About the author
The challenges and solutions to maintaining team effectiveness in a remote work mode
How long have you been working from home as you read this article? Good chances are, for at least two, maybe three weeks now. Everyone is doing their best to keep “business as usual”, all while being distracted, anxious and maybe confused. And once this is all over, experts firmly believe many workers will continue working from home.
So, the challenge for businesses seems to be here to stay. This is not very surprising as remote working is already high on the list of non-insurance benefits for workers in the US. Now we are witnessing the test run, and surely after the pandemic is over, a portion of work force will remain in a home office mode.
Working from home, apart from clear benefits, does come with a set of challenges, both psychological and infrastructural. While it is quite obvious that the customer front must be digitalized and aligned to reduce friction in the situation with no physical contact, internal processes also have to undergo significant changes to a new model.
How to ensure that a bank operates as a single team remotely?
Let’s take, for example, your average work day. There are targets to be met, things to get done.
The most common situation is sifting through endless new emails and writing several lists on papers. Then checking different apps trying to connect all the dots from several sources, hoping nothing will fall through the cracks. And then – documents…you cannot send them around as usual, or just pop into someone’s office to ask a question or resolve an issue. Several tasks are piling up, customers are getting nervous. Bottlenecks become apparent, and you are bombed with all kinds of questions.
Using digital solutions to adapt internal processes for distant working can help a great deal. The right solution is the one that checks the most important “remote work boxes”:
- Each team has transparent task lists, with defined priorities and progress indicators
- Processes can be changed remotely in the system by authorized advanced users, allowing different process flows, approvals, etc.
- The system can help detect bottlenecks and reciprocal activities between different roles in processes as a result of the new circumstances, and exposes instruments so those can be fixed
- Products and bundles can be defined remotely responding quickly to changed demand and customer needs, including the channels on which they will be available, pricing options and customers segments
- Team members can get reassigned through the system optimizing utilization of employees, as some roles become less burdened with tasks in the remote mode, while others suddenly become understaffed
- Re-training is easy – all processes use the same application, with the same logic and user experience, so there is no need to learn new software
And ideally, this would be the same solution that also handles digital interactions with customers – a sort of a one-to-rule-them-all, such as Digital Origination by Asseco.
Two faces of digitalization
Digital Origination by Asseco enables automation and digitalization of sales and onboarding processes for banks, providing fully digital customer interactions. This is the tip of the iceberg that everyone is aware of. Working with banks for many years, we have identified an equally important challenge of connecting the outbound channels with the processes that happen inside, or so to speak, “under the hood”. When the two sides of digitalization are blended and available in the same system, which is what Asseco SEE offers within Digital Origination, your processes can truly become digital and your efforts effective in the minimum amount of time, with deployment possible on premise and in Cloud.
Digital Origination can help banks improve in key factors of internal effectiveness – task lists with priorities and dashboards, roles management, reassigning and changing the processes and decision levels for quick decision making, all from the same interface.
Applying this new process digitalization, banks can improve the time-to-market, time-to-yes and time-to-cash indicators even above the usual standards, while simultaneously removing friction inside.
Choosing this solution is an investment in the platform that can withstand the test of time well beyond the current crisis and enable a strategic advantage and agility. Also, it will make your customers and employees happy as it provides them with the frictionless user experience they expect in the digital era.
Asseco SEE is a trusted partner of key financial institutions in the region, with almost 30 years of experience. We are highly skilled in digital solutions for banks, and have many vital solutions for digital banking at hand – make the best of it and send us your questions or schedule a free consulting call with us.
