The Future Belongs to Agile Organizations

The Future Belongs to Agile Organizations

The Importance of Real-time Collaboration

Tags: agile organizations, collaboration, North America, time zones

Record-breaking pace of change

During the pandemic, organizations implemented technology at a record-breaking pace. Microsoft CEO reported that “we’ve seen two years worth of digital transformation in two months”. More than 200 million participants joined Teams in a single day, generating 4 billion meeting minutes.

Today, the pace of change has stabilized, but organizations are taking a strategic approach to technology to accelerate productivity gains. Rethinking involves permanent changes to many dimensions of an organization: the pace it conducts business, the very nature of its value proposition, and the optimal mix of talent capabilities.

Agile organizations are quickly leveraging technology and its adoption by their workforce to create gains in the speed of communication and their responsiveness to consumers.

What makes an organization agile?

McKinsey describes agile organizations like living organisms, with 5 trademarks:

• Strategy – the North Star embodied across the organization
• Structure – a network of empowered teams
• Process – rapid decision and learning cycles
• People – Dynamic people model that ignites passion
• Technology – next-generation enabling technology

Agile organizations are intensely customer-focused. They must quickly adapt to market changes - internally and externally – as well as their evolving customers’ needs.

Agile organizations place a high importance on their collaborators, and empower them to create value for a wide range of stakeholders. They nurture and sustain human networks, aligning them to the North Star. They embrace initiatives, shifting resources (like people, technology and capital) quickly between networks.

Emerging importance of time zones

In today’s world, our old communication tactics are failing us. During the pandemic, chats allowed us to overcome the challenges of distance. And not just in the workforce; consumers also revolutionized their interaction with brands too.

Interaction is in a hyper state. Slack, a 2014 unicorn startup software for business communication, now has over 12 million daily users. Slack claims to reduce emails by 32% and meetings by 27%. Instant communication in the workplace has been shown to inspire a culture of teamwork, collaboration and security, often leading to increased productivity.

Although instant communication is certainly valuable, if it is not collaborative, the value of real-time is sterilized. Productivity gains from technology implementation have driven the pace of business, and that momentum does not seem to be slowing down.

Working collaboratively and simultaneously has its perks. Schedule meetings at a moment’s notice. Get answers to your questions, fast. Socializing between teams feels organic. Employees manage workload balance when colleagues share work hours. Travel relatively easily.

Agile organizations are not constricted to physical location and formalized communication, but leverage technology that impulses collaboration in real-time. Agile teams are specialized, regionalized, scalable and densely networked. They resemble Lego building blocks, regularly reshaped to respond to adapt.

North America: collaboration on-demand

The U.S., Canada and Mexico share a population of 500 million people, a GDP of nearly $30 trillion dollars, and each alone are important global economies. In fact, 50% of the trade within North America is of components destined for finished product. The three countries literally build things together. Further, 1 of every 17 U.S. jobs is supported by trade with Canada and Mexico.

Global supply chains bring new challenges in an ‘instant’ world, causing organizations to analyze a regionalized strategy. The USMCA strengthened the foundation for companies to ally-shore, to selectively lean into trade and co-production relationships with trustworthy friends and allies.

Mexico is poised to fulfill talent demands highlighted by the accelerated productivity evolution in the United States. Whether manufacturing or mindfacturing, access to expanded talent pools and networked teams in real-time collaboration could be just the trick to unlocking productivity gains. Many of our clients certainly think so.

Prodensa is strategically positioned in North America to provide bilateral solutions aimed to increase the access to human capital and manufacturing capabilities while easing the regulatory burden or doing business in a foreign country.

Read more: “8 benefits of hiring administrative talent in Mexico”