Work will never be the same: visibility is king

By James Murray, Managing Director, EMEA

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How is your team really coping? Can you spot the signs of distress on Zoom? Is this volume of virtual meetings sustainable? In Workfront’s 2020 State of Work research people reported doing 40% of what they were employed to do. Will that statistic worsen as visibility diminishes across the functional silos that are now also remote? 

This pandemic is putting the spotlight on visibility. We need to do more with less. We need to make decisions quickly on trade-offs and priorities. We need to be effective at seeing what is working and what is not. Excellence at allocating resources across the entire enterprise will enable us to move from surviving to thriving as we emerge from this crisis.

Keeping our teams busy right now could be vital to mental health, but busy doing what exactly? How do you ensure they are connected to a plan that flexes day-by-day, hour-by-hour?

Some people in our teams will be struggling in a chaotic home environment; others experiencing isolation. With less distraction I feel more productive, but does my company need me to do what I am doing right now? Would my time be better allocated to other activities? 

Doing my best work gives me a sense of purpose—a cornerstone of my wellbeing. Despite my best intentions, can I truly be doing my best work if I don’t know which aspect of my work contributes most to the team? I am engaged, which is good, but am I engaged in the right work? 

Succeeding at work—company-wide—isn’t just about where we work, but how. Doing great work—at scale—is a much broader challenge. To do great work, the right work, deep work, we need to work in teams following a process that requires context, access to information across functional silos, and intense collaboration. 

While we might replace the serendipity of bumping into each other in the office with Zoom and Slack, not all processes are easily moved to a home environment. The last thing we want to do is take our fragmented silos home with us, creating thousands of mini silos in the process. Communication can happen without work taking place. Of course communication is a necessary part of getting work done, but it's only one part. Tools like Slack and Zoom really come into their own once we have visibility into all the work being done throughout the entire company. Discussions will be more meaningful and we can make decisions about work priorities, issues, and progress. 

To do great work, we need to do more than just enable virtual working, we need to connect and unite every fact of work—people, data, processes, etc.—flowing through the entire company. To do great work, we need a work management solution designed for our times. You stand at a crossroads in the evolution of work—which path will you choose?