29 May 2020
The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has shaken the global economy significantly. Organisations and businesses have reported immense losses, with operational level at a halt and productivity dropping immeasurably across industries. Facing this catastrophe, the teams at Averis came together and worked laboriously, complementing one another’s roles in enabling continued productivity company-wide. Speaking to us is Patrick Khoo, Chief Information Officer at Averis Sdn. Bhd.
Q: Would you say that Averis maintained the same operational and productivity level during the past ten weeks? What are your key success factors?
PK: We are happy that our teams have met all Service Level Agreements (SLAs) while operating under our Business Continuity Plan (BCP). The level of customer transactions has not waivered throughout this pandemic period, and our teams met all the support and service requests. The number of projects the teams continue to work on are as planned, with some plausible impediments around provisioning and implementations due to travel restrictions, supply chain challenges and also the limitations of third parties.
Our recruitment and onboarding activities, which were transformed into virtual sessions, were carried out as scheduled. We brought training programmes onto video conferencing platform which turned out to be more effective as the number of participants is no longer constrained by the size of our training room, and the interactions are efficiently managed on the digital tool.
I believe the keys to these achievements have always been encapsulated in our core values – T.O.P.I.C.C., and some of these values have served us especially well during this trying time.
We spoke earlier (in the previous article) about how the various teams came together and worked as Complementary Teams. As we respond to the abrupt and drastic shift in work environment for the entire workforce, our agile BCP allows us to redistribute workload while balancing roles and responsibilities in a timely and efficient manner, taking into consideration of infrastructure and equipment readiness for different individuals. The result is a seamless transition from physical work location to virtual work environment where our people access from their own homes, and on which our people continue to deliver.
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Ownership is working remotely and pushing the agendas through. Taking ownership is not just being accountable for your job scope, it is also making active and enthusiastic commitments to your job, such as taking something off someone’s plate and putting it on your own. A good example is during the transition, there were quite a number of colleagues who took the initiative to cover additional workload to help out team members facing connectivity or infrastructure challenges, while our IT team worked to resolve everyone’s issues. This is a fundamental act that is simple yet vital to an organisation’s success.
People is one of the most vital assets to Averis and we make it our mission to make our work environment as people-centric as possible. We develop our people to grow with the business. During time like this when we are confined to our homes and isolated, we take time-out to connect with one another on a regular basis. Our team did not let social distancing did not stop us from celebrating our people’s birthdays. We deliver specially-designed, vibrant cakes to the homes of our birthday boys and birthday girls so that they can celebrate with their loved ones at home. When the enhanced MCO was announced, we set up a team to manage limited staffing at the office for the essential roles. This includes providing items like infrared thermometer and face masks to hygiene practices like hourly sanitizing. Lunch is provided by the company for those who need to work in the office so that they don’t need to buy lunch outside, which reduces risks and safeguards our people’s health.
Read about the full set of Averis’ Core Values. With these fundamentals at the heart of Averis’ business operations, it is no wonder the team manage to overcome difficulties arising from the unexpected pandemic, and responded efficiently within a very short period of time, which brings the level of damage to the lowest possible.
Patrick shared with us the post-MCO plans at Averis. Stay on to find out what their key learnings are and how they are getting ready for post-MCO in our next article.