In our opinion, the legal organisations that will be the most successful in the future will be those that have most effectively embraced the present day COVID related issues. They are strategic in thinking and will have adapted every part of their partnership to ensure the needs of the client are supported, charged appropriately, with quality legal counsel provided throughout, on whatever technological medium and where caseloads are being maintained without issues. In essence… this is simply about making your employees productive anytime, anyplace and anywhere. This is the modern workplace.
A modern workplace needs the right tools as well as the right operational practices. To this end, it was important for us at PAV to prepare and deliver our own modern workplace transformation first to then enable us to practice what we are preaching when working with our legal customers. Our program of modernisation required the adoption and integration of new ERP, CRM, telephony and operational systems to ensure all information was referenceable, accessible, governed and where productivity enhancements were leveraged from the get go. We wanted a fully managed and integrated platform that enabled us to communicate with our customers, quote them, raise tickets for them, maintain an appropriate contact database and history of prior events and transactions, configurations databases and previously closed tickets for root cause analysis. All with no paper, ink or infrastructure of our own being required. Nothing was physical… it was all virtual. The goals were employee productivity, operational cost reduction, improved business agility and a real green agenda.
Our cloud platform is outlined below:
This modern workplace project had several associated benefits to our bottom line costs as well as secondary productivity enhancing improvements as follows:
- 95% reduction in physical records, paper trails and record storage space
- 90% removal of legacy on premise “IT stuff” that is simply antiquated and expensive to maintain and anchors you to office space and data centres e.g. servers for applications, networking equipment, security equipment, physical telephony switches plus the plethora of things required to power and cool all of the “stuff” and as well as to ensure power redundancy as well! Tens of thousands of pounds saved every year
- 75% reduction in our environmental footprint through the switch to shared cloud services and SaaS utilisation
- Support our clients anytime, anyplace and anywhere. Only recently did we really understand the true value of this point as outlined next
During the COVID lock down, our new systems and processes were put to test. Social distancing limitations made access to office space impossible until we had adopted COVID measures in these spaces. We simply had our support operatives continue working remotely from their respective homes. During the 6 months between January and June we handled 28,000 support requests. At all times these requests were first handled 90% of the time and were resolved within service level >90% of the time. Low priority tickets were effected when we had support pinches but this was done with the awareness of the affected customer. We always wrap up support calls with a support questionnaire as this helps us to maintain an awareness around ticket handling and resolution success. We received 386 survey responses in this timeframe with the average customer satisfaction level being 4.86 out of 5.
The length of the lockdown and the continuation of rules around social distancing has created issues for all employers. We believe all organisations are experiencing a fundamental adjustment in employee / employer relationships. This relates to the remoteness of employees and also the daily bond that they have through daily interaction with other colleagues as well as regular contact with supervisors or leaders. The Deloitte 2020 Human Capital trends report does a very good job at highlighting some of the environmental / business issues that are now evident in the workplace. It states that 93% of people who responded to their survey believe that belonging (feeling respected and treated fairly) drives organisational performance. No surprises there then… but the path we are all on now is effected by COVID social distancing. This has created a need to drive physical separation into the workplace and possibly even into home offices and this has inevitably strained the feeling of belonging / culture that working alongside others on a daily basis can distil within the workplace. The article talks to the virtues of creating inclusive cultures and enhancing the alignment between individuals and organisational objectives as ways by which an organisation could be up to 8 times more likely to achieve better business outcomes in the future! The full report can be viewed here: https://execed.economist.com/blog/industry-trends/what-does-future-work-look-after-covid-19
The work / life balance has always been a dilemma but COVID has very definitely changed the prior status quo. In our view, the most successful customers will be those that embrace change, are inclusive with their staff, who invest in them and who have the sharpest / most crystallised value proposition. PAV has focused on the launch of 3 new customer solution sets (https://www.pav.co.uk/technology-solutions/) and have aligned them with specific technology enablers. In parallel, we identified the training and enablement requirements to deliver these solutions to a consistent quality. The focus overall is on the delivery of quality IT projects and helping our clients to save both time and money and also to enable them to focus their efforts on strategic IT projects instead.
Training and enablement clearly drives an organisational capability and ability to execute but a new and just as important secondary outcome has become apparent as it demonstrates the desire to invest in individuals and to further their careers and to afford them with improved organisational opportunity. Investing in our employees helps to drive a feeling of self-worth and alignment through technology and capability to our corporate goals and arrest isolationism negativity and downward effects on their wellbeing.
We are doubling down on our accreditations and training / enablement to ensure that we continually add happy customers to our testimonials (https://www.pav.co.uk/customer-testimonials/) or customer reference (https://www.pav.co.uk/case-studies/) sections.
