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Business partnering after Covid-19

5 minute read

Business partnering after Covid-19

During the Covid-19 pandemic, businesses adapted rapidly to the sudden change in, well, everything? 

Speaking after his team’s mobilization, former Director of Global Business Services UK at Ultra Electronics, Will James asked what exactly had changed, what had remained the same, and what balance did businesses need to find in order to succeed? 

What has changed?

The previous two decades has seen at least three ‘once in a lifetime’ crises. 9/11, the global financial recession, and now Covid-19 make up a trifecta of Black Swan events that have happened within a relatively short space of time. 

Turbulence is becoming a regular feature of the world, and businesses need to be more prepared than ever to respond in an agile way to more frequently occurring significant stimuli. 

Covid-19 had a sudden impact that tested many organizations’ continuity plans, as well as the human responses to the pandemic. 

For CFO’s globally, maintaining and preserving liquidity has been the number one priority. 

According to Will, the biggest business challenge has been the need for agility. Anticipating and responding to events is no longer about looking to and repeating the past. It is now a business partnering opportunity. 

As businesses begin to move from crisis response to planning and business restart, boards and leadership teams are re-evaluating and re-focusing many aspects of their organizations. 

From structure, to commercial operations, technology, customer experience and employee retention, businesses need the right leadership in the right places to move forward, faster. 

Will maintains that transformation that normally would have taken in the region of five to seven years happened in about six weeks. 

The impact of the pandemic has achieved long-term goals HR departments have been aiming for:

  • Humanized leaders, managers, and colleagues
  • Forced the issue of flexible working
  • Made us rethink the work-life balance
  • Transformed the ways we communicate with each other
  • Brought about more kindness, empathy, and a real sense of belonging and community

The role of the manager

Virtually overnight (pun intended) managers went from having a physical door always open, to a recurring Zoom meeting for check-ins. 

Within weeks, and in many cases days, entire offices were empty and front rooms were full of makeshift desks and coffee-table books as laptop stands. 

Priorities of managers to keep teams ticking and morale high remained the same, but with an entirely different space in which to do it. 

Most didn’t have the training, skill sets, or technical capacity to carry out this new way of managing a team. 

Suddenly, a managers to-do list consisted of:

  • Communicating with your now entirely virtual team
  • Keeping a sense of team, and team working, while being in isolation from each other
  • Learning to utilize online tools to keep in touch with each other
  • Motivating and managing performance of team members while trying to be understanding and flexible
  • Checking in on the mental health of your team members and getting to grips with the importance of this 
  • Keeping in regular touch with those on furlough as well as those remote working

Communicating with individuals as well as trying to get the team together, virtually, was going to prove absolutely vital. 

Research & analysis

Deloitte released a report in 2020 on resilient leadership amidst the business recovery from Covid-19, which focused on the human elements of leadership. 

“Resilient leaders understand that recovery is a human experience. In order to shift the mindset to recovery, they need to understand the four human dimensions of trust.”

Barrett Values Centre published their Global Covid-19 Culture Assessment analyzing the cultural impact of Covid-19, highlighting the differences in priorities before and after the pandemic. 

“Despite the fear and uncertainty surrounding the pandemic, there have been a number of positive changes in the way employees experience their cultures”

Employee’s pillars of understanding have shifted from performance, control, and hierarchy to people focus, adaptability, and working together. 

In general, cultures are healthier now than pre-pandemic. Shifting concerns have changed the potentially limiting values (PLVs) experienced during Covid-19, but the overall degree of dysfunction (what Barrett call Cultural Entropy) has declined from 20% to 17%.

Pre-Covid-19 the PLVs were bureaucracy, control, and hierarchy. Now they are caution, confusion, and job insecurity.

With PLVs occupying less headspace, the positives that have been experienced throughout the pandemic are being requested going forward. 

Business partnering

The role of the business partner is primarily concerned with driving a business forward and adding value, according to Andi Lonnen. 

They are also concerned with helping the organization do its job better by enabling non-financial colleagues to understand the financial side of the business and make smarter decisions with better information.

Ultimately, their job is to improve the financial performance of the business. 

Andi lists the desirable skill set for a business partner as follows:

  • Strategic, big picture thinking, forward looking
  • Commercial and sound business understanding
  • Strong communication and presentation skills
  • Ability to influence and challenge
  • Good relationship builder and networker
  • Capable motivator, both of themselves and others
  • Keen mind for acquiring and applying knowledge
  • Technical know-how, but not just a number-cruncher

Anders Liu-Lindberg summises that business partnering is the top soft skill CFOs want to develop in their teams, and is calling for business partnering transformation to address the lack of change that has been seen in the past two decades. 

The outcome, for Anders, should be designed around four key principles. 

  1. All activities that business partners are involved in must be value-adding. 
  2. Business partners should be the catalyst for moving from strategy to execution.
  3. They should act as key account managers being the sole point of entry for the business into Finance. 
  4. Business partners should have the exclusive right to present financial statements and other key performance metrics to business leaders, which will ensure one set of numbers. 

To achieve this, Anders recommends creating a framework for business partnering, redesigning the organization, roles and responsibilities, and developing critical capabilities such as problem solving, executive communication, and influencing. 

Post-pandemic, Gartner is predicting that the following emerging competencies are what leading companies will be adding to their finance models and teams. 

For leaders, it is about being authentic. Improving emotional intelligence whilst still be able to set direction and create alignment is going to be key to winning in the ‘new normal.’

Keeping it human will help achieve better business results through better interactions between people, every day. 

The top three skills the World Economic Forum state will be required to perform jobs have changed from 2020 to their 2022 predictions. 

In 2020, the top three were; complex problem-solving, critical thinking, and creativity. To thrive next year, they predict the three most important traits will be; analytical thinking and innovation, active learning and learning strategies, and creativity, originality, and initiative. 

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