The 5 Biggest Resource Challenges Facing Agencies in a Post-COVID-19 World
By Moira Alexander, founder of PMWorld 360 Magazine and Lead-Her-Ship Group
Industries around the world are familiar with how business landscapes are in a state of constant change. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has presented additional harsh difficulties and revealed some brutal realities, posing significant resource challenges in 2021 and beyond.
COVID-19 has served as a wake-up call for virtually every business and institution worldwide, with the recovery estimated to likely take more than five years for some sectors. It has posed – and continues to pose – some major resourcing challenges that threaten to delay projects or halt work in many companies altogether. Going forward, this could become problematic, especially in service-based industries.
Dynamic Resource Optimization
When modern resource management technology and processes enable managers and their workforce to understand, predict, and consistently respond to challenges that impact business, the result is Dynamic Resource Optimization (DRO).
Resource Optimization Challenges in Agencies
Some service-based sectors, such as consultancy, marketing, and digital service agencies, will likely feel the effects of these five key challenges beyond the pandemic.
- The speed of change
- Shrinking budgets as a result of the pandemic
- Remote workforce and the expanding gig economy
- Diversity, equity & inclusion initiatives, and adoption rates
- The deteriorating mental health of an overstressed workforce
Understanding how these challenges can impact your business, and how Dynamic Resource Optimization can provide solutions, is key to creating effective resource management strategies made for the modern workforce.
Speed of Change
With rapidly changing customer expectations and swift digital infrastructure adoption, finding the right skills at the right time has become much trickier. Since the start of the pandemic, the speed of change has increased, creating additional strain on companies to keep up and survive.
Service-based companies like marketing agencies have historically relied on face-to-face interactions and longer lead times to convert to a sale. Customer expectations have changed and are shifting away from more time-consuming in-person interactions in favor of more effortless interactions that provide faster access to products, solutions, and services. This is particularly evident with millennials and Gen Z, who want to engage online with support teams to solve problems seamlessly.
Meeting client needs requires finding team members with multi-channel or omnichannel support skills. It also requires firms to invest in supporting the growth of new channels while also maintaining a presence in existing support channels. This is especially important for other generations who still prefer in-person interaction. It can be a tricky balancing act that requires hiring new people or retraining existing team members to ensure skills adjacency.
One McKinsey Global Survey estimates that since COVID-19, companies have accelerated the digitization of their customer, supply chain, and internal operations interactions by three to four years. Surveyed companies that have successfully responded to the COVID-19 crisis have something in common: the adoption of a range of technology capabilities that fill in talent gaps and enable Dynamic Resource Optimization.
Shrinking Budgets
Shrinking budgets are having an impact on many industries, including service-based sectors like marketing and advertising agencies. Budget cuts top the list of concerns and are one of the biggest challenges for marketers. Many marketing and digital service agency budgets are shrinking, creating a shift to adopting digital technologies for greater visibility, agility, and data-driven decision-making.
A recent report by Gartner shows that marketers have reported that COVID-19 has already delayed campaign launches, altered ad creatives, and forced the cancellation of media buys. Gartner’s findings state that 76 percent of marketing leaders expect a decrease in marketing budgets due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As companies increase their digital infrastructure adoption to offset shrinking budgets, they may still struggle to find, attract, and retain project team members as they wade into deeply competitive labor pools. The result is that Dynamic Resource Optimization’s ability to improve the profitability of every project will only become more crucial the tighter that budgets become.
Remote Workforce and the Gig Economy
Remote work and the gig economy have always been around, just not at the levels seen since the pandemic began. The pandemic has accelerated the pace of remote work and added to existing workplace transformation issues. Today, over a third of workers are involved in the gig economy, and their wages and participation grew 33% in 2020 as a direct result of COVID-19. A by-product of this rise in independent workers has been increased employee activism and decreased employee loyalty. This has further contributed to skills shortages or skills matching challenges as companies seek reliable, loyal, and consistent team members to meet clients’ projects.
Dynamic Resource Optimization is designed to take a blended workforce into account, helping to uncover resource availability, match appropriate skills with project needs, and juggle a constantly shifting workforce makeup for a stronger, more agile team.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiatives Adoption
With so many people working remotely since the start of the pandemic, businesses are quickly recognizing the need to access a broader talent pool of qualified and diverse candidates. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) initiative adoption have also come into focus over the last year, and adoption rates are factoring into recruitment policies and practices. This, however, is not a direct result of the pandemic but rather a turning point in society that will have a long-lasting effect on the current and future hiring practices of virtually every organization around the globe. Some of the major resource challenges that will center around these considerations include:
- Removing systemic issues within the hiring process
- Legal implications for not eliminating bias from the hiring process
- Leveraging technology that minimizes human bias present in the hiring process
- Providing training to engage a truly diverse talent pool that supports an inclusive work environment
- Establishing DE&I policies that demonstrate social responsibility to clients
Going forward, DE&I policies and goals as well as internal culture, societal, and client expectations will need to factor into resource management strategies and policies.
Deteriorating Employee Mental Health
Workplace stress has always been a factor in the mental health of employees. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work and associated challenges have significantly accelerated the impact on an already taxed workforce and further complicated resource optimization strategies. It’s estimated that almost half of American workers are suffering from mental health issues due to COVID-19.
How well teams work, engage, and communicate is far more dependent on the health of individual team members than most think. Sadly, the stigma around mental health still exists, and people saying that they have mental health issues can impact morale and engagement at work.
While companies may adopt the most advanced technologies, have effective processes, and have a stellar reputation, team members’ mental and physical health can often be neglected. Stress, isolation, social factors, and other workplace issues can play a significant role in the rise of mental health challenges. It can lead to things like:
- Poor productivity and performance
- Problems with intra- and inter-team communication
- Human error
- Increased absence
- High staff turnover
The result of these five challenges taking place in the constantly changing landscape of industries in 2021 is the overall inability to reach effective resource utilization rates, leading to missed opportunities, missed objectives, and deadlines. It’s only by directly addressing these and other challenges through Dynamic Resource Optimization and a holistic approach to resources that true success is possible.
Dynamic Resource Optimization can be achieved through technology that can support increasingly complex projects, a networked economy of contract workers that an provide unlimited flexibility in resource management, and state-of-the-art processes that provide a means to address the challenges that businesses face. Achieving Dynamic Resource Optimization helps companies to effectively support complex, modern workforce needs.