Suddenly the new technology works! - The crisis means that everyone has to learn new things

It is widely known that crises create creative and new solutions. One obvious consequence of Covid-19 is the increased use of various digital services to conduct online meetings and video conferencing. All of a sudden, we have learned and accepted the new technology.

We at NTEX have a business that spans the entire world with sea, air and land transport. Until 2020, our management group meetings with Business Area Managers and managers in a number of different countries were usually physical. This is now impossible due to the Corona virus.

In order to gain the best possible control over how our operations are affected from one day to another, we have been forced into daily meetings with this group. As a result, we have started using an online service for digital meetings.

Some of us had previously tried this with mixed success. Most agreed that it rarely works.

"One or a few participants never manage to connect." "There are always some problems with the technology during the meeting." Yes, the arguments for not using the new services have been many. Now, however, we have been forced to use it and overnight everyone has realized that they have to spend time learning the new technology. Otherwise, they will not be able to attend the meeting nor receive the necessary information.

Thanks to the fact that we have had to learn how to use the new technology, we can better communicate and access the information within the organization. Suddenly I find that our staff is more informed than ever before.

I am convinced that we will continue with these types of meetings even after the pandemic. We will not have meetings every day, but much more often than we had before Covid-19. Now that we have learned the technology and gained greater acceptance for online meetings and video conferencing, we have also realized that we do not need to have as many physical meetings as we had before.

Thomas Ström