Months since the onset of COVID-19, rules around social distancing continue to define everyday life. Industries including the IT industry have been seriously impacted by the unprecedented requirements that the #newabnormal has ushered in.

However, as with all crises, disruptive companies across verticals have risen to the occasion and used the extraordinary circumstances that these unprecedented times present to either change or tweak their game.

Consider what has happened in the technology space. The IT services industry model has grown on the strength of having hundreds of thousands of employees on the floor at any one time. The restrictions on the congregation of large numbers of people and their free movement has upended this working model, compelling firms, big and small, to consider ways around making Work From Home standard and effective.

This has been crucial for business continuity because on any given day companies in the IT services space literally lead ‘on the floor’. Collaboration and team culture are fostered with managers making themselves available in the corridors so that associates can walk up and discuss challenges and ideas as they emerge without much prior notice.

So how can enterprises in this space replicate their pre-COVID model of leadership when nearly everyone is working from home?

Let me tell you about some of the innovative solutions we put to use at Mphasis. We created a virtual pod and assigned a lead to take charge of a set of people. The lead would call the people under his or her care twice a day to see how things were. This included checking in especially during the early stages of the pandemic on their health, as well as logistical challenges around their laptops and issues around connectivity. The objective throughout was to reach out to people consciously in a structured way so that employees knew they could reach out no matter what to a leader through virtual means.

We also created an app to serve as a second layer of mentorship for employees who required additional resources or advise.

Although most of us worked from home, for those that had to come in, especially colleagues who worked on the ODC floors, we ensured senior staff came in, to guide, supervise and mentor them.

When we saw how well the two new initiatives were working, we decided to take the same approach of personalized service also to our clients. We knew they were facing the same kinds of hurdles we were facing internally with restraints on movement, the gathering of large numbers of people and working on site. In addition, we were also aware that they too were dealing with challenges in delivering services and products to their clients.

For example, how were CIOs in our client organizations to continue to deliver to their businesses in a lockdown? If there was a problem in another location, how were they to circumvent the roadblocks so that they could ensure continued and seamless delivery?

In an attempt to replicate and provide the value we offered to our clients in pre-pandemic times, we decided to deploy the approach we had adopted with our internal stakeholders with our customers too. We began scheduling more frequent calls with our customers to both share details and information about where we were with deliveries, especially when things were held up and one of our customers even said that our service has improved during the pandemic!

I think when the rules around social distancing got more stringent, our virtual connection got even better with not only internal stakeholders but also our customers. With time on travel saved, we were able to bridge the gap virtually by spending far more time on remote meetings including via zoom calls than we have ever done before.

We also leveraged global shoring. In one instance, when the security policies of a client did not allow our teams to work from home, we roped in our colleagues from the US to step in and step up to the task at hand. And we managed to have an offshore team up and running in two merely weeks. This is what we have put into practice globally. Across geographies we have been able to ‘take it up’ and ‘take it down’ in different places according to specific client requirements.

The bottom line is that companies in the services industry have no choice but to be innovative if they want to stay ahead. And extraordinary times such as the ones we are living through now provide a valuable opportunity to think outside the box, improve design and delivery and make disruption routine. So go ahead, ask yourself what can I do to push the envelope and ensure my team and my clients get ahead?