Case Study – Office interactions in the shadow of COVID
Interim managers are facing many different challenges through the course of their work. One of the biggest amongst them is that clients expect an almost immediate result as soon as an assignment starts.
The restrictions and economic impacts caused by COVID-19 pandemic are amplifying these kinds of challenges.
As soon as the work starts at a client site we get to know the new colleagues quickly and reach a common ground in a short time. If an interim manager can fit in the team quickly she would receive a lot of information which can be crucial for a swift start in a certain area.
This is always an exciting phase of a project since we meet new people in a new environment while identifying new processes and tasks. We spend a lot of time together therefore the personal touch is really important in this phase. An interim manager can be efficient only if she is able to imagine herself in the situation and daily work of the future colleagues.
Due to the current restrictions the office life ceased to exist. All the clients have transformed to full-time home-office operation and every process has been moved to an online substitute. In the virtual space the previously mentioned events are not occuring anymore and the personal touch is missing. Consequently we cannot get information quickly and we cannot see the employees in their “natural” work environment in the office.
One would say these are negligible details but these tiny information bits are important building blocks of the project fulfillment. Naturally the main factors are knowledge and experience, however the human side of the interim manager and the project team is significant as well and their dynamics will be the essence of the success. In the online collaboration these fine details are not coming through.
Last spring we faced the first quarantine period with a team of 22. At that time we had a year-end closing (IFRS and HU GAAP), financial audit, internal audit and a self-revision project with billions of HUF at stake. These events would be a huge burden for a team even one by one but we have successfully closed them all on time without any flaws. It was clear from the start that the team will be able to handle the tasks online since an interim leader must know all of the team members and their capabilities as well. However most of this knowledge came from the office time spent together and worked as a team present in the same office.
After the mentioned assignment successfully closed the following project started already in the online space from the beginning. Even though the team is significantly smaller in size there is only one team member with personal acquaintance. The daily operation is carried out online and even the video is turned off for the sake of the connection quality (technically speaking).
Since client expectations did not change in terms of the project delivery timespan our biggest challenge is to adapt to the online processes, slower information flow and find substitute resources to informal information channels which were easily accessible in the office through personal interaction.
New challenges always require new perspective but open new opportunities as well. Being an interim manager means that adaptation is our core ability so we are looking forward what the new era holds for us.
