Category: Blog

Part 2: Utilizing Lockdown Solitude for Upskilling

In our previous blog, we have tried to shed some light on what remote working feels like and question if it is promoting loneliness amongst the workers or not. Debatable as it is, but being alone does not necessarily mean that you are lonely.

It is not okay to blend the ideas of loneliness and solitude. When asked to pick from the two, irrespective of whatever you chose, the present scenario will not permit you to go out in the open, so remote working is the only recourse.

So, why not make this work from home all about solitude and start picking up skills that a post-COVID business world will demand?

Like every new venture needs extensive research and study before its commencement, this upskilling that we are talking about is no different. So, knowing which skills are burgeoning their demands and which are shrinking in the present market are indeed important.

5 skills that are gaining momentum –

• Managing Strategy and Innovation
• Managing Tools and Technology
• Interpersonal Skills
• Learning/Motivation/Leadership
• Knowledge of Tech/Product Design/Production

5 skills that are losing vitality –

• Managing Administrative Activities
• Managing the Task Environment
• Operations Skills
• Knowledge of Media Communications/Delivery
• Knowledge of Human Behavior/Society

Upskilling is a pressing priority.

Upskilling alone holds the ability to push you ahead in your game. The fast-approaching business world will demand entrepreneurial skills from every professional, so that lay-offs are avoided, and they become more reliable and competitive.

Technologies, namely Artificial Intelligence (AI), Data Science, Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Virtual Reality (VR) and, Edge Computing, are in high demand today. And this demand is only about to increase in the post-COVID world. Upskilling will be a great help to professionals then. It will accentuate them with resilience and agility, the two most important needs of a fiercely competitive tomorrow.

Instead of perceiving the coronavirus-induced work from home as loneliness, the solitude of remote working should be utilized to polish your proficiencies further, and what better than online learning in this regard? The inability to do so will prove to be seriously detrimental to your career.

One advantage here is that the providers of online learning are well-equipped with various capabilities and resources to predict business demands and mold their programs accordingly.

So, in preparing yourself for the post-COVID era working, upskilling is the first requirement. Now, which new skill should you take up will rely on your job requirements and your self-awareness and research too.

Wait no more and take up a new professional skill ASAP, in case you still have not. And if you have already taken up one or more, then utilize this lockdown and hone yourself to be the winner in your genre(s)!

Part 1: Understanding Remote Jobs, Loneliness,and Solitude

Though loneliness and solitude appear similar to us, they are not quite the same. ‘Loneliness’ has a negative connotation attached to it, but ‘solitude’ is the state of being alone and yet not lonely. Global consulting firm Korn Ferry conducted a survey in June this year among working professionals regarding various aspects of working from home and returning back to the office. As per the survey findings, 50% of the participants (among 1044 professionals) are looking forward to “camaraderie with colleagues” once they are back in the office.

Remote working is fine if it is opted for by choice but being forced to work from home is altogether a different ballgame. With the pandemic curtailing social interactions entirely, the extrovert working professionals are feeling lonely. For people who love to work around great colleagues, the concept of work-from-home is difficult, says Gianpiero Petriglieri, Associate Professor at INSEAD, in his article, “In Praise of the Office.”

But, there is always a second side to every coin. Not everyone is feeling this ‘loneliness’. There are professionals who feel miserable and invisible on the work floor. These introverts have happily accepted remote working without a second thought. For them, this new normal has also been helpful in escaping the ‘crowd’ and enjoying their work in solitary confinement.

Deloitte has revealed in a survey that 55% of employees have not witnessed any change in work productivity due to lockdown and remote working. In fact, a California-based company has been successful in tracking a 47% rise in productivity amid this pandemic-borne work from home.

One much-needed reminder here is that being alone does not necessarily mean that you have to be lonely. On the one hand, where you may have missed the work-breaks and coffee sessions with your coworkers, similarly, on the other hand, some others have gained lots. The future of working from home has brought us up close and personal with their kids, parents, plants, pets, favorite corner of the house, in short, their personal lives.

So, is the post-COVID era of working blending the ideas and emotions of being lonely and enjoying solitude? Or would there be an option to choose from the two? Which one would you prefer?

The initial COVID-19 house arrest had been stretched way longer than we had initially expected. Hence, nothing looks more exciting than getting back to our much-missed workplaces now that the nation is unlocking itself. But, amid all this excitement, it is vital to note that the front desk or the reception area is going to show up as our first touchpoints and the obvious transmitters of the coronavirus.

So, without wasting a single more minute, the organizations need to do –

1. To cut down on the reception crowd
2. To deploy a no-touch visitor management solution

And NexAEI VisMate fits this requirement frame perfectly. It will help in the creation of a smart and futuristic workplace that is safe for all its visitors. So, we can consider it to be the ‘need’ of the new normal.

Time to dump your age-old traditional visitor management practices and welcome India’s very own & the world’s first-ever 100% free and touchless visitor management solution onboard, so that you can experience –

• Self-registration from visitor’s mobile
• Verified visitor KYC
• Pre-scheduled meetings
• Digital visitor card

Besides the touchless technology, security is another vital facet in such disruptive times. Keeping a vigilant eye on every visitor has been an obligation from time immemorial. With an apt visitor management solution, you will be able to keep a record of each visitor, safeguard your employees from undesirable/unapproved guests and thereby manage the floor traffic.

Organizations are leaving no stone unturned in deploying a one-for-all solution and take every possible measure to check the spread of COVID-19 from the office premises. It is vital that each visitor stepping in the office post this lockdown feels completely safe and is gifted with a premium experience.

It is about time we act more responsibly than we ever had and pick VisMate for effective visitor management in this new normal, or else we will be risking the wellbeing of innumerable office entrants. We cannot afford to commit such a grave error, can we?

Long gone are the days when you used to keep a visitor logbook on your reception desk and had to ask every visitor to fill in their credentials both during their check-in and check-out. Today is all about futuristic solutions, the ones that will make front office operations more convenient, businesses more secure, and above all, promote a COVID-ready touchless workplace.

Our way back to the office building after a prolonged work from home is not going to be an easy one, but the challenge was to do away with that ‘difficulty’. Providing contactless solutions, maintaining social distancing on the work floor, and adhering to WHO’s global workplace are the primary focus points.

And we, at NexAEI, came up with a solution that ticked off each of these requirements, a futuristic solution and just a perfect component for making a COVID-ready workplace. It accentuated our workplace with three major offerings:

Self-registration from visitors’ mobiles and thereby negate any form of touch at the front desk for checking in.

Verified visitor KYC so that visitor details as well as their health records can be documented and stored for an extra layer of security compliance.

Pre-inviting guests to do away with uninvited visitors and reduce chances of crowding at the reception with easy check-ins.

Our premium touchless solution proved to be in perfect sync with the ‘no-touch’ regulation of today’s quintessential COVID-ready workplace. We had been successful in doing away with ‘touch’ at our reception. Else, the reception desk or kiosk would have been the first and obvious point of virus transmission.

To summarize, it’s about time that you transform your traditional front office into a premium, futuristic reception as a modern-day crisis like today’s needs an advanced solution. And NexAEI VisMate Free Edition is that much-needed solution that can wipe off all your worries attached to employee safety in this new normal without leaving a single dent in the business operations. Click here to know all about us.

The new normal brought about by the coronavirus is an ever-changing place to be. Two vital things about this new normal are rising virtual interactions and plummeting tête-à-tête ones. Adding to these is the need for industry leaders to deliver sustainable and efficient results. As rightly said by Henry Ford, “If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself”; the relevance of collaboration herein becomes vital like never before.

Collaboration is essential because the business environment is dynamic.

Our tech-savvy generation today is heavily exposed to various kinds of content on our handheld devices. So, it becomes imperative to roll out collaborative solutions. The high-end virtual collaborations keep us active and engaged.

The times that we are in today demands us to be agile, to learn communicating remotely, make and manage remote connections, unlearn the older tactics, and commit to collaboration for a brighter future. Effective collaboration amid people with different skillsets brings innovation and agility to the table.

Even though there appears a constant fluctuation in the business environment, work culture, and engagement intensity, the importance of collaboration never got lost, not even for a day. Collaboration is said to enhance the work culture as it is a vital part of the social and professional lives of an individual. It is just that collaborators need to change their collaboration intensity and modes from time to time to fit in the business rightly.

Collaboration calls for balance, empathy, and faith

HR leaders are calling the present times to be highly crucial, and they are continuously contemplating as to what more to attempt so that the work culture becomes more inviting. The present self-isolation days are all about treating our people with empathy and see them as humans.

As the coronavirus hit us without any prior intimation, all of us and our workplaces had lost their day-to-day balance and couldn’t even come up with a change management plan very quickly. But, organizations that already had a highly collaborative culture in place could adjust to the present situation well, whereas the others struggled a lot. Some are still struggling to keep up with this ever-changing new normal.

On a lighter note, if an organization is not able to trust its employees, it cannot win a fight. Successful collaboration stands on the pillars of trust. Hence, faith between two employees as well as an employee and a leader is obligatory.

To rebuild themselves, organizations will have to reorganize their priorities and adopt the new ways of this new normal, a new normal that speaks the language of COLLABORATION!

“Agile, done well, enables vigorous innovation without sacrificing the efficiency and reliability essential to traditional operations.”

– Sarah Elk, co-author of Doing Agile Right

If we attempt to prepare a list of all the factors that are responsible for the success of an initiative or project, agility will undoubtedly top the list. It is a major contributing factor in a successful project, so much so that it is placed even before a project approach. In short, the more the agility, the better the result, and when we say better results, we mean better financial results, enhanced project metrics, improved customer satisfaction, superior strategy execution, and so on.

Agility means flexibility in thoughts and actions. Organizational leaders or the decision-makers are responsible for gauging their customer needs and demands, get into rigorous market research and then go ahead with change implementation in the nick of time. What is essential in this entire process is an undivided focus on effective iteration, unambiguous interaction, and fruitful collaboration. Agility plays the most vital role herein as the process involves effortless switching between priorities with an ever-changing market. Businesses cannot afford to stick with one scheme for years as it loses its viability with time.

To ensure that you are doing agile right, all you need to do is take the following steps –

Focus more on systematic agility instead of periodical agility

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations were known to be periodically agile, whereas now the business scenario has undergone a complete turn of events in the presence of this pandemic. Organizations need to breakdown, have unambiguous missions and visions, bring all their resources into the line accordingly, modify the working models, and likewise to ensure that it continues delivering systematic agility.

Maintain a perfect balance of principles and practices

Agility encompasses both speed and direction along with methodologies. To do agile right, an organization needs to use its agile practices in various innovative ways but in collaboration with its teams, business models, leadership ideologies as well as the organizational culture and values too.

Bring innovation and growth to the table

Most of the companies had not done justice to their agile implementations to date. It is vital to make work satisfying for all the employees, and so rigorous testing is required before implementing every approach. Besides, the right technology needs to be used in the right way too. By doing agile right, organizations can spike up their productivities to an extra 40%.

Outline the agile aspiration for your organization

Today the adoption rate of agile is being driven by change and the demand for its momentum. A whole lot of strategizing and advocacy goes into deciding the extent of agility one needs for an organization without disrupting anything. So, it is vital that an organization really commits to it and outline it well. As rightly said, agile is not just about the destination, but the journey itself. If you have faith in your agility and you are doing it right, then this fast-changing business world is almost a cakewalk for you.

All you need to do is pivot fast and align yourself with strategic primacies. Valuing speed will lead you to relevance and being relevant and dynamic is all that a business needs today.

To know more about agility challenges and how our cloud-based mobile application can help your business, please take a look at our offerings by visiting www.nexaei.com .

Imagine how smooth could your journey be had you been able to predict all or at least most of your roadblocks ahead of time? So, you could prepare for it and had your handbook ready for action anytime!

Predictive monitoring is one such magic for your business. It is one application of process mining that is transforming industries today. It has gone a step ahead to prove itself to be one of the most vital concepts surrounding which entire businesses are being built these days. To be able to know beyond the present day is a boon if you know how to utilize it effectively.

So, let us probe a little deep into what can really be predicted by this approach and how exactly it can coexist within the existing organizational structures.

Monitoring

Predictive monitoring takes the companies one step ahead of its time by monitoring how their data points behave and thereby analyzing the same over a certain period via remote asset monitoring. Doing so helps in predicting and deciding the successive big step, and here comes the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Whenever any changing pattern is noticed in the data behavior, this monitoring system alerts the business right away. It comes up with an action to be taken by analyzing the same data.

Maintenance

In contrast to predictive monitoring, predictive maintenance is all about consuming specific algorithms and data for giving out the best time for carrying out any sort of obligatory maintenance works.

When used in the manufacturing industry, predictive maintenance takes up past performance data together with present maintenance regularity. With all these accumulated data, predictive maintenance disapproves of sticking to the preset schedules only; instead, it helps the organizations to drive better control over its maintenance works. It again helps an organization in making better decisions and thereby reduces its costs too.

How do predictive monitoring and maintenance benefit your organization?

Predictive monitoring is meant to identify the occurrence of an event before it has occurred. Some human expertise, as well as Artificial Intelligence, comes into action to yield a barrage of insights. It’s just that the system needs to be trained well for every likely scenario. Even if it fails to prevent a downtime once, it’s the same approach that accelerates uptime too.

IT leaders are in a mode of constant learning about predictive monitoring and how it can bring value to the businesses. Its rate of acceptance has been rising rapidly, as data continues to rule over most of the futuristic models of business. It goes way beyond the traditional network monitoring and use of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) architectures, and it is doing a fantastic job in delivering reliability and preparedness.

Key Takeaways –

1. Discloses system downtime to the organization before its occurrence
2. Tracks the real-time system or application health
3. Identifies the grounds for an all-inclusive performance of a system

As data and insights continue to dictate futuristic business models, it is now the right time for you to introduce predictive analytics into your business processes.

Happy working!

As computational verdicts are rising above the human ones, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is gaining precedence in day-to-day organizational operations. AI not just solves a ton of issues faced by companies daily, it gives birth to new challenges too. One such problem is the growing anxiety of humans regarding the fairness of decisions based on AI.

A pertinent question in this context – can an AI-led automated decision-making process be completely unbiased?

That algorithms operate on the provided data to calculate optimal models is the core of the problem. Instead of rectifying a problem, they are known to replicate it. So, the companies need to convince their users that on the successful implementation of AI, the fairness will not be compromised.

To prove the fairness of AI in terms of decision-making, let us take you through some never-before discussed pointers –

Cooperation

Fruitful cooperation of AI and human brains is known to make AI-backed moves fair and free from any bias. Humans are less rational when pitched against machines, and they turn blind towards their misbehaviors, but research proves that humans are generally less biased while judging others. So, for AI to be fair, fruitful cooperation of the two is ideal. It is just that the managers need to be more ethical and intuitive.

Accountability

That AI is fair or not can majorly be decided by the organization that has adopted it because it’s the organization that is accountable for the results generated by the same. So, the judgment of fairness should not be given only by the technicalities of the said algorithms. Mostly there remains a gap between the creation of the data scientists and the desired outcomes of the leaders. So, these two need to work in sync to find out the organizational values that cannot be given up in the name of algorithm utilization.

Negotiation

Algorithms are more accurate than human judgment, any day. But, tasks like rational workflow management are not similar to constructing a humane company. If AI is supposed to promote a work atmosphere that is more humane and less mechanic, then optimizing utility helps in the promotion of learning and improvement in humans. A negotiation mindset is, therefore, required for designing a fair AI model so that an effective negotiation can take place between humanity and utility.

So, to guarantee fair decision-making with the assistance of AI, organizations need to invest in building a work culture in which fairness and credibility are the key components. And only through this can we introduce fairness in human thought and machine computation!

Investor Adam Sweidan coined the name “black elephant” for the COVID-19 pandemic by gluing ‘black swan’ and ‘elephant in the room’ together. As early as in January this year, the Global Risks Report of the World Economic Forum had pointed towards potential threats from the infectious disease; none of the organizations worldwide did take it seriously enough. So, apt is the name ‘black elephant’ as no one wanted to address this evident approaching disaster.

Previously companies could let go of threats like cyberattacks, climatic disasters, and so on as regional issues. On the contrary, today the markets are so closely interconnected, locally as well as globally, that a disturbance in one place travels to another very quickly.

Companies today need to have resilience built into their systems so that whenever it faces a black elephant like for instance, Covid-19, they have their playbooks ready. So, here’s to take you through a brief yet vital guide for chalking out plans to enhance your resilience so that tackling all of the future black elephants become a bit easier!

Evolved leadership for evolved resilience

Proactive and creative contemplation for the future should exist among the board’s topmost priorities. Only then can an organization be ready for facing black elephants. Industry leaders should operate with utmost commitment towards some unblurred values, encourage robust and fruitful collaboration, make quick and critical decisions (as and when mandatory) and embrace a holistic perspective. Leaders need to embody curiosity to look beyond every obstacle and grasp possibilities. Resting on laurels will bring no luck.

Better governance for better resilience

The boards are capable of pushing towards better resilient efforts by fortifying the organizational defenses. Taking lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, companies need to in the supply chains as well for bringing down the disruptions. Besides, promoting remote work and backing it with robust tech support and retraining programs for upskilling the employees lead the companies towards better resilience too.

So, it goes without saying that ‘resilience’ is the key, and trust us when we say that it is not built in a day! Soon today’s pandemic-borne crisis will be treated as a jump-off point for tomorrow’s black elephant! So, it is time for you to gear up with the best solutions and be one step ahead in the game of resilience!

Happy working!

Would you like to keep investing in an employee whom you can never utilize for the organization’s benefit? Or would you like to invest in one able and efficient professional whom you can call in for help whenever you feel the demand?

Under normal circumstances, even if we could afford to have resources on the bench, in a disruptive world like today’s, such a thing is unthinkable. Here arrives the savior of the situation, the TaaS, or the Talent-as-a-Service model. As the name very well demonstrates, TaaS is all about organizations utilizing highly skilled, talented professionals on project-wise demand via a cloud-based platform. Other than anything, adopting a TaaS model leads an organization towards cost-cutting and efficiency enrichment.

For so long, we have seen the startups working with the TaaS model more than any other organization, but today even the MNCs are highly into it. Whatever innovative plans and ideas you think of executing, this model delivers the fastest. This way, the company fund also finds its best value and utilization.

The model in question is known to engage the right talents in fitting projects and make way for learning, but at the same time, it does not snatch away from the professionals their control over their endeavors and time. TaaS builds a collaborative workforce, where both the organization as well as the talent can work compliantly.

Over the last six months of the pandemic, it is not the recruitment process, but the priorities of the organizations and the related strategies have changed. While many have halted their recruitments, some others are only interested in grasping the brightest talents. The situation is unsteady and utterly risky today, and TaaS utilization proves to be the best strategy for a sound business.

As far as the talented professionals are concerned, the ones working as a part of the TaaS model find it working out just fine for them because –

1. they can do more meaningful work in a lesser stressful ambiance
2. get great exposure and learning opportunities from all the organizations they work with
3. have a flexible work schedule
4. can work from any location (which is the real need of the hour)

The ongoing pandemic has fundamentally transformed the entire work milieu. This transformation is and will be a one-of-a-kind experience. Amid every uncertainty floating presently, the only aim in the economic realm is to keep the businesses pertinent and competitive. For talented professionals, it has never been a better phase to work satisfactorily on their terms, utilize their skillsets, make money, and gain pools of experience.