As corporate and work environments continue to evolve, digital acceleration spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic has only heightened expectations about the speed and effectiveness of that evolution. That pandemic-related digital acceleration was necessary to secure immediate economic survival, but it ended up doing something more — setting a new normal in terms of organizational speed. So, while the original intention was to quickly enable remote work, organizations now see digital acceleration as a more permanent part of the effort to realize business outcomes.
86% of the 326 business executives across different functions surveyed by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services in April 2021 say their organization had accelerated its digital transformation during the pandemic. Of those 279 executives who responded that way, 91% plan to keep this faster pace as their default speed, or move even faster, for the foreseeable future.
That “great acceleration”, however, did not always come with optimal results in terms of productivity, scope, or speed. After all, the survey reveals that not all companies were well-prepared for the digital acceleration necessary during the pandemic. Fewer than half of survey respondents (45%) strongly agree that they were able to accelerate digital initiatives and stay productive
at the same time. Only one-quarter of respondents strongly agree that they were able to accelerate the digitization of all the processes that they set out to digitize during the pandemic, and just 28% say they have been able to transform as fast as they needed to over the past year.
You can also discover more findings of the full report by downloading it here.
