Innoviz CEO Omer Keilaf shared his thoughts on the effect of the global pandemic, particularly the upshots he considers likely from the challenges it has posed:
“Over the past few months, businesses around the world have seen unprecedented restrictions on how and where they can operate, and many employees have had to adjust to doing their jobs from home while also juggling child care.
“At Innoviz, we’re not immune to these global impacts and have been fortunate to have as-close-to-business as usual-as-possible during these corona days. We have found new ways of collaborating on project development, meeting our customer needs and working amid increasing restrictions. Some of these new ways of working, I believe, will serve us in the long term when everything goes back to normal.
“The first to feel the changes were management members such as myself. Our weekly management meeting changed to a daily, early morning virtual one, where we discussed daily targets, and each member took ownership over making their team’s daily, weekly, and bi-weekly targets. Some under-four-year-olds were allowed in (photo). Surprisingly enough, we all felt that the new frequency of the meetings empowered us to do more.
“In a very swift reaction, our project management activities were split between several workstreams and several focus topics. New team leaders were nominated for the different groups, and a clear day-by-day schedule was defined to meet daily targets. As a company that is used to communicating regularly in person, we found that written reports were a great way to keep communication and coherency in place. In fact, In some of the groups, these new tools and reports brought even higher efficiency. Measuring our progress at the end of each week, we realised the long-term potential of these new ways of working. Overall, we found that most of our project development challenges were related to shipping goods between sites, suppliers and customers. Over time, these too were resolved.
“The COVID-19 crisis drove us to do things differently. It is my belief that any difficulty that we are facing now will strengthen us going forward.