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24 | NOVEMBER 2020 | UTILITY WEEK Customers Analysis Home truths for operations leaders How are operations leaders rising to the challenge of working from home necessitated by the pandemic? At a recent Utility Week webinar, we asked them. Jane Gray chaired the session. T he disruption caused by the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic and subse- quent measures to control its spread has been immense for businesses across all sectors and geographies. Among the most prominent ways this dis- ruption has manifested is in the sudden need to support all kinds of business operations with remote and flexible working arrange- ments – a need that does not look like disap- pearing any time soon given the remorseless rise of the pandemic's second wave. In the UK utilities sector, companies by and large responded well to the initial chal- lenge of pivoting to support mass remote working. Notwithstanding a few challenges here and there in securing extra hardware, increasing capacity on corporate VPN's and the like, business continuity was protected, and customer service maintained. What has generally been less clear is the extent to which efficiency, effectiveness and productivity have held up – especially in back office functions, which have historically suf- fered from technological under-investment compared with customer-facing activities. During lockdown, this means less detailed or accurate performance data has been available to organisations about back office functions and, as disrupted operating models transition into business as usual, there is a growing desire to level-up this disparity. Utility Week, in association with digi- tal engagement specialist Verint, recently hosted a webinar to explore these issues and the challenges they pose for operations leaders in the utilities sector and beyond, with speakers including Rebecca Henry, operations director at RSA Insurance, and Lily Stein, operations manager at Octopus Energy, as well as Verint's head of opera- tional management best practice, Chris Rainsforth (see column on facing page). During the webinar, Henry suggested that the real Covid challenge for opera- tions leaders is that it "has really held our feet to the fire in terms of identifying value add and non-value add activities within our businesses". She offered a variety of examples from RSA's experience during the pandemic so far that demonstrated this point, including an abrupt need to "home-shore" the work of Learning from mistakes A popular question that is oen posed during webinars and conferences on any number of business issues, is how managers should make room for experimentation and, crucially, failure as a prerequisite for achieving improvements in efficiency and service. And true to form, this was a key question from those listening live to Utility Week and Verint's recent webinar on productivity and flex- ibility as twin challenges for today's operations leaders. Interestingly, both answers given by the senior operational speakers involved in the event centred on team autonomy and empower- ment of decision-making, though from two quite different perspectives. Responding first, RSA Insurance operations director Rebecca Henry referenced the salutary lessons she and her reporting managers had learnt when they attempted to use new vis- ibility of incoming workflows to prescribe back office work to teams and individuals in a very controlled way – with the best intentions to increase throughput, efficiency and customer satisfaction. The result, however, was a backlash from workers, whose morale took a hit with immedi- ate consequences for productivity. Listening to the insistence of teams that they were capable of taking responsibility for their own workloads, Henry helped set up a new pro- cess of daily team huddles in which information about incoming work was presented and a plan collaboratively devised to deal with it by team members, with the oversight of a manager. The improved sense of autonomy and responsibility led to an immediate recovery and upli in productivity. Henry said one of the big- gest challenges lockdown posed for continued productivity in business areas that had adopted this way of working was how to sustain the collaborative and transparent nature of the team huddle over video link – though she clarified that teams soon adapted to this need and were now thinking creatively about how to manage a "hybrid" environment including a blend of office and home-based team members. Building on Henry's example of learning form "mis-steps", Octopus Energy's Lily Stein talked about the challenger brand's long standing belief in giving multi-skilled customer service teams complete autonomy to apply new ideas that they believed might result in better