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Business
Dare to be wise during times of change
Kurt Looyens, Founding Partner, Dolya Consulting
It was the Roman poet Horatius who, way back in 20 BC, encouraged us to “Sapere aude” or “Dare to know” by telling the story of a man waiting for a stream to cease flowing, before attempting to cross it. “He who begins is half done. Thus dare to begin, dare to know, dare to be wise.” Human endeavour, effort and persistence make us overcome all obstacles.
Fast forward to the global pandemic, which has changed all of our lives indefinitely. More than 2000 years later, Horatius’ wisdom couldn’t be more topical. Just like then, we cannot wait for “the stream to cease flowing, before attempting to cross it”. A pandemic gives impetus to change.
The 2020 pandemic triggered a density
of change in all aspects of life, at a pace unseen in modern history. Change in how we deal with work life; change in how we deal with each other in our daily personal interactions and change to our society at large.
“Daring to be wise”, we are advocating what could well be a long-term silver lining of Covid-19, indefinitely, if we just “dare to begin”.
Remote working
One of the most visible alterations in our daily routines has been working from home. In response to the Covid-19 crisis, nearly all businesses were abruptly forced to transition portions of, and in many cases their entire workforce, to remote work.
In the EU, home workers now make up over 40% of the workforce, up from less than 10% in 2019. A similar trend can be seen elsewhere in the world. It hasn’t just impacted work-life balance, carbon footprint
or overall productivity though. As companies hurried to get their employees up and running remotely, it is likely many were in the first place focused on connectivity, while potentially ignoring the privacy, security, compliance and document management challenges which the “new normal” brought along. Even more, as those companies are now considering shifting (partly or fully) to remote work permanently, that will require many internal processes to be refined and restructured if businesses are to stay resilient.
Technology has made fast strides in the last decade. Many businesses nevertheless continue to rely on the same old tools for business-critical functions. Take compliance. In this new remote working environment, compliance officers cannot walk the floors as before and will need easy access to company communications, systems, and documents.
The compliance workload has been growing consistently, even before the
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