“What started as a short-term intervention to manage risk around returning to physical workplaces is increasingly being seen as a medium-term strategy to support new ways of working.”

The return to the physical workplace is a major enterprise resource challenge – a Rubik’s cube of a problem balancing supply, demand and people.

I highlighted this in my first blog six weeks ago, and since then, KPMG UK’s Restart team have had over one hundred client conversations around how different enterprises are returning to work. What’s more, the teams have played a crucial role in the onboarding of tens of clients who are using KPMG’s Restart user journeys and technology configuration for Service Now, Microsoft and Salesforce.

From that starting point, some clear themes have emerged. Above all, what started as a short-term intervention to manage risk around returning to physical workplaces is increasingly being seen as a medium-term strategy to support new ways of working. So why has this strategic shift taken place?

• Many organisations are either considering reducing their office footprint (often significantly), and/or recalibrating their offices to become a place for specific collaborative work activities, rather than for transaction desk work.
• Some are seeking to use their employee base more efficiently, by making working patterns more flexible (reduced working weeks on demand), or by making it easier to spread workload better internally, avoiding the use of contingent labour.
• Others are recognising an ongoing need to manage the employee experience differently across what becomes a more remote user base.

These business cases all require information on employee needs, and workflow to support new activities, such as organising physical team working, managing office space demand, and making more tasks fungible across the employee base.

Speaking for KPMG in the UK, we started early in building user journeys to manage the near term challenge – and we’ve nearly completed the full deployment of those journeys via our app to 17,000 UK employees, and many more globally.

For the clients who are using these journeys to build their own Restart apps on ServiceNow, Salesforce and Microsoft, we’ve also packaged our Remote Worker Toolkit which is packed with assets, surveys and challenges to expedite remote working and collaboration. Now, we’re focussing on how to use the app as a platform to capture the information and run the processes needed to operate in this new reality.

As more clients onboard, we’re increasingly stretching the potential of the underlying platforms to meet these needs and create a one-stop, automated experience on the mobile phone for employees, to create an effective working model that works for them, whilst allowing organisations to succeed in the new reality.