upcoming working models for the next decades: in just a few weeks, it received a terrific thrust and became the predominant model. By mid-2020, every enterprise, company and corporation from all over the world has been able to convert its operational structure in a brand new one, based on remote working and new ways to connect people in order to allow them to work together without physically interact with each other.
Since then, many pundits keep on saying that the last – according to some of them, the ultimate – digital transformation has started from it. In other words, it was a specific need, shared by almost every subject in the business world, that generated such a huge change. A new working model entered the scene: the remote one, which wasn’t anymore a mere emergency solution, but an actual protocol with its rules and specificities. Among the most significant ones, we can detect those that you find listed below.
- Flexibility of schedules. An employee is no longer tied to a strict and invariable working time. He can generally manage his schedule according to his will and needs (just think about those parents who have to take their children to school in the morning), being obliged to make himself available only when he has to share his job in a public conversation (for example, a conference call with supervisors and/or office managers).
- Centrality of tasks. As a consequence of this attitude, the productivity of an employee is now measured only through his ability to complete a task within a fixed period, regardless of how he distributes the overall amount of work.
- Reinforcement of interaction between different departments. It may sound like a paradox, but the distance has enhanced the interdisciplinary cooperation, probably as a reaction against the distance itself. In any case, the era of compartmentalized companies seems to be definitely over.
The first consequence of this last achievement was an increasing presence of cross-team collaborations inside a typical company’s workflow. Let’s be clear: it’s nothing new, since a cooperation and a synergy between different departments has always been a goal for every big corporation. The difference is that, while before 2020 it was an extremely hard goal to reach, thanks to the new platforms developed during the remote working’s worldwide spread the cross-team collaboration model has become a pretty usual procedure, widely shared in almost every business reality, from the smallest ones to the big international companies.
The fundamental principle of the cross-team collaboration pattern is the valorization of every single department’s specificity, so that anyone can perform his work at his best. This strategy leads automatically to a spontaneous optimization of human resources, since everyone is called to perform a task that falls perfectly within his competence. Basically, this hyper-integration between different skills is the weapon that the business world has chosen to fight the global economic crisis subsequent to the pandemic; through it, many companies have managed to overcome the crisis’ most acute phase, finding a new stability and opening themselves to the upcoming “economy 3.0”. An economic pattern where human resources and technological innovation are able to find a perfect balance.
And since this strategy has already proven to be actually effective, the combined effect of remote working and cross-team collaboration can be defined the new frontier of enterprise. Or, at least, the best way to maximize the profits through a thorough workflow optimization.
