Elly Yates-Roberts |
This month, we are bidding farewell to our traditional office space. Like many companies, we leaned into Covid-19 by innovating with our partners at Microsoft and leveraging Teams, Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, Guides and soon Mesh. During this time, we have found that employees and clients can be productive working from home, including by facilitating demos, virtual workshops and development reviews from home offices, garages and even in the field.
We helped clients with countermeasures to Covid-19 travel restrictions that continue to create opportunities to reduce travel time and expense and we pushed out guided skills training when it was not safe to gather in the training centre with an instructor.
Some of this was a compromise but much of it turned out to be better, more effective and less expensive than previous methods. Now it is time to harvest what we have learned and turn what has been a tragic experience into a better future.
Continue working at home
Our instructional designers and programmers will continue writing, designing and programming at home where they are more productive – adding in-person collaboration when needed.
Transform common space
While we are not returning to the office, we can still benefit from working together with clients in the same physical or virtual space. We have invested in a hybrid digital facility that will continue to virtually serve our global customer base while also serving in-person workshops and production. It includes a digitally equipped conference room, large digital demo/learning lab and a studio large enough to accommodate half a dozen vehicles. The famous Tustin Blimp Hangar #2 is also located close by, where it provides 237,000 square feet for massive virtual events.
Leverage the hybrid
Our need to transition to virtual delivery of services and collaboration opened global market opportunities for CraneMorley. We have become very good at delivering instruction and developing projects with clients in Ireland, Germany, Vietnam and the USA via virtual sessions. However, it has also been great to return to in-person collaboration.
What is truly exciting for the CraneMorley team is the opportunity to “eat our own digital dog food”. We respect that most of our clients will go through a similar journey in the rest of 2021 and together we will forge a better path.
Thomas Pratt is president at CraneMorley
This article was originally published in the Summer 2021 issue of The Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.