Hello CEO: John Karnblad, CGI

Our 1,350 members range from small start-ups with few employees to large multinational companies with thousands of employees around the world. Under the banner "Hello CEO", we gather their views on the past year, their thoughts on the future, but also lessons and experiences from a time unlike any other. For the fifth installment, we present John Karnblad, CEO of CGI in Scandinavia.

How would you sum up the year of the pandemic from your organization's perspective?  

- It has been an intense year with a transition of deliveries and changing ways of interacting with clients and employees (or members as we say). Initially, there was a concern that the pandemic would affect our client engagements but it has worked unexpectedly well, much due to the fact that we have a diversified client portfolio where some clients grow in these situations while others hold back. Being new to my role at CGI at the time, I was impressed by the organization's crisis preparedness. This is in our "DNA", in our operational model that involves many deliveries to both business-critical and socially critical organizations in Scandinavia and the world. So we have continuity in our planning and are thus prepared if something should happen," says John Karnblad.

How have you responded to the needs that have arisen during the year? 

- This has included volunteers in the organization engaging with the communities they work in, with trainees helping to deliver food to health workers early in the crisis. We have also been able to help in the form of assignments, for example in healthcare. One example is Södra Älvsborg Hospital, where we helped streamline and automate the administration so that they had more time for their care needs. The hospital had a diversified system and a process environment that we processed with RPA (robotic process automation) to simplify workflows and reduce the time spent on administration.

What has been the most challenging? 

- Keeping fatigue at bay in the organization and among our members. Keeping energy levels up and in good spirits. We are at different stages of life, some may live in cramped quarters with family and it becomes a challenge when many have to be at home at the same time working or studying. The hardest part has been to keep the spirits up for those who live alone without company, to make them feel joyful and stimulated in their everyday lives.

- There has been a constant effort to seek and share experiences between our organizations in Scandinavia and globally, with a focus on finding approaches to create team spirit and community. But there is probably no one-size-fits-all solution; rather, it is the diversity of activities and actions that make things work.

- Among other things, we have organized training sessions with an instructor outdoors so that those who want to can participate safely on site or via a digital link, and we have run the classic digital fika. Some employees decided to have a joint digital movie night. We have a music band that recorded a really good song in different places that we later performed at a conference. So we've tried to unleash creativity in several ways. But there is something about the physical meeting that is lost and that is difficult to achieve over the digital meetings.

What lessons have you learned and what will you take away? 

- One lesson learned is that the financial support from our authorities has been incredibly complex and time-consuming to manage and report with, in our view, unclear conditions. This created uncertainty for both us and our clients. The importance of collective agreements became particularly clear. Despite the fact that CGI has been aware of this for a long time, parts of the organization were prevented from seeking financial support.

- Other lessons learned are the importance of proximity to colleagues. To have strong teams as leaders and to have a continuous dialog. If the proximity to colleagues is not there from the start, it will be an even bigger delta to overcome if we end up in a similar situation again where we only meet digitally. An already existing team spirit provides a much better starting position. Our general crisis preparedness gave us additional leverage to push our issues. We saw early on that we could provide our customers with the supplies they needed and had zero interruptions globally. We were also able to help some customers who had not received goods from their suppliers to get equipment to their employees, which also highlighted the importance of looking at the whole supply chain.

- Finally, we had an organization-wide communication plan with clear rules that successfully helped minimize the risk of contagion in the workplace.

Looking ahead, how do you see the near future?  

- We have come through the crisis well, the loss of revenue has been mitigated by a reduction in costs for cancelled trips, general expenses for meetings, etc. In the beginning, the manufacturing industry was affected and so were we. By switching to other customers, we have still had a decent year.

- We see a pent-up demand globally for our services and the biggest challenge will be the battle for skills. We need to be creative and invest in skills development, bring in new graduates or dare to re-skill when necessary. I am positive about the future in general and believe we will see significant growth in our industry.

- It will be interesting to see how we land in the organization of working hours and where we work and meet. If you look at the urbanization trend, I believe in a counter-trend now, with those who want to start a family looking out of the cities. This makes it more difficult to provide the skills in the metropolitan regions and we need to find new ways of doing this.