Unified, Intelligent, and Open for Business

I’ve been a strong advocate of remote working policies (see here, here, here, and here) for many years. To me, the best people always were everywhere and a team member’s value (and productivity) has never depended on their screen being near mine, or other team members’.

The best people are everywhere.

While UIB has a traditional headquarters office in a shiny Singapore CBD tower, up until two months ago, our globally distributed team had often been considered a disadvantage — a “mark” against us cited by potential investors, clients, and, surprisingly, new hires, who at times expressed concerns about not being “close enough” to each other.

No one could have guessed how quickly, dramatically, and (quite possibly) permanently the world would change. In fact, just a few weeks ago we celebrated our 6th anniversary, an event which, just a day later, would not have been possible:

If you conduct a survey at the end of 2020 on the driving force for companies’ digital transformation (and with it, new work from home policies and practices, aka "WFH"), the results would neither be a top-down strategy nor a bottoms-up request but instead the “disruption from nowhere” that suddenly made the impossible an existential necessity for many businesses’ survival.

For all of us here at UIB, there has been almost zero change in our day to day business — with the likely exception of not being able to conduct our annual team meeting in person. Beyond that, we’ve been receiving exponentially more inquiries about how to “work remotely.”

What’s the biggest “secret” to working from home? As a team, we have discovered that the single most important thing is to get up every morning. ??

Since our inception six years ago, we have always successfully worked in close partnership with clients around the world by helping them to digitally transform their businesses, cultures, and processes. Now that this skillset has rocketed in demand with no “return to normal” in sight for the weeks and months ahead, we are seeing the need for rapid, continual digital transformation in physically (not socially!) distant environments, where innovation is becoming a globally distributed team sport with accelerators, events, hackathons all being run virtually.

Sure, the end of the virus cannot come soon enough. But I also want to encourage the perspective that the current constraints can be a catalyst for continuing (or starting) to innovate together with our people and partners. If you’ve not yet seen it, I recommend reading Straits Times Associate Editor Vikram Khanna’s OpEd on the pandemic's impact on economic trends and the changes we can expect to see in our work environment. Or just take a look at this Coronavirus Innovation Map which launched mere hours ago.

Meanwhile, I want to assure every client, investor, supplier, and end-user that UIB’s patented platform technology, partners, team members, and myself are 100% fully operational in a world where we all, for the time being, are required to be physically distant from each other.

Let's tackle this disruption from nowhere and innovate together!