What will post-pandemic office life look like?
What will the workplace look like, now that we’re nearing “post-pandemic” times?
Over the past year, we saw certain roles that were usually done from office cubicles transition to makeshift home offices at kitchen counters and dining room tables.
Now that we’re rounding the corner from the pandemic, there have been whispers and heated discussions about whether certain employees will be required to return to in-person work. Employers seem to think so – especially to boost collaboration.
The idea that collaboration is ideally achieved via in-person interactions suggests that collaboration requires face-to-face contact. While this may be true in some instances, before returning to pre-pandemic office presence in hopes of maintaining or boosting productivity, businesses need to take a hard look at what the real productivity bottlenecks might be.
The fact is, in general, collaboration is the answer to much of today’s business challenges, especially as companies’ operational structures expand and become more complex, both functionally and geographically. However, this Harvard Business Review article, published years before the pandemic, points out that too much of this good thing can eventually become problematic, and that collaboration overload may signal the presence of a deeper organizational problem.
For Clinical Operations, collaboration is a must
One sector in the healthcare industry where collaboration overload is likely to be experienced is within clinical operations. Clinical Program and Trial Managers (CPMs and CTMs) and their teams run a tight ship as they navigate the complex networks in which they operate. The clinical operations function is critical for the successful design, conduct, and analysis of clinical trials that involve multiple stakeholders across different levels, both inside and outside the company. CTMs and CPMs:
- Handle study participant data
- Ensure patient safety and regulatory compliance
- Select and manage vendors
- Manage impressive timelines
- Maintain tight budgets
- Collect and analyze study data
These functions generally result in an extraordinary amount of seemingly constant communication with various parties.
Ensuring that these relationships are all sufficiently nurtured, in a manner that is productive and efficient, is a delicate balancing act. Often, CTMs and others in their teams end up spending significant amounts of time daily, tied up in meetings, fielding emails, or tracking down critical documents or information. This leaves little time for individual creation, analysis, review, thinking, and strategy, i.e. the real concrete work that moves trials forward.
This dilemma has gotten worse over the years, even with the advent of technology supposedly designed to facilitate common tasks and mitigate redundancies. Yet, despite having access to these technologies, CTMs often find themselves overwhelmed and burnt out due to collaboration overload.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced industries and businesses to identify and implement new ways of doing things, many of which happen to improve efficiency too. This is a lesson that the clinical operations function could learn from. Eliminating redundant tasks, streamlining workflows, and capitalizing on technology may help speed trials and prevent burnout.
Preventing collaboration overload in Clinical Operations
As we adjust to post-pandemic life and try to benefit from collaboration, sponsor companies should also try avoiding the other unproductive extreme – that of collaboration overload. Here are some tips to do this:
- Keep your clinical operations study teams small.
- Having more team members means more emails, more training (when someone leaves/joins), and generally, more communication. That’s not to say that less people should do more work. Instead, they should be supported by technology that automates manual workflow and frees their time.
- Create and document repetitive processes to eliminate future effort.
- Documented processes allow new team members to self-train and reduces the time it would take for hands-on training.
- Documenting processes does not require creating elaborate, formal SOPs. A bulleted Word doc saved to your shared cloud will suffice.
- Keep your shared drive organized!
- Don’t create too many subfolders
- Ensure files are labeled clearly and not “Protocol 435_new_original_tracker_site-subject”
- Assign each study team member entire pieces of the study such that there is little overlap between responsibilities, e.g. managing the central lab vendor, managing North American sites, etc.
- This way, everyone can work quickly, independently, and feel pride of authority and ownership – even junior staff. That’s not to say that team members can’t and shouldn’t bond or share information and tips. They should, which leads us to the next tip…
- Create a smart meeting schedule. This will reduce email volume and should take minimal time from the team. A smart schedule is one that:
- Has enough “general” clinical operations working meetings that internal team members can troubleshoot issues, ask each other for feedback, and share tips, such that email back-and-forth is greatly reduced. We recommend 1-2 meetings of this type per week.
- Has infrequent “status” meetings, in which people mainly provide updates, round robin style. We recommend that these meetings, which are typically cross functional, occur no more than once per month.
- Doesn’t assume that vendor management meetings need to occur on a weekly basis, or at all, if the vendor provides weekly status reports and is generally doing well.
- Assumes that people can and should jump on a messaging app or schedule a quick call if ad hoc collaboration is required (instead of being pulled into a formal, scheduled meeting). It also assumes that people on the receiving end of the ping or call request can choose to decline the synchronous communication and request that it be tabled to later.
- Assumes that a meeting ends once its purpose has been achieved.
Our innovative Clinical Operations Oversight Solution, ClinOps Pro, is built on advanced technology that is designed to simplify clinical operations. With the help of ClinOps Pro, CTMs and their teams don’t have to return to doing business as usual with the same levels of pre-pandemic stress and inefficient workflows.
Learn more about ClinOps Pro and prevent collaboration overload by eliminating unnecessary processes, complex systems, and the many people it takes to maintain them. Avoid frustrating stakeholders, wasting precious time and incurring avoidable expenses.
Sources
https://hbr.org/2017/03/collaboration-overload-is-a-symptom-of-a-deeper-organizational-problem
