Forging An Antifragile Company Post-Pandemic

A CEO’s toolset

In the post-Covid-19 era, companies are looking for ways to reconfigure their operations and meet radically changed demands for products and services. Leadership, organization, culture, and work itself need to adjust to a new reality as businesses around the world have officially adopted remote and hybrid work, especially those in industries related to new technologies.

The challenges that have been presented are far from few, but companies are continuing to adapt to changing environments, teams and communication styles—and some have even improved their cultures and increased revenue. A solid toolset that includes radical transparency, psychological safety, and Agile-based frameworks like Scrum or Kanban, helps to make a company antifragile and resistant to unexpected changes in a VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) world.

Proper organizational skills are crucial for effective remote working and while working at home has advantages for some, for others, it’s more challenging. Adopting the right tools, processes and metrics for hybrid and remote work is key to measuring success in the midst of transition. Long-term and short-term activities can be monitored with platforms like Jira, Asana, or Slack, where both clients and team members alike can track progress. These tools translate organizational strategy into realistic results and offer value to clients, while also allowing employees to focus on their work, rather than using valuable time to solve technical issues.

It is important for these goals to value products over projects. Software is just a means used to create products that have a purpose, provide value to users, and benefit companies. Products have their own strategy beyond just building an app, and by adapting to Agile, building products becomes a more flexible process. In addition to flexibility, Agile adds value for users by prioritizing individuals over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, collaboration over negotiation, and responding to change rather than following a strict plan.

Companies that implement an Agile-based approach are usually more resistant to various unforeseen challenges, like the Covid-19 crisis. Readiness to change is at the very core of the Agile mindset, allowing teams to deliver products quickly in small “iterations” so that it’s possible to change development plans at any given moment and adapt it to the new conditions. By putting emphasis on user testing during the development process, companies create products that will consist of features demanded by users, not by business stakeholders.

Though Agile supports consistent communication and feedback throughout the development process, switching to a dispersed work-from-home model can often put teams under stress: communication suffers and previous levels of information-sharing aren’t enough in a remote and volatile business environment. The result is declining efficiency, and transparency and psychological safety can oftentimes be the solution.

By embracing radical transparency, employees are empowered to make better decisions. Allowing employees access to all company data and information builds trust, loyalty, engagement and a wider cultural thread of open and honest communication that runs through the whole business: thinking, decision-making and action.

Prioritizing psychological safety in your work culture allows for employees to use failures as lessons to learn and improve from. In a team with high levels of psychological safety, members are more eager to make meaningful and effective decisions. This is extremely important during uncertain and risky times, like the current pandemic. If the team feels safe, they’re not afraid to make bold decisions and in case of mistakes, they’re not blocked from moving forward and improving their decision-making.

Generating this sense of security is more difficult in a dispersed working environment—communication is inevitably more difficult, with fewer casual interactions and if the above best practices aren’t implemented, the focus is likely to be on objectives, goals, instructions, course corrections and so on, with little time left to devote to people and relationships. And yet, the further apart team members are, the more valuable and significant those relationships are, especially in terms of impact on results.

Remote working and dispersed teams are already an established feature of the new normal. Whether it’s your own internal team or agency help you’ve brought in from outside, your goal remains the same pandemic or no pandemic: a high-quality product-focused on both user and business needs. For that, you need great teamwork and experience tells us that in a post-Covid world, the above practices will help you forge a team that delivers results.