Making Remote Works Collaborative and Accountable

Design thinking and digital transformation are two buzzwords receiving a lot of attention these days. They also give business consultants and trainers ample opportunities to make money and sell their services. Actually, the two are closely related, especially during the time when COVID19 has caused tremendous disruption to business as usual. Without effective means to bring diverse talents together in the same physical setting for collaborative problem solving, the design and transformation processes will easily fall apart with fruitless result.

With remote and distributive works becoming a new reality, how can business workflows including those related to innovation and deployment be possible? Both design thinking and digital transformation make the promises to foster innovation and accelerate implementation. They need a well articulated roadmap to solve collective productivity problem and building new work culture for remote and distributed collaboration.

I think the no-code/low-code movement and proliferation of workflow tools have already confirmed the strategic importance of the space. There is an urgency for building a cloud infrastructure for online co-presence and co-creation. This is a new kind of intranet, which not only has to solve the communication problem but a cultural one. How can departmental members and team players get a sense of belonging and identity as well as collaborate creatively to solve problems? How can they be held accountable for “remote works”?

We need new UX/UI design and ingenious technological deployment to tackle this challenge. Will Microsoft Team, Slack, or Zoom be enough to address our needs? As Howie Liu of Airtable puts it in a Forbes Magazine interview:

“The first wave centered around communication companies like Zoom and Slack. “Covid hit, and everyone was flailing to figure out how to literally talk to each other. That was the first essential need,” Liu says over a Zoom interview. “The next wave of Covid-accelerated adoption will be around Airtable and other products that let companies build structured workflows that are more remote-work compatible and digitally native.”

To sum up my observation: Making remote works collaborative and accountable is the missing link.