The recent disruptions that have occurred worldwide has created a domino effect, affecting our personal and professional lives in many ways. The expectations of working in remote locations due to heightened social distancing, without compromising the need for extreme employee productivity, and with legal disruptions like the Defense Production Act (in the US) has introduced a new normal which throws up many challenges for our workforce.
According to Global Workforce Analytics cited by The Balance Careers* , only 56% of the workforce hold jobs that are compatible with remote work.
- That still leaves about 44% of the workforce involved in field work such as after sales service, factory or plant operations, retail store associates, and other front line staff processes that do not have the option of working remotely.
- Even in the 56% of remote compatible jobs, people face the following challenges in times of volatility and adversity:
To respond to this paradigm shift, organizations need to significantly reduce cognitive load and enable better collaboration for a remote knowledge-based workforce. At the same time, organizations need to bring field workers to the knowledge fold by providing automation, remote work and training solutions without compromising on safety, security and compliance guidelines of the enterprise.
As an organization, we have been helping businesses make this transition long before it became a norm due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our fundamental pivots to enable this transformation has been driven by the following tenets:
- Help enterprises for the next LEAP (Learning, Experience, Access, Productivity) powered by platforms for the knowledge and field workers
- Leverage cognitive, intelligent conversational solutions to support the knowledge workforce
- Improve faster learning and onboarding by leveraging micro learning solutions
- Augment physical reality with virtual reality for seamless support and assistance in remote operations
- Drive hyper automation to expand human capabilities by automating work which covers tacit and explicit knowledge
Here is a snapshot that illustrates how we enable these tenets into solutions for our customers:
Figure 1: Snapshot of the Virtual Workforce Solutions
- Enable self service using virtual assistants to support front and back office employees – Mindtree deploys a Microsoft Azure-based conversational platform supported by our MindFlow accelerator for customers, which automates emergency response, FAQ, L1 and L2 issues with no manual intervention.
- Drive hyperautomation and collaboration leveraging Power Apps and Microsoft Teams – We augment the human workforce with bots to automate business processes by leveraging automation solutions and Microsoft Power Apps.
- Integrate accelerated quick learning modules for faster employee onboarding – By leveraging Shotclasses, our mobile-first, micro learning platform and avatar-based training solution, we accelerate employee onboarding and encourage ongoing learning.
- Enable guided selling, powered by augmented reality – Leverage augmented reality platforms to drive guided selling for high touch products like housing, apparel, etc. powered by PTC Vuforia.
- Remote operations – Leverage shared augmented reality powered by PTC Vuforia and Vuforia Chalk and our IoT accelerators to offer expert help to remote field technicians.
Enabling the Paradigm Shift Leveraging the Intersection of Journey, Experience, Technology and Speed
Based on our engagements with customers, we have tailored an approach which ensures success at a rapid pace. The section below elaborates this bespoke approach
- Journey-based – Driving adoption for these solutions are dependent upon tailoring the above-mentioned use cases to the key personas of an enterprise. We start with defining simple persona-based journeys to deliver future capabilities that accelerate adoption by employees. Digital Pumpkin, our innovation lab, has created a fast-paced approach to drive and define these personas in a matter of hours and not days.
- Experience – Our virtual innovation lab, Digital Pumpkin, helps define the future experience in parallel, while outlining these personas.
Figure 2: Architecture Diagram of the Virtual Workforce Solution
- Technology – The acceleration of this solution is enabled by leveraging industry standard technologies and best practices combined with Mindtree's intellectual property, as illustrated above
- Speed – We have created a rapid execution framework which helps us execute these solutions remotely with our virtual solution pod teams in weeks, and not months. The intent is to reduce the need for contact in these uncertain times without reducing the desired levels of collaboration. An illustration of our approach to execution is given below:
Figure 3: Solution execution approach and timeline
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