When the coronavirus pandemic erupted, companies had to change. Many business-as-usual approaches to collaborating with colleagues—or just getting anything done—would have failed. They had to increase the speed of decision making while improving productivity, using technology in new ways, and accelerating the scope and scale of innovation. And it worked. Organizations in a wide range of sectors and geographies have accomplished difficult tasks and achieved positive results in record time.
At the heart of each of these examples is speed—getting things done fast and well. Organizations have removed boundaries and have broken down silos in ways no one thought was possible. They have streamlined decisions and processes, empowered frontline leaders, and suspended slow-moving hierarchies and bureaucracies.
The COVID-19 crisis has forced companies great and small to vault ahead five years, in a matter of weeks, in adopting and applying digital technologies. From remote learning to distance meetings, a technological transformation has been accelerated by years as the metabolic rate of business has sped up.
By and large, the tremendous remote-working experiment brought on by the crisis has shown that a lot can be accomplished, immediately and virtually, with small teams, fewer and streamlined cycles, and without so much time expended on travel.
I recognized that many are still hoping to return to business-as-usual face to face meetings, nevertheless when we are forced by necessity to move ahead in a virtual environment, we learn by doing.
In our case, we identify the compelling need to provide virtual negotiation training to our teams globally, and with face-to-face activities proved to be valuable, it was not feasible anymore. We managed to organize in record time this useful capability building activity to more than 150 participants from 64 countries, as part of our pre-onboarding this year.
We organize 17 small groups of nine participants, each with a coordinator and a negotiation counterpart. The three role-play consecutive negotiation rounds help participants put in practice and pressure test their model adoption. The case-study created to simulate a real-life market access negotiation for a pharmaceutical product proves to be very insightful. Nevertheless, organizing all has been a complicated task with many moving pieces.
So far, we received very positive preliminary feedback from the majority of participants, with 96%, positively rated the overall experience, and 80% being extremely/very satisfied.
Look a couple of verbatim comments:
“Great experience and the idea of a few of us in a group allows every member a role to play, to explore the learnings from the e-learning materials. great work, and I think the number is just perfect as it allows different ideas shared.”
“This was an incredibly well-done exercise and an amazing opportunity for someone like myself, who is newer to the Market Access community to interact with colleagues across the globe. Very much appreciate all of the planning and organization that made things run smoothly.”
Do you have examples of how your organization is moving faster and learning by doing In the new normal?
