At Paystri, we often cite people, processes, and technology as our key strategic enablers. My mind immediately gravitates to these pillars when thinking about three things we learned about remote work throughout COVID-19 that made us stronger as a company.
First and foremost, people are our most valuable assets. An organization may have the best strategic plan in the world, but without a team of high-performing A-players to execute on that plan it will be challenging (if not impossible) to achieve those goals. As one might expect, having a high-performing team helps mitigate concerns over remote work and its impact on productivity.
Our culture emphasizes a commitment to continuous improvement and dedication to our customers, while also providing a safe environment to take risks and learn from failures. This foundation, combined with an awareness that there will be some bumps in the road, allowed us to swiftly embrace an overnight shift to a fully remote workplace.
The onset of the global pandemic created unprecedented uncertainty for organizations, customers, and employees. However, we took a different approach by onboarding new staff, rolling out 401k contributions and other incentives, and making sure our colleagues felt safe by communicating our commitment to weathering the storm without reducing headcount. It happened to be a great time to recruit as the remote workplace took prior geographic constraints off the table. Thanks to the outstanding performance of our team, we were able to continue growing and keep pace with our strategic plan in the face of unprecedented uncertainty.
Our processes also became more efficient because our existing methodologies were well equipped to handle the stress tests introduced by remote work. We constantly challenge our team to identify opportunities for enhancing, adapting, and streamlining operations through cross-functional collaboration. And the team met this challenge, growing our institutional knowledge base organically and capturing that information in our internal Wiki and other forms of documentation to share with the organization. We also ensured that key performance indicators (KPIs) surrounding process changes that were made to optimize the remote workplace were measured, monitored, and correlated to desired outcomes.
According to a recent survey by McKinsey, COVID-19 fast-tracked the technology landscape by several years. Given our role as a payments technology company, we are well-positioned to help our customers adapt to these accelerated changes that include the rapid adoption of contactless payments, a shift to card-not-present transactions, and more secure ecommerce payments that leverage technology like EMV 3DS 2.0.
The remote workplace also presented the opportunity for us to identify new, creative ways to leverage technology that enhances and digitizes the customer experience. Existing collaboration tools such as Slack were further integrated into our technology stack. We also extended these capabilities to our partners to streamline communication and improve workflows.
This past year presented challenges never experienced by organizations and their constituents. While these obstacles are significant, it’s also an opportunity to stretch beyond what we thought was possible. Thanks to our foundational pillars of people, processes, and technology, Paystri is poised for success throughout the pandemic and beyond.
