Innovate, even with remote teams
Despite the sluggishness of the markets, some companies have succeeded in creating customer value, even while working remotely. Here’s how they did it.
Leading businesses have adopted a progressive approach, blurring the lines between production and consumption – developing a “prosumer” approach. Haier, Twitter, Apple, and Amazon increased interactions with customers from the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis.
Here are six lessons that can be rolled out in a general way to create customer value:
- Define a remote work schedule and stick to it. Your teams need to be safe, both emotionally and intellectually, before new ideas can start to emerge.
- Strengthen your service culture: once you have established remote communication channels, encourage collaboration to help employees who are in contact with customers.
- Leadership must reinvent itself to support the agility of small, remote customer-facing teams.
- Reduce customer-employee distance by increasing interactions.
- Let your employees take ownership of the customer relationship. This will increase the likelihood of innovations.
- Gamify: make work fun, increasing commitment and therefore ideas and innovation.
To go further
How leading companies are innovating remotely
by Ben Laker, Charmi Patel, Pawan Budhwar and Ashish Malik, (MIT Sloan Management Review, december 2020).
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