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4 Strategies to More Successfully Manage Remote Teams

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Since the 1990s, we have seen major industries get disrupted by new technologies and innovation. The Internet and tech commoditization, increasing consumer demands, and rising competitive rivalry have all forced businesses to adapt and evolve. Managing disruption has made the overall business landscape much faster, uncertain and, at times, chaotic.

With the pandemic, we have had to adapt again to remote or hybrid work arrangements. While it has many perks, working remotely brings with it a new set of challenges that managers continually need to navigate. First, it is harder to read your team’s energy when you are not in the same office. Second, the number of meetings tends to increase in remote environments, which tends to lead to lower productivity. Third, not being in the same room sometimes reduces the speed of execution, resulting in bottlenecks and miscommunication.

Although working remotely comes with its challenges, here are four strategies that leaders can implement to better manage remote or hybrid teams and disruptive environments:

1. Build a Team for Adaptability

The most important capability to navigate a world of disruption is adaptability. Teams that are built with an emphasis on adaptability are able to pivot and change direction much faster, and are more likely to solve problems that they have not seen before. These teams are also able to navigate the nature of remote work.

Adaptable team members keep an open mind and may be more inclined to find new ways to collaborate with each other, and it may be easier for them to continuously pivot to changing regulations or rules. In other words, being adaptable allows teams to get the job done whether they are working from the office, a client site, or remotely.

2. Get Buy-In

Before starting on your journey, focus on getting your team to buy into your vision and mission. Show your team why the goals are important, and the prize that awaits everyone on the other side of the journey. Being bought-in makes your team more likely to push through uncertainty and change, especially when things get difficult. This can also reduce the need for constant oversight or micromanagement.

A team that is bought-in also feels more accountability with their work and with each other. This ensures teams are focused on getting results while supporting each other along the way. The resulting sense of investment also helps as burnout continues to be on the rise and the boundaries between work and life continue to get blurred while working from home.

3. Provide a Clear Plan and Establish Milestones

When things get chaotic, it helps to clearly define your roadmap and assign key actions to your team with ownership and accountability. When dispersed and facing uncertainty, direction is what a team needs most. Providing your team a clear action plan not only gets you marching on the same path, but may also make you more productive.

Being clear on your deliverables and establishing concrete milestones can help reduce distractions, making it easier to navigate uncertainty and change. This can also reduce virtual meetings to relevant team members working toward a certain milestone, which could boost overall team productivity and save valuable time. 

4. Celebrate the Small Wins

When you are executing and being pulled in multiple directions, it is tough to take a step back from the nitty gritty day-to-day. Most of the work we do in transformational times does not yield results right away—it takes time. Especially when dispersed across different cities or countries, it is hard to see the progress we have made if we do not make a conscious effort to see the forest, not just the trees. Over time, this can contribute to burnout and lower productivity.

Celebrating the small wins helps your team see the progress they are making every day, and puts things into perspective. It also brings the team together, which is a must when working remotely and are not getting the social interaction that we need.

Employee Engagement is Key in COVID-19 Recovery

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Businesses and their employees have had to rapidly adjust to the shutdowns and disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and their ability to adapt and pivot will continue to be critical as organizations start to recover from the impacts of the crisis.

To further compound these circumstances, the ability to maintain engaged, empowered, and satisfied team members has proven challenging for many. While some organizations have thrived under their modified operating conditions, others have struggled to respond to change and keep team members engaged and productive. While rates of vaccinations are bringing some hope about the pandemic’s eventual end, the tidal wave of change we have experienced is unlikely to ebb any time soon.

When creating your COVID-19 recovery plans, the value of engaged and satisfied team members in this fast-moving environment must not be understated.

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Engaged employees will support your organization to achieve its mission, execute its strategy and generate results, particularly as times remain uncertain.

As leaders, we must ask: how can we leverage the rapid change we have experienced over the past year, continue to drive growth and sustain employee satisfaction and engagement? Here’s how:

1. Accept remote or hybrid work environments as the “new normal”

The days of office cubicles and open floor plans for all employees are gone. We now operate in a world where some of our team members will continue to work where it is the safest, most suitable, and most empowering for them.

Many organizations across industries have already embraced the fact that working remotely, in some form or fashion, is here to stay. This shift has had many benefits—such as being able to recruit talent outside of your typical geographic area and eliminating lengthy commutes from home to office. However, the shift has not been without challenges and very real risks.

As we move into a recovery phase, leaders must remain alert to the challenges brought by an environment with minimal face-to-face interaction, the potential for feelings of social isolation, the need for different ways to access information or support, and the natural distractions of being at home.

For leaders, scheduling regular check-ins and establishing rules of engagement has not changed, regardless of whether you work in an office or at home. However, with a majority of our workforce currently at home, we need to get creative in the way we support and engage our teams.

2. Manage the new risks

This shift from in-office environments to hybrid or remote work environments has brought to light many physical, psychological and technological risks. Leaders must build out their risk management framework to incorporate a broader lens.

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It is now paramount to ensure team members have access to resources to work from home safely and comfortably, with the right technology support and a focus on open lines of communication.

The pandemic has also brought on feelings of isolation and fear for many. If you have yet to adjust your workplace mental and physical support offerings, do not neglect these critical needs any longer. Ensure such offerings are also set up for those workers continuing in a hybrid or fully remote setting.

3. Prioritize communication

How we communicate and engage with our teams is as important as ever. Whether it’s Zoom, Slack, Webex, Microsoft Teams or any of the other platforms we have increasingly relied on over the past year, we need to provide opportunities for both formal and informal communication to flow.

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Through informal social connections, leaders can demonstrate emotional support and consideration for their team, which ultimately leads to higher engagement.

When leaders are engaged, supportive, and available to their employees, it helps reduce feelings of isolation and reinforces your strong company culture. At the end of the day, when team members feel they work for an organization that supports their ambitions and wellbeing, it increases productivity, retention, and cost savings. This translates to bottom-line success.

Six Considerations Impacting Strategic Regulatory Change Management

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Regulatory change management (RCM) is one of the most important risk and compliance related domains in 2021, thanks to two key drivers. First, the shift from Republican deregulation to Democratic control and an expected uptick in regulatory requirements. Second, similar to the 2008 crash, the pandemic-induced economy and focus on Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans caused many banks to relax their regulatory exams and requirements, while regulators gave companies extra runway for transitioning processes and policies for remote/work-from-home models.

Sometimes regulatory changes are significant enough to change business strategy. In 2021, chief risk officers must be prepared to quickly adapt and react to a historically volatile risk management environment.

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When thinking about an updated, strategic regulatory change management program, here are six considerations for chief risk officers:

1. Lax compliance during the pandemic in 2020 may have introduced hidden risk for activities that normally would have had deeper oversight. 
Sometimes rule changes can also introduce new risks or eliminate a previous risk that needed to be managed, such as potential new default rates around extensions, forfeiture and other things. For example, historically low interest rates present a vexing risk for banks dealing with less profit but just as many loans to process.

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What kind of new risk may be found within those loans?

2. When communicating change across the enterprise, establish responsibility to manage it.
Once you understand which regulations have changed, prioritize those that present the most risk, identify what department’s products and processes are impacted, and determine who is responsible for managing those policies. Having a secure central repository for communicating, storing and managing compliance documentation, versus relying on employees storing information on devices outside corporate servers, is ideal.
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3. If conducting quarterly testing of compliance requirements, it may be challenging to identify key areas in advance that could slip, such as controls around IT/cybersecurity.
When the risk portfolio changes, the controls to manage those risks must be updated accordingly. Firms that may now be less dependent on management oversight and more dependent on confirmations that processes are being followed should put automated controls in place to verify those activities.

4. Companies should shift to best practice or common checklists that can be standardized and shared across the enterprise. 
Assessment checklists are a great way to ensure that all requirements are being met for a wide variety of business processes. Once checklists have been updated, cloud-based software systems can track who has access and can also notify when changes happen. 

5. Historically done manually in-house by visible teams, monitoring and testing for compliance purposes will be conducted remotely. 
The visibility of those tests presents significant challenges, and it is critical to determine how errors and issues will progress and be communicated to the remote testing teams, management, and the organization at large. 

6. Verifying and certifying online training for remote employees can be daunting. 
Creating courses formalized for online training represents a major compliance and process change, particularly for companies in industries with limited work-from-home models, such as financial services. Training materials will need to be updated for new employees, while previously trained employees will need to be retrained. 

On Data Privacy Day, Catch Up on These Critical Risk Management and Data Security Issues

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Happy Data Privacy Day! Whether it is cyberrisk, regulatory risk or reputation risk, data privacy is increasingly intertwined with some of the most critical challenges risk professionals face every day, and ensuring security and compliance of data assets is a make or break for businesses.

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In Cisco’s new 2021 Data Privacy Benchmark Report, 74% of the 4,400 security professionals surveyed saw a direct correlation between privacy investments and the ability to mitigate security losses. The current climate is also casting more of a spotlight on privacy work, with 60% of organizations reporting they were not prepared for the privacy and security requirements to manage risks with the shift to remote work and 93% turning to privacy teams to help navigate these pandemic-related challenges. Amid COVID-19 response, headline-making data breaches and worldwide regulatory activity, data privacy is also a critical competency area for risk professionals in executive leadership and board roles, with 90% of organizations now asking for reporting on privacy metrics to their C-suites and boards.

“Privacy has come of age—recognized as a fundamental human right and rising to a mission-critical priority for executive management,” according to Harvey Jang, vice president and chief privacy officer at Cisco. “And with the accelerated move to work from anywhere, privacy has taken on greater importance in driving digitization, corporate resiliency, agility, and innovation.”

In honor of Data Privacy Day, check out some of Risk Management’s recent coverage of data privacy and data security:

CPRA and the Evolution of Data Compliance Risks

Also known as Proposition 24, the new California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) aims to enhance consumer privacy protections by clarifying and building on the expectations and obligations of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Frameworks for Data Privacy Compliance

As new privacy regulations are introduced, organizations that conduct business and have employees in different states and countries are subject to an increasing number of privacy laws, making the task of maintaining compliance more complex. While these laws require organizations to administer reasonable security implementations, they do not outline what specific actions should be taken. Proven security frameworks like Center for Internet Security (CIS) Top 20, HITRUST CSF, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Framework can provide guidance.

Protecting Privacy by Minimizing Data

New obligations under data privacy regulation in the United States and Europe require organizations not only to rein in data collection practices, but also to reduce the data already held. Furthering this imperative, over-retention of records or other information can lead to increased fines in the case of a data breach.

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As a result, organizations are moving away from the practice of collecting all the data they can toward a model of “if you can’t protect it, don’t collect it.”

3 Tips for Protecting Remote Employees’ Data

As COVID-19 continues to force many employees to work from home, companies must take precautions to protect sensitive data from new cyberattack vulnerabilities. That means establishing organization-wide data-security policies that take remote workers into account and inform them of the risks and how to avoid them. These three tips can help keep your organization’s data safe during the work-from-home era.

What to Do After the EU-US Privacy Shield Ruling

It was previously thought that the EU-US Privacy Shield aligned with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), but following the CJEU’s recent ruling, the Privacy Shield no longer provides a mechanism for legitimizing cross-border data flows to the United States. This has far-reaching consequences for all organizations that currently rely on it. In light of the new ruling, risk professionals must help their organizations to reevaluate data strategies and manage heightened regulatory risk going forward.

The Risks of School Surveillance Technology

Schools confront many challenges related to students’ safety, from illnesses, bullying and self-harm to mass shootings. To address these concerns, they are increasingly turning to a variety of technological options to track students and their activities. But while these tools may offer innovative ways to protect students, their inherent risks may outweigh the potential benefits. Tools like social media monitoring and facial recognition are creating new liabilities for schools.

2020 Cyberrisk Landscape

As regulations like CCPA and GDPR establish individuals’ rights to transparency and choice in the collection and use of their personal data, one can expect to see more people exercise these rights.

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In turn, businesses need to ensure they have formal and efficient processes in place to comply with such requests in the clear terms and prompt manner these regulations require, or risk fines and reputation fallout. These processes will also need to provide sufficient documentation to attest to compliance, so if businesses have not yet already, they should be building auditable and iterative procedures for “data revocation.”

Data Privacy Governance in the Age of GDPR

As personal information has become a monetizable asset, risk, compliance and data experts have increasingly been forced to address the regulatory and operational ramifications of the rapid, mass availability of personal customer and employee data circulated both inside and outside of organizations. With new data protection regulations, Canadian and U.S. companies must reassess how they process and safeguard personal information.

Key Features of India’s New Data Protection Law

Among the new data protection laws on the horizon is India’s Personal Data Protection Bill. While the legislation has not yet been approved and is likely to undergo changes before it is enacted, its fundamental structure and broad compliance obligations are expected to remain the same. Companies both inside and outside India should familiarize themselves with its requirements and begin preparing for how it will impact their data processing activities.