At some point, the COVID pandemic will pass, whether that’s due to a vaccine, a two-minute test, or herd immunity. But if you want to thrive in the post-COVID world, you’ve got to start working on operational improvements now. After all, if you’re walking to the starting line while your competitors are already settled into the blocks, you’ll never catch up. The good news is that people have lost all the props and crutches—their workstations, in-baskets, pencil sharpeners, coffee buddies, pet peeves, and their cannot-love-withouts—that anchored them to the old way of work. This seismic shift means that people can no longer say, “But we’ve always done it this way.” Without those anchors, resistance to change is significantly lower.
Read how value stream mapping helped two companies improve their processes in my new Industry Week article here.