The COVID crisis has driven acceptance of some significant cultural changes in Health. Previously resisted, but forced through because of the crisis, the benefits are transparent and countrywide in nearly every setting.

A few months ago, I spotted a MASSIVE contradiction on LinkedIn...

Much if not all of the information in your daily, weekly or monthly reports will have been originated by a person, one who goes into a system and manually inputs a number.

Here is the InPhase get back to office work policy! We thought we’d share it in case anyone finds it useful. We took some of this guidance from the government web site to ensure we’re checking all the right boxes for us. I’m sure everyone has very different circumstances but if this can help you, we are happy to share.

Every organisation has had its plans affected by COVID-19 and the vast majority of organisations have already re-planned once and will do so again in the next 2-3 weeks and again in 3-4 months.

Many large organisations were used to taking 3-4 months to write a single annual plan. But there had already been a movement to more agile planning and execution cadence.

What was pre-existing best practice and what lessons can we take from the COVID-19 experience?

I’ll first admit to failure.

For decades my company have profited from selling and implementing risk management software which I don’t think does a good enough job.

As we enter the 6th week in lock-down, it seems that there are fresh signs of renewal and spring all around and maybe, just maybe, we can also see signs of teams getting into new routines, successfully making efforts to stabilise work patterns.

We often visit CEO’s, Heads of Transformation, culture “experts” and performance leads, to talk about transformation and performance improvement. We often hear data is the new golden bullet that will help them be smarter, do a better job, drive more revenue or provide a better service.

Organisations will spend in some cases many millions of pounds, euros or dollars setting up data warehouses, data cleansing, data analysis and data mining systems. Data seems to have become the wonder drug that people believe will transform their businesses overnight.

With almost every sector in crisis, we know the charitable sector is having a particularly tough time. Lack of donations and lower resources than normal, investment into new IT systems has been completely taken off the menu. This is why we at InPhase wanted to do something about it.

I’ll tell you what’s scary. Over the last 4 weeks, I’ve seen massive government departments, big corporate businesses, care homes and other critical front-line organisations spin up spreadsheet after spreadsheet to help them manage what is now the fastest-changing operational environment they’ve ever seen.

Is there such a thing as a successful week, in crisis?

I can honestly say, at the end of a VERY long week, I LOVE the InPhase team. I thought I did before, but I hadn't seen anything. The power of people coming together in the face of adversity is incredible. I'll be honest, we discussed at SMT furloughing staff, taking the 80%...for all of 1 minute. And then we said, "Nah, let's do something really awesome."

How are you doing?

When COVID-19 first hit, I wanted to make sure all of our customers, as well as our staff, were OK.

We setup a process to call all of our customers and asked them “how can we help” (many of our customers are key service providers; the NHS and health service providers, Local Authorities, Fire Services, Social Housing providers). They all said “we are really struggling with understanding what’s happening with our workforce. We are finding it difficult to manage key actions and who has to perform the high priority actions with so many people going off sick and self-isolating.” Mobile working clearly added to the complexity.

InPhase providers of crisis management software have today scrapped enterprise pricing in support of the Covid-19 efforts and moved to a rapid deployment short term licencing model.

It’s hard sometimes to recognise what a business improvement and crisis management supplier that genuinely cares about you looks like. If you’re an exiting or striving rock star manager looking for a rock star supplier to help you fix real business problems and drive genuine results you’re going to need to make sure you picked the right partner.

While the Corona virus continues to escalate and there is the possibility offices may need to close, we would like to let you know that InPhase currently expects to be able to deliver a fully working, normal service throughout the epidemic. We will update you if this should change in any way.