Covid-19 births the acceptance of digitalization globally

The CEO of MTN, Selorm Adadevoh, has observed that, covid-19 has leapfrogged the acceptance of digitalization across the globe.

We all said the future is digital but now COVID-19 has accelerated the process and today, we can say both the present and future are all digital. We live to see what the “distant” future will bring us,” he stated.

Speaking at the 28^th MTN Business World Executive Breakfast Meeting on Thursday, Adadevoh said “Who would have thought that there will be a time when almost everything in this world will be done digitally?  Today we are Working from home, our children are all learning and doing “home school” online, Doctors are doing diagnosis online as the first line of choice and entertainment is being done solely through the power of the internet.  This indeed is a new world order and Technology remains a critical driver in this discussion”.

According to him, the theme; “The Future of Work is here– Preparing the Work Place for New Talents Needs’ could not have been selected at a better time.

For us at MTN, we have spent several years preparing ourselves to deliver a bold new digital world to our customers and we are happy to say that in this period of COVID-19 we are delivering just that.  We are embracing the ‘new normal’ of doing a whole lot of activities through digital means”, he stated.

 

On his part, the Chief Executive Officer of Fidelity Bank Ghana, Julian Opuni, said it will be fairly naïve of businesses to assume their mode of work post Covid-19 will remain as it was before. He added stated that the advent of the novel coronavirus has made relevant remote working and remarks that this new normal is here to stay.

“If you look at our environment, the remote way of working is now effectively here to stay and certain capabilities that we didn’t think were available suddenly have become very evident.

The ability to just do lots of meetings in a very short space of time has now become the way of work and we’ve had to create that capability and even the protocols around working remotely and having meetings and teleconference with your colleagues,” he stated.

He, therefore, advised businesses to start thinking up new ways to effectively meet the demands of customers within the circumstances the coronavirus brings.

Julian Opuni said a sure way to do this is to scale up the mode of delivery of services to meet recent trends and to find innovative ways to measure the productivity of workers as they work from home.

We now have to quickly scale up certain parts of the business that may not be seen as evidently critical to delivery of our services and you still have to do it in an e-learning kind of environment and train and get people ready to be able to do those services because the customers’ needs have been changed significantly as a result of what’s going on.

“It also means that we’ve had to establish, and all businesses would have to do it, establish new ways of measuring productivity and activity of your staff because when you have people scattered all over areas and locations and all over the place, do you still use your traditional ways of measuring output?

And I think what is evident now is because of the rotation system and the facts that people are working from home etc. It’s no longer about hours worked, it’s really about output and you have to put in place those systems that will enable businesses measure output and see the productivity of their staff,” he quipped.

 

Source: Kofi Ahovi//Businessweekghana.com