The Future of Work
- A new beginning

Dear Tecnotree employees and your families,

I hope both you and your families are all safe. The last few months have certainly been a very challenging and stressful time, but hopefully, it has made us recognize the value of life, family, friends and general human compassion more than ever before.

While we have all been keeping the faith and anticipating an end to this soon, it has also made me think long and hard about what that end will look like? Or is it a call for a new beginning?

I feel we are on the onset of a disruptive and fundamental change in the way we think about our careers, our work, lives, family responsibilities and social interactions. The hard truth is that these activities, we very much took for granted, may never be the same. As we continue to transform from a work interaction perspective, our families and communities will also adopt to a new normal that is yet to be defined - a new beginning.

According to a recent Mackenzie report, 100 million jobs will be lost and new ones created by 2030. The need for more digitization is a reality across all sectors of the industry. New social networks, partnerships, ecosystems and ways of both working and living will emerge while many traditional business models will cease to exist as we know them. So what are the necessary and essential ingredients for this new beginning?

We at Tecnotree are among the most fortunate in the world! We embraced digital in 2015/16 and launched our first digital platform for telecom operators in 2019. We decided to fundamentally change the way we build technology and adopted a customer-centric agile first format to develop our digital platform. This helped transform the whole organization to become agile in everything we do and be customer driven internally as well.

We embraced cloud and deployed our first zero-touch deployments in 2019 and more recently, a full digital stack with zero-touch in 2021. We adopted continuous learning and certified more then 70% of our workforce in the new and emerging digital standards through TM-Forum amidst Covid 19 last year. We naturally slipped into a work-from-home mode with zero disruption to committed deliveries or SLAs.

I would like to thank everyone of you and your families for this smooth transition into a new beginning!

The advent of the new second wave of COVID has hit harder than what happened in 2020; with many of our colleagues and their families affected over the past few months, it has clearly created new levels of stress and anxiety among us. To me this affirms the hard reality that the changes we adopted in 2020 were only the start and will not be sufficient to take us forward. To embrace the new future of work, we need to transform much more and much faster. We need to create a stronger platform that will allow Tecnotree to realize our vision and ambition to be the best in everything we do while championing the new future work culture that is unfolding in front of us. The time has come to call upon the SISU warrior spirit residing within each of us, to define a new digital identity to help us trail blaze a new beginning.

We will need to re-think and re-learn many things we do today and internalize being truly digital in every aspect of our business. We need to dream of new early areas of digital transformation that will define our unique Tecnotree digital identity to the community we serve and to the world:

  • Digital Customer Engagements centers with near real experiences using AR/VR and AI/ML based interactions in our demos, customer interactions, training sessions and meetings with customers enabling zero-touch, and yet highly immersive digital experiences
  • Digital presence in all our sales and marketing engagements, whilst also creating new and refreshing digital identities and experiences for our prospective customers
  • Closer to home, we need to adapt and integrate greater personalization and empathy in all our global employee interactions, making us feel more like a family, without the traditional physical interactions. Some ideas could be:

- Digitally connected collaboration rooms, training rooms for zero-touch interactions and near-real presence for meetings, awards and celebrations to enjoy a richer and more personal interaction – digitally

- Digital virtual entertainment, fitness platforms for our employees & families to socialize, destress and relax, experience virtual coffee breaks and cross-company e-sports engagement and gaming initiatives

- Digital health benefits for our employees with zero-touch services

- Tecnotree SISU playbook for the future of work ideas and innovation as a living document where all ideas are crowd-sourced, captured and prioritized for implementation.

A lot of these ideas although embryonic, will have to emerge and become reality in 2021/22 especially with the advent of 5G. Let us co-create the Future-of-Work for Tecnotree as an initiative that will make us pioneers in our new beginning.

Padma Ravichander
Chief Executive Officer