Transparency, trust, and collaboration are the first pillars of any successful business. It does not take a lot of study to come to this conclusion, but it is not clear that this is a cardinal value for everyone after more than 12 months of the COVID pandemic:
• There are those who yearn for a return to normality: not the new normal, but the old normal.
• Those who think that the world has totally changed and that anything is possible now.
• The waiters, and there are many of them, who “wait and see”.
• The cynics who are waiting for the next catastrophe.
Let us take a different tack. Beyond the marketing slogan that hammers home the point that customers and employees must be put at the centre of our concerns, we must remember that long-term success is achieved through the:
• Strength, transparency, and leadership of the management team,
• Trust in the staff and their training,
• Horizontal and vertical collaboration at all levels.
If collaboration is fostered by trust and leadership, the work environment is essential: culture, space, flexibility, and mobility, face-to-face and remote are all determining factors. To this can be added exogenous elements such as transport, location of the company, products, and services, etc.
Collaboration is of course primarily “intramural”, but it must also be possible to collaborate with teleworking colleagues. This “dual” system is not as simple as it seems because, at least during meetings, we tend to call on people who are physically present more than on colleagues who are videoconferencing.
Finally, collaboration must take place with customers and business partners: the relationship should be based on partnership, which is rarely the case. To endure, all partners, whether customers, suppliers, or employees, must be able to find their place in the equation.
Perhaps these are typically Swiss cardinal values: a sense of compromise, diplomacy, respect, and a sense of value.
In a world that has become binary and often “reductive”, let us hope that these principles can continue to dictate our future collaborations.
Good luck, good thoughts, and good reading.