Written by Cally Chan, General Manager of Microsoft Hong Kong and Macau
Earlier on I’ve shared my thoughts on the importance of empowered and connected workforce anywhere, anytime. These days, all business leaders (myself included) have had to step up to the challenge of addressing what are often unique, always fast-changing business continuity challenges, posed by COVID-19.
A recent survey by Mercer (Business Responses to the COVID-19 Outbreak) found that nearly half (42 percent) of all businesses are currently encouraging employees to work remotely and that 92.2 percent of companies have said that working from home remains their primary option of choice during an office closure. Jared Spataro, Microsoft 365 Corporate Vice President, recently shared an email from Microsoft China employee Lily Zheng on her learnings from working remotely during the #COVID19 outbreak.
In Hong Kong, Winnie Chu, our Senior Business Group Lead, Azure, also shared her unforgettable, one-of-a-kind experience in the past few weeks. From remote working with back to back calls throughout the day, to managing the online classes and homework of her 6- and 9-year-old boys, to volunteering and make handmade masks to those in need, Winnie maintained faith and a positive perspective during this challenging and difficult time.
We have all had to make major changes to how we live and work. When we return to ‘normal operations’ at some point in the future – it is likely that some of these changes might have changed our routines forever.
These are indeed extraordinary times to lead a business – not only to keep operations productive, but most importantly, to reassure and help to keep people safe. At Microsoft, our top concern is the wellbeing of our employees and supporting our customers in dealing with business impact during these challenging times. By making Teams available to as many people as possible, we hope that we can support public health and safety by making remote work even easier.
In a recent Microsoft 365 blog post, we detail how individuals and organizations can access Teams for free and what we’re doing to ensure continuity of service during increased usage.
Closer to home, we have launched #EmpowerHK campaign which supports the city through a two-pronged approach by leveraging Teams and our technology. One of the two key target audience of the campaign is Hong Kong’s small-and-medium-businesses (SMBs). Through donation in cloud and technology services, we offer Hong Kong’s SMBs a wide variety of digital solutions and technical assistance in kind, including laptop computer rental service, e-Meeting and voice call service, training and activation services, as well as one-the-go business operations. This does not only help companies mitigate the impact of the outbreak by enabling them to continue to be productive, but most importantly, do so in a secured manner.
Secondly, the #EmpowerHK campaign enables 50,000 teachers, 800,000 students and 1,000 primary and secondary schools to conduct real-time, interactive remote teaching and learning through Teams.
The Mercer study also highlights that many employees rely on their employers to monitor and assess the situation and share key findings with them. For example, it is important to not only gather information from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and government entities, but to evolve business continuity plans and communications to reflect the latest developments. Brad Smith in a recent blog post, reinforced how we’re actively helping “healthcare teams stay connected with telehealth solutions, schools and universities stay connected with students through virtual classrooms and online learning, and governments stay connected with their citizens with the latest guidance and resources made available online.” And this is not only happening on a global level, locally, we are supporting doctors to conduct remote diagnosis through Teams.
I totally agree with Brad’s sentiment that while our technology has a vital role to play in supporting people and organizations, it is our individual actions in: staying focused on personal and public health as the priority, helping individuals to adjust and ensuring we are integrating the latest and most relevant guidance into our business continuity plans – that will allow us to overcome this very unique operating environment. I am inspired daily by the stories I hear of companies addressing these challenges – and wish all of us the very best in continuing to do so.
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