New Job. New Year. Retrospective.
As I reflect on how I closed the financial year for the Digital Experience business of GHD Digital, I have some important self-reflections from the past fiscal year. In 2020, I joined GHD at the beginning of the pandemic and took a global leadership role with GHD Digital’s Digital Experience practice. While joining a new company is already quite challenging, joining a fast-growing digital company during a global pandemic was even more difficult.
The pandemic had a positive ‘forcing function’ on our business. Now that I am preparing for the next fiscal year, here are few reflections from the past year, and I am grateful for each of these lessons:
- Resilience: The high degree of resilience exhibited by GHD Digital spoke volumes to me about the caliber of my colleagues. What has stood out for me is the fantastic way we pulled together during the last year. As the dark clouds of the pandemic hovered over us, we worked hard to find best practices and new ways to adapt to unique challenges as they arose. The ease with which we transitioned to remote work and the high productivity levels that our employees still maintained made it seem like we have always operated this way.
- Digital mindset: Perhaps one of the most significant benefits we had was the ability to change the culture within Digital through a “digital mindset.” When #GHDDigital began, we knew the importance of thinking and behaving digitally. We used the pandemic as a motivator for us to develop a culture around creating this belief. Our digital mindset comprises five core tenets: self-aware and learning, entrepreneurial and innovative, collaborative and co-creative, optimistic and resilient, agile and adaptable, and technical/business leadership. This mindset helped us weather challenges through the year while also preparing us for the future.
- Priority: I am indeed grateful for the way we reorganized our priorities — health and family first. The health of our workforce and colleagues is of utmost importance. We quickly reorganized to ensure that our global staff of talented people stayed healthy, which in return kept their communities safe. I am glad to be working for a company that always puts our people first. We adapted to changing times by focusing on client engagement and developing new ways to engage and interact safely.
- Empathy: The team at GHD Digital maintained a sense of appreciation for empathy. Just like us, our customers and clients are facing complex challenges. Within our Digital Experience practice, we empathized with our customers and used this time to understand their existing and new challenges better and work alongside them. We innovated with our client’s changing business priorities and engineering requests.
- Innovation: We tapped into our ability to innovate. In Digital Experience, we discovered new ways of extending our business resilience to customers and markets by establishing our Platform Business Unit to deliver digital transformation through our platform solutions. We also invested in developing new connected infrastructure solutions using IIOTs and cloud platforms.
- Teamwork: We came together as a global team. One of the privileges I have had is an opportunity to integrate and be consistent with our offerings, solutions, and service capabilities globally. Our teams are more integrated because of our new global challenges.
- Customer experience: Our opportunity to tailor digital experiences to engage with our customers became more natural and intentional. Customer engagement became central to our idea of digital experience. Understanding how we can instill confidence among clients, especially when working remote, became a new opportunity to enhance our experience offerings.
Ultimately, we must continue to develop our self-awareness, successfully adapt, and innovate. Our world has been disrupted and may never be the same, and so we will continue to invest in our opportunities to benefit our customers and their businesses.
Here lies a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become better versions of ourselves and thereby become a more vital organization. I am using this time to develop empathy, demonstrate vulnerability, and become a better leader for my staff, colleagues, and family. These are lessons of a lifetime, and I am grateful for the blessings amid all the uncertainties, which then gives me the courage to get into the new fiscal year and embrace the many challenges that may lie ahead — always realizing that we will come out of the fog stronger than before.
I end these reflections with gratitude for my outstanding global staff in Digital Experience, our incredible leadership team at GHD Digital, and all our clients and partners. I appreciate your company on this journey. Let’s stay close, stay united, and stay vigilant together.
Rojo Mathai, Global Head of Digital Experience. GHD Digital
