One would like to say that working from home has had a positive effect on operational costs in general, but I don’t think we have a full grip on the new operation costs as yet. So you’re moving away from the actual physical office environment costs, and it’s quite surprising how these costs escalate if you start bringing all the different building blocks together: it’s the building; the maintenance of the building; electricity; water; wear and tear; the air conditioners; the sanitary processes; security, the tables and chairs, your stationary, office cleaning, Wide Area Network etc. But then there is the cost of new operations we don’t understand yet – remote networks, application readiness, human performance, human health, collaboration efficiency etc.
What we are finding is that now the greatest uncertainty is the human aspect. In an ideal world we would like to be able to measure performance based on output based deliverables, but unfortunately in most cases, there are no effective models and with the speed of change brought about by this pandemic, most companies have been caught off guard. This is further complicated by the mental effect on people and how this is going to impact business in the future.
Yes, it would be great if you could pay for HR skills, as and when you needed it, but what is the model and, more importantly, are you getting the right skill that will ensure efficient time allocation?
When one looks at the ICT sector, unfortunately, what we are finding is that skills are getting scarce and this is resulting in higher costs to companies:
- Unskilled staff takes longer to do the work due to lack of knowledge and experience
- Unskilled staff costs company due to wrong decisions
- Unskilled staff cost company due to errors
- Wrong skills are deployed resulting in the HR clean-up process
- When you get the right skill, the price point is not in line with the value achieved
- And so the list continues…
As Telesa is focussed on this industry, we have been building a model over the past 18 years that has assisted us in finding that sweet spot to ensure that this vital area to all companies’ survival is run efficiently while mitigating risk at the same time. The fundamental core of this process is using a three prong approach – Automation, Skills Development and Visibility.
Why these three fundamental focus points are fundamental will be addressed in further blogs where we will unpack international ICT trends.
