The pandemic caused abrupt global shifts in the way people worked across all industries in 2020, with remote work becoming the "new normal" for workforces worldwide. But while the virtual workplace may have emerged as a byproduct of the pandemic, it seems most business leaders and finance and operations professionals across the world believe it's here to stay.
According to survey results published in Vena's 2020 Industry Benchmark Report, out of the 350 global business leaders surveyed from a wide range of industries, an overwhelming majority of survey respondents (92.5%) revealed that they saw the virtual workplace as something that's here to stay, promising to make an impact on organizational culture well into the future.
As companies continue to meet the needs of their remote workforce, how can they find ways to facilitate more collaboration within finance teams and cross functionally to stay at the forefront of change and to help their businesses plan for today and tomorrow?
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Despite the many challenges brought on by the pandemic, one of the valuable lessons for businesses and finance teams that emerged from the global crisis is the importance of driving cross-functional collaboration. Aligning your finance team with other teams across your organization is critical for navigating change, positioning your business to adapt to a new normal and ensuring that everyone is working toward the same strategic goals. But in order for your finance team to make faster and smarter data-driven decisions based on trustworthy numbers, it's important to bring your people, departments and systems into a single source solution so they can work anywhere together.
Integrated Business Planning
It's easier to bring everyone together with a unified view of your business when all of your business's financial and operational data sources are integrated in one place. By automating and centralizing your data, you'll be able to connect the dots between departments and provide your teams with a secure and collaborative work environment. From this integrated business planning ecosystem, additional data aggregation and planning capabilities will empower your teams to analyze data faster, measure KPIs and develop multiple future scenarios with scenario planning. And as you continue to drive your business forward, creating dynamic reports using ad hoc reporting tools and interactive visuals and dashboards, will give you a full view of your company's latest financial data--from any device--wherever and whenever you need it.
With accurate data at everyone's fingertips, your finance team will be better positioned to dig deeper into the data and to make better strategic decisions for the business, ensuring organizational resilience and overall financial health. This includes supporting a changing workforce by reallocating skills where necessary, hiring new talent to fill in gaps and making business investments as you plan to grow.
Read this article to discover how Vena's Finance-Led Planning solutions can help you streamline budgeting, forecasting, what-if analysis, strategic planning, financial reporting, management reporting and dashboard and KPI tracking.
Thriving in the New Normal
Getting positioned for the new normal means reimagining new ways of working across your organization. But when you unify your finance team and other teams within your organization around common goals and provide them with the tools and complete planning capabilities to ensure business continuity and meet new business demands, not only will your business be better equipped to navigate change, it will be well positioned to thrive in the new normal.
