Opportunities To Develop: Working From Home series with PwC

It’s not all ‘business as usual’ when working from home (WFH), inevitably we will experience some downtime, but this downtime is full of potential.  We caught up with Leyla Yildirim, Chief Strategy Officer from PwC Channel Islands to hear her thoughts on the subject.  Leyla has extensive experience developing ‘future of work’ scenarios for clients and for PwC, including innovative ways of working and driving productivity.  

In this Working From Home series with PwC, we have already covered some more practical elements of remote working, so here we will explore the opportunities to develop your staff and your business.  And whilst the current climate provides some new challenges, Leyla is keen to encourage us all to turn these into opportunities.

Whether you are a big business or a small one, the opportunity to develop during this difficult time is clear.  If you and your team are adapting to working remotely then you are already doing it, but scheduling in time to develop your company’s strengths is important.  Think about projects that have been on the wish list for a while or an area of the business that you would like to develop but never have the time.  Practically, there are some great virtual collaboration tools you can use to hold your own innovation workshop with your team.  Take a look at our introduction to our innovation toolkit, and try using a Google Jamboard for some of the group activities.  

For individuals, opportunities to develop don’t have to involve an extensive Learning & Development programme led by management, you can take ownership of your own learning with some great free-to-access online content.  Take a look at our article about online learning here.

PwC’s perspective:

Opportunity to upskill  – After the flurry of initial activity as we all adjust to home working, it is likely that parts of the business will be less intense than usual.  If productivity takes a hit, we can use the extra capacity to upskill our people. We are curating an extensive programme of digital upskilling content for our staff to access virtually.  This centres around our PwC Digital Fitness App, the app is a very engaging way of completing a tech oriented quiz to determine your digital fitness score - and highlighting your digital strengths and weaknesses.  The app then directs you to bespoke learning to boost your skills. All the learning is accessible virtually and can be done in bite size chunks daily, weekly or whatever suits the user best. The app also provides valuable data about our people, their skills and learning needs.  We can see who our digital stars are, and make decisions about where we need to invest further.

Leyla’s thoughts:
Our hope is that a regular learning regimen within the working day becomes the norm for our people.  Digital upskilling is seen as one of society's greatest challenges for the future of work – I believe that timetable has been accelerated exponentially by recent events.  If everyone in Guernsey committed just 30 minutes a day to learning a new digital skill, it would put us in a fantastic position post crisis to apply that learning to drive innovation and boost our economy. 

So with Leyla’s positive lens we want to add that there will be an end to this current situation and a new normal will evolve.  No longer will companies be able to deny the benefits of working from home and like-wise they will no longer just apply to those with special circumstances.  By embracing and working with these changes we can see many positive development opportunities for businesses and individuals.  

Read our other articles in this Working From Home with PwC series:

Establishing Your Connection  Let’s Talk Logistics

Reading recommendations from external sources: 
>  Springwise: Top 7 remote working innovations
>  Board of Innovation: 5 ingenious innovations triggered by chaos

PwC’s Digital Fitness App offer:
At PwC, we are currently offering our Digital Fitness App free to people across the world until 31 July 2020, helping users stay informed about digital transformation and why it’s important to us all.

The app assesses and improves your digital awareness, knowledge and capabilities by:

• • administering a baseline assessment to identify areas of strength and improvement,

  • offering curated digital content in quick and easy to consume formats, and 

  • providing weekly opportunities to re-assess your Digital Fitness score and track your improvement.

Through using this app we hope that you will become more confident, comfortable, and curious about all things digital.

For more information on how to access PwC's Digital Fitness App, please contact: leyla.yildirim@pwc.com