Stax says Sri Lanka is slow to accept remote-working, advocates wider adoption

Stax Inc., a leading global management consulting firm, observes that delaying digitization during this pandemic era would present substantial drawbacks for Sri Lankan companies as they would lack the capacity to compete globally. By adopting digitization, Stax Inc. articulates that businesses would soon learn that customers are no longer confined to the geography of Sri Lanka and could thus improve their scope of clientele and operations.

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, many prominent Sri Lankan companies are yet to enable systems and processes to empower digitalization in their operations. In order to do so, this paradigm shift would have to encompass internal and customer-facing processes, while instigating paperless concepts as a part of Sri Lanka’s operating culture. This way, businesses will be able to increase efficiency while boosting their performance, productivity and profits.

Observations by Stax Inc. also found that some organizations are wary to mandate remote working and digital processes due to the generation mix and bias at management level. To overcome this, education and effective training must become a key element with demonstratable results, as change also requires time. Digital signatures and documentation are still seldom used in Sri Lanka, whereas they are commonplace in developed markets such as the UK, by contributing to substantial savings in time, energy, emissions and efficiency.

Elaborating Stax’s learnings, Dr. Rasitha Wickramasinghe commented, “Many companies have inculcated a ‘we have to get into the office’ mindset. Stax has gone the other way and we are saying ‘we can work from home’. Our default mode is to work from home, and whenever we need, we will come into office. Even according to pre-covid studies in developed markets, it is proven that people express satisfaction when remote working. Performance and productivity have been higher than when physically commuting daily to work. We should see this as an opportunity to enable remote working as our default mode.”