A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives, a curated forum for enterprise technology leaders, nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the CIOApplications Editorial Board.
Kfc Uk & Ireland
Challenges Of Remote Work In The Food And Bevarage Industry
What are the challenges that the food and beverage industry is facing, especially relating to the collaborative market space?
If I take the head office into account alone, as people have moved across the country it has become a major challenge to gather everyone at one place again. So what we did is we have got the people for whom working remotely is the only feasible option come to the office once a month and the locals tend to come once or twice a week to office, depending on how they want to operate. Running big workshops virtually helps in a way to accommodate more people, but the white boarding that takes place before for creative thinking suffers in case of hybrid collaboration. Everything has its merits and demerits. If you take the restaurants for example, hybrid collaboration is impossible and we have to travel there anyway. The major challenge comes at the head office and to meet this we’ve upgraded our office to accommodate hybrid functioning, thereby allowing remote collaboration with ease. We are training people to adjust to this environment so that they can also facilitate others joining remotely to participate in hybrid collaboration. However the bigger challenge here is how we can bring the workforce back to the office after they have got so used to working remotely. The inflation has contributed to make this harder as daily travel and food costs come into the picture. Our tactic here is to try and make coming to office a ceremonial event, so that it makes it worth coming.
Tools are of course an important part of collaboration, but it is also about educating people about virtual collaboration. For instance, in a physical meeting, it becomes easier to spot the right people, who could be given an opportunity to present an opinion. But in case of virtual meetings it is impossible to give everyone an opportunity to opine, the chance of the ones with stronger and louder opinions to get offended increases. So that is a major challenge. For tools, we are using Office 365 and Teams primarily. We also use Miro boards for white board collaboration; online document transfer is also a modern technique that we are using. Though not that heavily reliant on tools, we do use Slack and we’ve also launched an application to help build better sense of community across different locations in different restaurants called Wings app.
What are the security practices and measures that organizations have to take up while using collaboration tools and software as security is a major aspect of collaboration?
Since COVID people have started using a plethora of tools and have been using their credit cards or their department budgets to pay for them, without proper control and governance. To tackle this we have to provide the right tools, hence we have moved the company on enterprise licenses of the collaboration tools we are using. These single sign on and multi factor authentication based tools have also helped us to avoid using VPNs all the time even if they are used over different devices. We have upgraded everything on MFA and single sign on tools from security perspective. When you move to a single contract it becomes easier to facilitate employee and company data protection.
In your opinion is there any new and disruptive tool or exciting technology coming up that might be helping the collaborative space in terms of security?
I think password less logins from a security perspective is coming up to provide better overall security. I have not spent much time on looking at tools other than the ones we are using. We are already using tools like Monday.com, Jira, Slack, Miro boards to help us collaborate better. Focusing on more ways of working as of now, we are not looking to add any more tools for working collaboratively across multiple locations.
Of course, virtual collaboration tools make a big difference in remote working conditions, but it's also educating people in terms of how to collaborate virtually
Lastly, what advice do you have for your peers, other leaders or even for the readers in the collaborative space as to how they could streamline their processes or gain better security or ease of access to files?
So, in my previous job we also had the problem of plethora of tools that were being used. It came down to us as a company offering better tools so that the employees don’t have to sign up for services by themselves. The key to this is in awareness about the wants of the employees and providing them with the necessary tools that meet their wants effectively. Training the people about the existing tools is also an important aspect. We have to take lessons from retrospectives regarding how to improve ways of collaborative working, and take actions which will help us to function better as a team.
