LEADERSHIP AND CULTURE IN TIMES OF COVID-19

Leadership in times of Covid-19: It’s early but here’s what we know by Christoph Bauer, Innovation Leader at Societe Generale in Frankfurt, Germany

The novel coronavirus has introduced the most impactful change of our working lives in recent history: the normalization of the home office and mobile working. But what does that mean for leadership? And what has been the impact of all these changes? Which tools help deal with this new reality?

Let’s start with leadership: I’ll go out on a limb here and say it didn’t change anything on the strategy level. Good leadership is good leadership, no matter the location. But on the tactical level, aka the “how to make it work”, many novelties and new requirements have popped up. From setting up video calls to distributing work efficiently, digital skills and especially the availability of the right tools played a major role in the speed of adoption. All this has changed the way teams interact and work collaboratively. From my experience: teams that were already leveraging agile principles and using task management tools had a much quicker recovery time than those that were still managed by “walking around”. Micro-Management does not scale in remote setups, so trust, ownership and intrinsic motivation became the biggest drivers for successful transitions.

On the empirical side with a focus on Germany, we see lots of positive impact regarding concentration and relaxation, more time for hobbies as well as a general happiness about not having to commute to the office every day. The number of stressed German employees decreased by 29%. A third of employees have changed their view on the home office in a favorable way – only 6% say their acceptance of home office arrangements has declined. But there is also negative sentiment: German employees miss social interaction and those with families find it hard to structure their time. Half of German employees under 30 say it’s hard to distinguish between work and private life. But remember: it’s early and the long-term effects of isolation and lack of informal exchange will take time to be measurable.

Modern cloud-based productivity and communication tools can help reduce these negative side effects. Teams that still lack these as well as teams still working with paper-based processes faced the biggest hurdles when trying to stay productive. The most sought-after tools were (video) conferencing software with high audio and video quality as well as virtual whiteboards such as Mural, Miro or Klaxoon. Startups use these by default, but many corporates had to adjust. For events, a whole new category of tools popped up: providers such as hopin or Run The World deliver features for interactive online events such as fairs, conferences and other formerly analogue occasions. We’ll see lots more activity in the realm of tools supporting remote work in the future – and we already have some clear winners.

Morocco: The challenge of new employee-client collective intelligence by Wadii Rhazi, Innovation Director, Societe Generale Morocco (SGMA)

The COVID-19 crisis has favoured not only digital acceleration at all levels, but also the reappropriation of digital tools. From collaborative tools to virtual events, efforts to adapt to social distancing constraints have resulted in a continuous innovation process, accompanied by closer relations between clients and employees.

First example: the Fête de la Musique (annual street music festival) which coincided in Morocco with the initial easing of lockdown measures. A mini digital festival was held on Facebook Live inviting clients and employees to celebrate life through song and pay musical tribute to everyone contributing to the fight against the coronavirus.

The live chat between clients and employees during the live-broadcast concerts showcased a never-before-seen level of socialisation and solidarity. A few days later, a webinar on “exiting the Covid-19 crisis thanks to innovation” was organised for employees and clients alike. Nabil Hilali, one of Morocco’s leading experts on open innovation, demonstrated for a wide audience the many opportunities offered by the crisis to rethink business models and ramp up the digital transformation. According to Mr. Hilali “Business model innovation is the key to resolving this crisis, serving in the short term as a remedy and over the longer term as an opportunity.”

During the webinar, a committed employee also spoke about solidarity-based innovation, related to her experience doing volunteer work. The success of this event inspired the decision to set up a second webinar, this time aimed exclusively at corporate clients, with various and clients sharing practical avenues for resolving the crisis through frugal innovation. In response to the restrictions arising from IT security imperatives, a work-around solution was also designed using a collaborative tool called Klaxoon.

The solution was created to supervise the roll-out of electronic payment migration in Sub-Saharan Africa, organise client surveys and tests, establish in-house collective intelligence and offer gamified training programmes. Lastly, additional collaborative innovations have proved successful, including an e-brochure tool used independently by CRMs to create electronic sales brochures personally tailored to their clients’ needs. The idea was suggested by a member of staff and then developed by two internal SG entities. Yet another example is the partnership between Ecole Centrale de Casablanca and Societe Generale Morocco, involving the school’s students and researchers in R&D initiatives associated with business challenges relating to the Covid-19 crisis.

Developing a result-oriented culture TO EMPOWER team members by Group Innovation Division

The Group Innovation Division is a recently renewed 30-member team with diverse profiles from within and outside the bank. Whatever their seniority, the team members are required to continuously adapt to evolving business priorities at a fast pace

To maximize our team impact and also build consistency and a sense of belonging among members, we chose to co-build together our vision, shared objectives and team values and use those as a solid alignment and monitoring tool. Almost like a compass.

As a first step, the team agreed on its key cultural foundation (mission and values) and a set of shared objectives and accepted the possibility of dropping lower impact topics. As a second step, each of us was invited to associate their individual contributions to the shared objectives.

• When the association was clear, project owners formulated a Key Result (from the OKR method). For instance: Digital Sales target set per country. They contributed to achieving said Key Result autonomously or as a team with business stakeholders.
• When the association was unclear, the team commonly agreed to give up engaged actions, re-prioritizing resources towards more directly contributive objectives. At some point, this led for instance to the decision to close our Tel-Aviv innovation Lab.

Key Result achievement leads to a systematic sharing session within the Innovation team heads and among business and service units stakeholders’ community (Digital Leaders) to help boost a learning culture. Quite soon, though, we also realized that building a safe (i.e. benevolent) work environment was even more crucial to help team members give-up on some of their projects.

The Covid-19 context turned this approach fully digital through tools such as Slack, Zoom, Trello and others (Teams wasn’t deployed at the time). Rituals became central and even more appreciated, further accelerating the adoption of visual management methods and requiring new joiners to jump-in with no delay. Six months down the line with continuous adaptation, the empowerment culture we’re building is progressively becoming understood and appreciated by the team. Immediate next steps consists in updating the Innovation team heads' shared objectives with the current banking context. All in all, such a set-up has been pivotal in developing a result-oriented culture and a sense of ownership among team members. But of course, it’s a long run and there is no finish line in such a journey.

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