As we head into the new year and a volatile business environment, businesses continue to face the challenges of a largely remote workforce, evolving digital business requirements and elevated customer expectations.

Entrepreneurs and business leaders need to be quick to join the dots, make new connections and find innovative solutions to problems. Opportunities abound for those who are ready to embrace a creativity-led leadership to steer their teams through these uncertain times.

To challenge the status quo and inspire your team, here are some insights and practical tips.

Culture influences creativity

Organisational culture is crucial to an innovative company, yet it can often seem like an elusive and intangible concept. Based on the results of the Adobe Creativity Quotient (CQ), only 29 per cent of APAC leaders have succeeded in creating a culture that embraces creativity.

Those who don’t are missing out on the opportunity to create value for their business and nurture employees to do their best work.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses that had embraced change and had the agility to launch new business models were better able to thrive in the new operating environment.

Those were the businesses whose leaders were competent in change management and were able to effectively guide their teams through a period of intense transformation.

As businesses increasingly embrace hybrid work environments, they need to find new ways to support a culture that develops employee creativity. Aim to recreate or simulate the aspects of the company culture that require in-person engagement, such as water cooler conversations and informal spaces for bonding, as these are familiar environments for collaboration that spark creativity.

Also Read: How to use Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to drive resilient leadership in 2021

Data centricity only matters if you have the right data

Successful entrepreneurs and business leaders understand that customer centricity hinges on data. However, only 36 per cent of leaders effectively use data at the start of every creative process and one in five use data retrospectively, to post-rationalise creative approaches.

One of Adobe’s customers in India, Tata CLiQ, brought up the ‘problem of plenty’ that organisations face when it comes to data.

Because businesses are collecting so much data from all their customer touchpoints and interactions, they are often overwhelmed by the amount of information available and hindered from making important decisions fast.

With the wealth of tools available to capture granular data, the priority must now shift to collecting and dissecting the right data. The use of data needs to be strategic, meaningful, and structured, right from the start.

It is also worth marking data collected ‘before’ and ‘after’ COVID-19, with insights drawn from it contextualised by how the pandemic has changed customer behaviour.

Blurring the lines between roles

The pandemic has changed what constitutes good customer experience (CX), and expectations will only continue on an upward trajectory.

As organisations move towards more agile customer experience management (CXM), different roles and teams within the organisation – including marketing, technology, and customer service– need to integrate for deeper collaboration.

Convenience is the main tent pole of CX today, and the delivery of that requires the collective intelligence within an organisation to understand the human experience as well as the emotional aspect throughout the customer journey. It is also what sets one startup apart from another in a crowded marketplace.

Empathy fuels creativity

According to Adobe CQ, only 25 per cent of APAC business leaders were driving the skills needed to navigate transformation and change. While technology can augment and enhance this, it cannot replace creativity and uniquely human abilities, such as empathy.

Empathy is increasingly vital in everything a business does – from understanding buying journeys to managing internal team processes, to analysing data insights. Data combined with empathy and creativity, equip a brand to deliver exceptional CX.

To innovate and drive business transformation in 2021, lean into fostering entrepreneurial skills that can be applied across business functions and roles. Technological skills, while important, will become less mission-critical as empathy, critical thinking, and the ability to problem-solve creatively, take precedence in the post-COVID-19 environment.

Also Read: 7 things to consider when distributing leadership roles among founders

Understand how technology augments human skills

While 2020 brought about a massive digital shift, offline channels remain an important platform to connect more intimately with customers. Companies that are able to understand the power of integrated CXM and apply that throughout the entire customer journey, will stand out.

Technology will continue to advance, enabling businesses to reimagine their operations. However, people also need the right skills to understand how to get the most out of that technology.

Leaders need to think not just about how to teach people technology skills, but also how to provide adequate time and resources to help employees apply that technology meaningfully and creatively across the business.

We’ve emerged from a year unlike any other and the year ahead remains uncertain. Those who lead with creativity will be well placed to thrive in the new normal.

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Finance teams in ride-hailing, logistics and food delivery companies can all testify to a common headache — consolidating data.

Due to the nature of their operations, these platform businesses deal with a high velocity and volume of financial data that makes monitoring and tracking it a stressful experience.

Despite the important role finance plays in both operations and growth of a company, it remains one of the few aspects that has not been digitalised. Financial data is still collated on age-old excel spreadsheets. While this would suffice for small businesses, it is not sustainable for high-growth businesses.

Saurya Prakash Sinha shares similar sentiments. At his former employers PhonePe (mobile payments) and Flipkart (e-commerce), Saurya noticed they were struggling to manage their financial data.

“The existing financial tools were crumbling with the growth in transaction volume, omnichannel commerce and numerous payment instruments. We realised the financial demands of businesses were rising and new financial infrastructure would be required on top of which the new commerce and fintech companies would be built,” he shares with e27.

Having discovered financial processes such as reconciliations (an accounting process that checks two sets of records to ensure the figures are in agreement), calculation of commissions and accounts reporting were not catered for in the existing technological stack, he partnered with Prashant Borde to build Recko.

The Bangalore-based startup seeks to solve this problem by providing a centralised platform for businesses to manage their financial data. It achieves this by collecting data from a wide range of sources, including mobile payment platforms and banks, before consolidating and displaying it on an easy-to-read dashboard for finance teams.

How it works

Diving into the specifics of how the platform operates, Saurya shares individual financial “events” are created in real time for purposes, ranging from order approval to successful transactions.

According to him, this enables companies to monitor their financial operations at a more granular level and the real-time nature of it enables teams to identify gaps and plug them, instead of waiting for months.

Also Read: ‘gojek taught me the importance of making data-driven decisions’: outgoing CTO Ajey Gore

Once these events are created, they are organised into immutable and auditable ledgers that are ready for auditing or diligence checks — putting an end to the stressful experiences of finance teams when such tasks are due.

Recko’s platform serves a variety of purposes for businesses. In the case of calculating commissions, Saurya shares Recko stores commercial terms and payment cycles within its system. By eliminating human errors and guesswork, he says the company has enabled clients to recover incorrectly charged commissions from their business partners.

To support the reconciliation practice widely adopted by accountants, bank accounts can also be integrated onto Recko’s platform to enable companies to cross-check their transaction figures with their actual cash flow.

Protecting data

With over US$9 billion worth of transactions reconciled on Recko’s platform, we quizzed Saurya on how the company protects the financial data passing through its infrastructure.

“We follow a stringent set of security practices to safeguard data in transmission as well at rest. The infrastructure is regularly penetration-tested for any loopholes or gaps, both internally and our security partners,” he replies.

Also Read: Fall in line: What is the role of a Data Protection Officer at a startup?

He also claims Recko is ISO 27001-certified (the international standard for information security) and compliant with PCI DSS (the information security standard for organisations that handle branded credit cards from the major card schemes).

With new regulations governing data protection are likely to emerge amid the increased scrutiny on cybersecurity, Saurya maintains Recko’s infrastructure is designed to be flexible enough to accommodate them.

Growth

Adopting a usage-based revenue model similar to SaaS companies, including AWS, the flexible nature of the solution enables companies to scale their operations in tandem with Recko’s offerings, enabling it to cater to a range of organisations ranging from early-stage startups to large enterprises.

With Temasek-backed Vertex Ventures leading Recko’s US$6 million Series A funding last year, the company is set on expanding its operations to a global level.

“We quadrupled our customer base and onboarded customers in Southeast Asia and Europe. There is a large pipeline of customers from multiple regions. We are also having our initial pilots in the US and would be opening up the geography very soon,” Saurya discloses.

With Recko solving an age-old problem for finance teams, it certainly has the potential to change how companies manage their financial data. As they have discovered, when one solves a real need, the sky’s the limit.

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Image Credit: Recko

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There’s no denying that 2020 disrupted business norms. Driven by the pandemic, organisations were faced with the need to accelerate change in the way they do business and engage with employees and customers. As organisations, we grappled with how to reach our communities – wherever they may be – in a seamless way.

As one of the world’s leading and largest graduate business schools, INSEAD strives to deliver exemplary experiences for its students, staff and faculty alike. In the face of the pandemic, which closed off most of our global campuses like Singapore, we faced a new challenge: a seamless transition to digital learning experiences. 

What’s more, the pandemic motivated many to future-proof their skills and secure their position amidst a period of uncertainty.  Interest in MBAs grew significantly at the peak of the pandemic, INSEAD saw applications for its MBA programme increase by 58 per cent compared to pre-COVID-19 levels. 

In the face of this new challenge we found an opportunity to continue delivering the standard of experience our students and staff expect, underpinned by strategic digitalisation initiatives we’ve implemented to modernise our systems around student scheduling and enrolments.  

Overcoming our integration roadblocks

Unlocking and connecting data across applications and systems is one of the biggest challenge organisations face today. In a learning environment, a disconnect in the ability to bring student information together with legacy IT inhibits our ability to power undisrupted, digital learning experiences.

Our technology ecosystem was composed of more than 100 disparate and siloed applications, which made it difficult to keep up with evolving student and faculty expectations.

During high-traffic periods, such as enrolments and scheduling, this created a frustrating experience for students while overwhelming staff with manual work and driving up IT costs for operations and maintenance. 

We needed to modernise our legacy systems, unlock important data–wherever it was and promote connectivity and reusability across our technology systems. An integration approach was critical in bridging our data divides and overcoming silos across our applications and systems.

Put simply, we needed to modernise how we operated on the backend to meet the expectations of our students and faculty.

In an increasingly crowded market, where people have the choice between several business schools and programmes, digitisation and integration were no longer ‘nice-to-haves’ but ‘must-haves’. 

Streamlining scheduling and enrolments through automation

Scheduling and managing course enrolments are tedious, time-consuming tasks for students and staff alike. By far one of the biggest challenges faced was not having a universal system to navigate scheduling, which led to weeks’ worth of additional manual work on the part of staff and often led to technical issues scheduling classes on the part of students. 

We needed a more efficient system, one that freed our staff from having to manually book thousands of courses when the system failed to do so. We also needed to provide a universal scheduling view for staff across various departments which had become accustomed to using their preferred specialised scheduling tools.

Also Read: For the digital economy, traditional education needs an update

By building 36 APIs, supported by platforms such as MuleSoft, we’ve been able to reduce manual work across the organisation by 60 per cent and increase developer speed by 44 per cent. This has also allowed us to automate the enrolment process, further liberating staff from extra work.

Less time spent on cumbersome processes such as scheduling and course bookings means we can focus on boosting our digital learning experience through new services. 

Furthermore, we’ve also been able to integrate our student information system with other systems to give all staff access to a universal and holistic view of scheduling while using their preferred tools. 

Building the classrooms of tomorrow

Organisations today need to take a holistic approach to understand their core audiences and the education sector is no exception. 

Empowered by MuleSoft and a focus on reusable assets, we’ve boosted productivity across the institution, cutting around two weeks of manual work and development every semester to enrol and deliver student life capability. 

We plan to continue innovation in the future, such as relaunching our Alumni Portal so past students can reap the benefits of a connected experience too. The way we work and live is constantly changing – the way we learn must also be reimagined to meet students’ needs and build the digital classrooms of tomorrow. 

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing contributions from the community. Become a thought leader in the community and share your opinions or ideas and earn a byline by submitting a post.

Join our e27 Telegram group, FB community or like the e27 Facebook page

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Yoan Kamalski, the co-founder of co-living startup Hmlet, has stepped as the CEO of the Singaporean firm, Business Times has reported.

Peter Kennedy, senior advisor at Burda Principal Investments, an investor in Hmlet, is serving as its interim CEO starting this month.

As per this report, Kamalski’s stepping down is the latest in a series of departures by the top management. Hmlet CTO Pramodh Rai is set to leave in June.

Hmlet, hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, had cut its workforce in December last year after it struggled with sales and change in customer habits.

The post Yoan Kamalski steps down as CEO of Hmlet: Report appeared first on e27.

Meet Jenny Gustafson, who uses psychology to cultivate better relationships with her team and clients.

Today, she helps you understand WHY psychology is so powerful.

We discuss:
– How has knowledge of psychology helped us in life
– Why is psychology important for all founders to know
– How psychology can help you better understand your team members
– Why you MUST learn empathy NOW
– How psychology can help your team members better understand each other
– What it’s like to be a working mom
– And more!

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This article was first published on We Live To Build.

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