Category: Liderazgo, Mercadeo y Gerencia

Executive Summary

In order to limit the spread of Covid-19 in workplaces, managers must ensure that employees are comfortable disclosing their risk. A potential solution, is to implement “random rotation” policies in the workplace. Random rotation ensures that workers who report exposure maintain plausible deniability vis à vis coworkers and direct managers. An employee being sent home can plausibly argue that he or she was unwillingly randomly-selected. Through this channel, workers concerned that they may be sick can safely ask to temporarily isolate. The cost of random rotation is that some employees will be sent home even if they don’t ask to be. This is a calculated cost. The fact that healthy people can be rotated out of work is the reason it is safe to self-report exposure.

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As the economy reopens, employers are striving to adopt policies and practices that protect their employees from contracting Covid-19. It’s an especially pressing concern, given that infections continue to surge in many states.

Ideally, employees would proactively report that they, or someone in their immediate environment, is experiencing early symptoms as soon as they suspect they may have been exposed. However, employees may not want to reveal that they are a contagion risk. In spite of CDC and WHO guidelines on reducing stigma, reports of discrimination against Covid-19 survivors and frontline workers abound. This makes suppressing outbreaks early very challenging. It also means that as employers plan re-entry — or manage existing in-person workforces — they must ensure that employees are comfortable disclosing risk.

We have researched how safety violations and sexual harassment get reported in garment factories, as well as the effectiveness of different reporting protocols in generating actionable data. We believe that the lessons learned from those high-stakes contexts can help to ensure that workers to report potential Covid-19 exposure in a timely manner.

One approach is to implement “random rotation” policies in the workplace. In this scenario, all workers are regularly surveyed about their Covid-19 exposure and symptoms. Based on survey responses, a minimum share of employees, say between 5 and 10%, is systematically rotated out of the workplace for a week. Employees rotated out include all employees reporting Covid-19 exposure as well as a randomly selected group of employees who do not. At the end of the week, returning employees are tested for symptoms. Symptomatic or Covid-19-positive employees receive appropriate medical care.

Random rotation ensures that workers who report exposure maintain plausible deniability vis-à-vis coworkers and direct managers. An employee being sent home can plausibly argue that his or her selection truly was random. Thus workers concerned that they may be sick can safely ask to temporarily isolate. The cost of random rotation is that some employees will be sent home even if they don’t ask to be. This is a calculated cost. The fact that healthy people can be rotated out of work is why it’s safe to self-report exposure.

The methods described here can be used to elicit sensitive information beyond Covid-19 exposure. Mental health issues, burn out, and harassment are major threats to employee well-being that often go unreported because of fear of stigma. All of them have been made worse by the pandemic, confinement, and job insecurity. Investing in survey methods that ensure plausible deniability can help get information out and target support to the people who need it.

A Tested Methodology

Random rotation builds on “randomized response” survey methods that have been used by social scientists to collect sensitive data for decades. The key idea is plausible deniability. Surveys must be designed so that any sensitive answer can be attributed to random shocks in the survey procedure. This allows respondents to plausibly deny having submitted a sensitive answer regardless of the recorded response.

For instance, a researcher seeking to estimate illicit drug use among athletes may give survey respondents a deck of cards bearing different questions: 20 cards ask the question “Do you use performance-enhancing drugs?” and 10 cards say “There is no question. Just answer YES.” Each athlete shuffles the deck and privately draws a card. If an athlete answers “YES,” the researcher cannot infer whether the athlete uses drugs or is complying with the survey protocol.

While using randomized response in organizational settings is a more recent idea, research shows that these techniques can significantly increase truthful reporting. And laboratory evidence shows that plausible deniability improves whistleblowing, even under threat of retaliation. Outside of social science research, protecting sources is a familiar concern for military and law enforcement agencies. Part of the value of random “cordon and search” counter-insurgency operations used in Afghanistan and Iraq is that they allow military forces to act on information while protecting their sources.

How to Implement Random Rotation

HR departments can implement random rotation themselves, but it may be easier to contract with survey firms to collect workers’ self-reports and develop a list for HR that doesn’t disclose individual responses. It’s essential that a minimum share of the workforce be sent home in order to protect the identities of potentially-exposed employees. A plausible starting point would be to decide initially to rotate between 5 and 10% of the workforce, to survey workers on whether they feel comfortable enough to report exposure, and then to adjust the percentage depending on responses.

An important complement of random rotation is a paid sick-leave or work-from-home program that limits the potential financial losses from being rotated out of the workplace (the Families First Act subsidizes sick leave polices for small and medium enterprises). This is especially important for economically vulnerable employees. If managers are concerned that employees are abusing the system and systematically asking to be rotated out, the number of leaves per worker could be kept to 2 or 3 per half-year. Finally, random rotation is more useful when employees are knowledgeable  about their contagion risk. For this reason, organizations should encourage employees to participate in contact tracing programs.

Is Random Rotation Right for Your Organization?

Whether random rotation is right for your organization depends on its ease of implementation and the magnitude of health benefits it brings. Random rotation is particularly easy to implement in workplaces that are not functioning at full capacity or have work-from-home programs. In these cases, the opportunity cost of sending a healthy employee home is low. In addition, implementing a random rotation policy expresses a commitment to public health that may help employees manage their re-entry anxiety.

Further Reading

Potential health benefits are high if employees are at high risk of Covid-19 exposure or if employees are economically vulnerable. Meatpacking plants are a good example. Close working conditions and cold temperatures facilitate contagion. Economically vulnerable workers, aware of high unemployment rates, may fear losing their job if they bring up potential illness.

Ultimately, it may be appropriate to tailor random rotation policies to individual work units. Economically vulnerable frontline employees may need a higher minimum rate of rotation to feel comfortable reporting they are a contagion risk. Companies that are interested in applying these policies can find implementation resources here.

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Executive Summary

Due to several barriers, tech adoption at an organizational level is often slow or even nonexistent. Why is true tech adoption so difficult to achieve? Based on the authors’ experience working on these issues, they see five key actions business leaders can take to create a culture that will help drive better, more effective tech adoption: 1) incentivize technology use, 2) invest in infrastructure, 3) make reskilling and learning part of the plan, 4) don’t make it piecemeal, 5) and understand how governments and policy are involved.

Erik Dreyer/Getty Images

While the use and application of technology has become near ubiquitous around the world, the actual adoption of new and emerging technologies across most organizations continues to be less than optimal. Due to several barriers, tech adoption at an organizational level is often slow or even nonexistent. This keeps old legacy systems alive and hinders an organization from achieving its full potential efficiently. This lag in adoption has long been a concern for companies but now, amid a pandemic, it’s a crisis.

As businesses have been compelled to re-evaluate their business models either in part or in whole, many have adopted technology to counter difficult market conditions — making externally facing changes, such as revamping their online presence to stem slumps in revenue, or internal ones, such as automating payroll functions or using an enterprise-wide tool to keep tab of workflows to enable their teams to work effectively and productively from home.

This process of rapid transformation is being aided by technology companies, whose business models often start with getting their products into the hands of as many users as possible. Most technology innovators believe in the “democratization of technology” — making technology platforms available for free or only a nominal fee — and letting  user adoption play a major role in how those products and innovations are developed. For example, with the sudden need for more online education tools, the plethora of products that Google alone offers has allowed for quick adoption and adaptation among schools and institutes and will surely inform the company’s product roadmap.

Despite this flurry of activity, we still find that technology adoption is often too slow and the lasting effects are unclear. Why is true tech adoption so difficult to achieve?

While the coronavirus has changed a lot about business, research that preceded the virus can help shed some light on this question: Published last fall and based on interviews with750 executives across Australia, China, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Singapore, United Kingdom, the United States, and India, a survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit identified challenges including: employee skills, lack of senior management awareness, lack of remote working opportunities, organizational culture, issues of complexity, cost and risk, and inadequate infrastructure. Plus, older, larger companies are often constrained by the presence of legacy systems and legacy approaches to innovation and problem-solving.

Costs, complexity, and skills are all valid barriers, of course, but without the right organizational culture supporting technology — especially in the age of a pandemic — investments in training or specific tools could wither on the vine. That’s why we see organizational culture as area of particular focus for companies looking to adapt to new technologies in coming months.

Based on our experience working on these issues, we see five key levers to help business leaders create a culture that will help drive better, more effective tech adoption.

Incentivize technology use. Building such a culture requires different types of approaches across industries, but a time-tested strategy is to incentivize technology use. Monetary benefits or fresh solutions to hard problems can usher in behavioral changes when managed properly. The same way periodic appraisals determine staff competence, the ambit of employee reviews can be widened to include technology adoption scores. For example, office teams and teachers in several countries are already using gamification apps such as Kahoot to appraise or evaluate staff and students.

The vast majority of people readily embrace technology in their personal lives — whether in the form of smart phones, smart watches, or apps that are used for personal finance to personal fitness (and everything in between). They make life simpler, more convenient, and more efficient. Apart from generating much needed statistics, a lot of these technologies actually save time and analyze patterns in our day-to-day lives. This suggests that people simply need the right incentives from their workplaces or from governments, should they be employed in the public sector.

Invest in the infrastructure. If the use of technology is going to be cumbersome, its uptake is going to be disappointing too. Another requisite for creating a culture of technology adoption lies in making the infrastructure around it — including IT networks and systems, software, processes, and practices — supportive and user friendly. Without both investment and a thoughtful execution plan for new technologies, it is difficult to convince employees of the benefits of adopting new technologies. While this can be a hard sell from a budget perspective, having a point of view on the opportunity cost the business faces from cumbersome, outdated technologies offered without the right support systems may help make the case.

Make reskilling and learning part of the plan. On similar lines, education and reskilling go a long way in enabling the right kind of culture. It’s telling that one McKinsey global study found that 87% of executives were either already experiencing or expecting skill gaps in their workforce within the next couple of years. But rather than thrusting new technologies upon employees, organizations should provide them with the right training and support to better use and adopt those tools. This can look very different depending on your industry, but a good question to start with is the relevance of the individual in the evolving nature of work.

Don’t make it piecemeal. Organizations must have a long-term strategy toward the creation of a culture that encourages and embraces technology adoption. A piecemeal approach to tech adoption and implementation may feel like short-term progress, but will not lead to the creation of a digitally-focused mindset, and it will not result in a clean departure from legacy systems or attitudes.

Understand how governments and policy are involved. Governments also play a role in fostering and encouraging a culture of tech adoption. The right kind of culture often percolates from the highest authority creating a conducive environment for technology to thrive. They lay the legal groundwork and build the ecosystems that attract tech entrepreneurs, who in turn, drive innovation. Be it Silicon Valley or Singapore, public policy has a role to play in getting the ball rolling on new technologies and ways to create stronger research and knowledge sharing.

With heightened concerns over data flows across borders, governments will have to work closely with private players to ensure that both sovereign and economic interests are safeguarded. And some small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are being incentivized by their governments to digitalize faster. A prime example is Singapore, where the government is incentivizing SMEs to go digital — this is part of the stimulus packages announced by the government to support businesses combat the economic impacts of Covid-19.

Technology has the potential to build positive culture and purpose. It will, without doubt, further organizational potential. But technology, culture, and purpose will need to become better integrated if we want to build enduring and sustainable organizations and societies of the future.