As Covid19 discussions flood global social conversations, enterprise offices in Europe and the U.S. are beginning to seek the best approach of evaluating and facing the imminent impact on how, when, and where they continue to work.
While Hong Kong passed almost entirely to telework arrangements in the past 2 months, Italy, Slovakia and the Czech Republic just closed down social facilities, schools and museums. In Belgium, EU institutions advise staff considered to be in risk-groups to work from home.
The U.S. isn’t spared. This month, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Amazon sent out notices to staff in higher risk groups to stay home, while creating contingency plans to sustain business processes for as much as possible entirely from a distance.
It’s About People.
Any business is people’s business. We, at Onboardcrm.com, have been working in 30+ locations and 50+ languages and we have already dealt with less than ideal market conditions, requiring region specific arrangements, flexibility and resilience. We’ve explored the avenues for alternative environments and collaboration in the past two decades and we know just how frustrating and overwhelming it is to set up efficient and effective services, all the while staying together, meaning nurturing a productive relationship with staff from a distance.
What companies are facing as we speak: immediate response to unexpected disruptions (both regionally and worldwide) such as public spaces shut down, travel restrictions, working hours shifts and 100% remote work imperative. Are they ready? Chances are probably not.
Are we entering an era where telework becomes the only avenue of possible work, even if exercised from a cramped up house with children and pets bouncing in the background of a teleconference meeting? We have pondered on the question in less hazardous times and experienced it internally more than once and here is our take.
Accept that your entire staff may be home-bound.
Ignoring the situation will not make the government change their mind from a meeting they hold right now on closing public spaces. Equipping your staff with a laptop and a good internet connection at home is the first basic step to take.
You need to actually organize your operations as if telework is the only scenario. So, hold a divisions meeting that includes all unit leaders to map out contingency rules and procedures from client facing roles, through IT, HR and facilities.
Identify projects and roles at risk.
The pertinent is simple: what projects and roles ultimately require office presence and what don’t. In answering these questions , be bold and experiment to imagine the unpreceded. Traditionally, admin work is always done on site and in standard office hours. As an example, at Onboard, we centralized all our documentation in the cloud, our entire Payroll and Time-Off protocol is operated online and doesn’t depend on office-based equipment. Ask yourself the question how your administration processes such as accountancy, project management and employee management can continue effectively outside of the office.
Check your tech stack.
Are your employees able to use conferencing and collaboration platforms easily? Is your documentation properly segmented and accessible by matrix-defined user groups to insure data privacy and GDPR compliance when working remotely too? Check your devices availability, see about security protocol. Is your active directory cloud enabled to ensure that your IT can manage the laptops of your employees and most importantly the data sharing and data protection policies also while they work remotely?
Design and streamline new paths of communication.
If it comes to the moment you are unable to walk to the desk of your colleague to discuss a case, you need to know what lines of communication to follow. Timing and place for reaching out to staff, team meetings, agreed on deliverables, responsibilities… Everybody should have contact information listed along with primary communication channels. More importantly is agreeing on how your staff communicate with clients and how and when teams will meet.
Measuring performance.
Don’t expect it to go as usual. Efficiency and efficacy may shift. You may need to sit back and evaluate your staff’s performance data on a regular basis in order to see what remote work approach works best for the delivery of your specific services.. To be able to do so, it will be crucial to implement a centralized performance management system to monitor and gather data for the activity of all your staff involved in the delivery of your services. It will be very important to recognize, in an early stage, the weak links in your teleworking process as well as underperforming groups of your staff, try to correlate these and think of a specific solution.
If you are ISO certified, adapt and leverage your ISO Procedures
Companies that hold any ISO certificate have at least a part of their business processes written down and accessible to their managers and employees. You should certainly update these processes to be 100% compatible with distant working, make them available online and expand the frame of the process documentation to all processes that are to be followed by your staff when working from remotely. This is of course applicable also if you don’t hold an ISO certificate yet.
If you run your operation in multiple countries and in multiple languages
Make sure your operation can function in a hybrid way, depending on the place of execution. In today’s uncertain environment, where companies are more and more exposed to new risks, such as virus outbreaks and various climate change related natural disasters, it is very important that, if your operation is international, at least parts of it can quickly switch to remote-working while unaffected offices continue to work as usual. The challenge in this case would be to think how multiple office-based and teleworking operations in different places could work simultaneously and deliver services without any quality erosion.
Choose your service providers carefully. Do they have a bold contingency plan?
From now on, when choosing your service providers, make sure that they have an appropriate contingency plan and can deliver their services even if their staff cannot or is not allowed to work from the office. Request your current service providers to supply information about their ability to face natural disaster as well as epidemic situations and identify risks related to the contingency plans of providers who deliver key-services to your business.
Global disruptions of any nature, be it climate, public health, political migration are disturbing and impact everyone. Covid-19 may pass quickly and the office as a place of work may quickly recover all its importance, but we need to have plans for emergency situations. We are responsible for continuing processes, but we are also responsible for supporting the people we work with.
