Exclusives

M&E companies transformed on the fly this last year, by responding to both the industry shift for consumers and the content workforce, with more at-home content consumption by the former, and more remote work for the latter.

Empowering a distributed workforce with digital solutions has been crucial, yet very doable, thanks to better (and cheaper) technologies that have allowed employees and employers to be flexible, according to Brajesh Jha, global head of media and entertainment for Genpact.

“What we’ve learned in the past year is that it’s possible to have a workforce that is made up of people working from anywhere,” he said, speaking May 12 at the annual Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit (HITS) Spring event, during the presentation “Driving Operational Agility with a Virtual Workforce.” “If we’re to reimagine our [business] in terms of a globally distributed virtual workforce that is supplemented with the power of artificial intelligence, what are the building blocks, how do we make it possible?”

Companies were forced to evaluate their place in a hybrid-virtual world, and rapid gains in automation have assuaged any concerns employers may have had when offices shut down and people began working from home. Jha’s presentation focused on how the remote-work challenges of 2020 are opportunities for organizations in 2021 to find ways to release capital that’s been long-trapped in archaic organizational structures.

Whether or not there’s a return to the workforce and workplace we remember pre-pandemic depends on the industry, and who you ask, Jha said. A Genpact-funded survey found that less than 40 percent of executives want to return to an office-based business model, and more than half said they prefer a remote/hybrid workforce.

“It’s not as much a slam-dunk as it seemed as last year when it was discovered you could do everything with Zoom, Google and Teams,” Jha said. To find out where the workforce is headed, companies should examine the impact working from home has on workplace culture, mentoring opportunities lost or gained, and of course, the impact on the bottom line.

To watch the full presentation, click here.

HITS Spring was presented by IBM Security with sponsorship by Genpact, Irdeto, Tata Consultancy Services, Convergent Risks, Equinix, MicroStrategy, Microsoft Azure, Richey May Technology Solutions, Tamr, Whip Media, Eluvio, 5th Kind, LucidLink, Salesforce, Signiant, Zendesk, EIDR, PacketFabric and the Trusted Partner Network.