Sounding Off: COVID helped pave the way for innovation in people

Tom Kershaw, Travelport

"It’s very tempting to look back too much and say ‘you can’t do this for this reason’ and to some extent we have a license to be more innovative."

Quote from Tom Kershaw, CTO of Travelport, in an article on PhocusWire this week on the evolving roles of CTOs.

Each Friday, PhocusWire dissects and debates an industry trend or new development covered by PhocusWire that week.

Many roles in the travel industry have altered over the course of the last 20 months - from those at the sharp end of operations to their comrades in the C-suite.

This has often been as a result of companies and organizations needing to downsize or furlough staff and share the workload among existing team members.

Businesses and their staff have been forced to adapt what they do, learn new skills, modify old ones and figure out how to operate the companies with fewer, often untrained people.

The overused term "innovation" is usually applied liberally to new services or features, more often than not with a tech slant to them.

But it carries equal weight when it comes to how people have evolved and raised their own personal game during the COVID-19 pandemic.

So much attention (perhaps even too much) has been given to how companies have tweaked their products, introduced cutting edge hygiene protocols through technology, formed exciting partnerships and survived a turbulent period in the industry's histoy.

Behind all these initiatives and recovery strategies are people, from the top to the bottom of companies, determined to ensure their employers or the organizations that they lead can look forward with a degree of optimism.

There is a valid argument that people have had no choice but to adapt and think in different ways. But this does a disservice to those that have gone even further and considered how to not only get through 2020 and 2021 but position their businesses for a prosperous future.

Let's just hope that the innovation shown among the workforce is allowed to remain once the grind of business-as-usual kicks back in.