Whether or not you’re all in on the news reports
about the Coronavirus (COVID-19), it will affect you. Whether it’s simply not
being able to buy toilet paper or that there are school closings and
cancellations, it will impact all our daily lives in some form or fashion for a
while. As business owners and leaders, we have an obligation not only to our
customers that we serve but to our employees as well whenever there is a
significant disruption.
Today's disruption is this current pandemic but
living in the mid-Atlantic we also endure the risks of hurricanes, tornadoes,
heavy snows, torrential rain and on a rare occasion, earthquakes. All of which
could severely disrupt an organization's operations which could start a ripple
effect on our economies and communities.
You may be thinking, well, "my company doesn’t
really meet much with the public so we’re probably okay." And you might be
until external forces make decisions that directly impact your employees. Many
school systems are preemptively closing schools for weeks at a time. If you’ve
got high schoolers, it's not much of an issue except for the mess you’ll
probably come home to every night. But if you or your employees have younger
children, there may not be any place to take them. This means an office full of
kiddos or some employees may just have to take time off. Assuming, every
employee brings some benefit to the organization, that loss of productivity
will hurt.
And now you have been disrupted...
Almost every organization we work with has some sort
of Disaster Recovery plan, even if it’s just in someone’s head that will get
their servers and data recovered in an acceptable amount of time. Some of these
customers think this is also their business continuity plan. It’s not. What do
you do when a significant number of your employees, or simply one critical employee,
cannot do their work for an extended duration? This is just one of many
business continuity scenarios that need consideration but seems to be one of
the most relevant.
Remote work is the answer for those not in a
position that requires direct hands-on work at a specific location. For
example, factory line workers, hairdressers, any of the trades (plumbing,
electrical, etc.), retail, and other professions where remote work is
impossible. But for the rest, being able to work remotely is incredibly beneficial
not just to the organization but to the individual as well. Unfortunately, it’s
not just buying a bunch of laptops and waving to the employee as they head
home.
Processes,
processes, processes
To be successful in a work from the home scenario
you must first design your internal processes and workflows to enable a near
seamless and uninterrupted transition to the at-home worker. Every process
starts with some sort of inputs that must be acted on and completed. Assuming
it’s not the last step of the overall process, this then needs to be handed off
to the next department who does their thing and passes it to the next. Here at
CTG, our support process starts with a call or email that generates a ticket,
that ticket gets assigned to a technician and then gets scheduled for work. The
ticket then gets worked, documented, closed, and then heads over to finance to
get billed or applied to a contract. There are at a minimum three distinct
functional areas in that flow, our dispatch takes the call and works it through
getting it scheduled. Our technicians work the ticket until it’s resolved and
can be closed, then finance bills the customer and receive in the funds when
paid. As such, we need coordination, notifications to the relevant tech or
departments, and acknowledgments of those various hands-off. As you can imagine,
this is all electronic. We’re not shuffling papers from one person or
department to the next.
Ditch the paper
everywhere possible
While an environmental nicety, that’s not the point
here. If you must move physical documents from one step to the next you are
already doing things inefficiently. It’s time to review those processes from
the section above and figure out how to perform those actions electronically.
Added benefits to moving to an electronic-based system include; savings over
time in buying paper, the ability to have all the records backed up to an
off-site location, and the new flexibility you’ll gain in your workforce. For
your paper people, how much would it cripple your organization if an
environmental disaster (hurricane, tornado) destroyed or scattered your
documents across the city or county? Do you have a way to recover those
documents? Now imagine that the disaster really didn’t matter to your business
because your employees can still perform their job from anywhere.
Get off-site
Do all your services (email, CRM, accounting
package, resource planning, phones, etc.) reside on-premise? Remote work
capabilities improve dramatically when some or all your business services
reside in the cloud. First, you eliminate the need to invest in infrastructure
to allow remote workers to get into your on-premise systems. Second, it will
reduce your Capital Expenses (and the long depreciation cycle). It will convert
a portion of those checks you stroke for bigger hardware, new operating systems
and versions of your key applications (and the service charges by your IT
provider for performing all of those upgrades) into an operational expense that
you get to claim in the same year it was incurred. Third, everything in the
cloud is usually at the latest and greatest version that you would otherwise
have to go back to the second item and stroke those checks. At CTG we’ve built
our own IT in this way, which quite honestly, we could close our physical office
and continue to operate as we do now.
Get off-site part
Deux: But Jeff, I just can’t.
Let’s go with the assumption that for regulatory or
other reasons you just can’t move application X to a Software-as-a-Service
provider or host it yourself in the cloud. We see this a lot, especially in
healthcare. In those cases, there are options. Starting with getting remote
access to your network environment via a Virtual Private Network. This is
generally a piece of hardware at your location (often a firewall with this
capability) and piece of software on your employee’s PC/Laptop (or tablet even)
that will connect your employee to your network securely. Another fantastic
option incorporates a hardware device that automatically connects back to the
network and some (such as the one we sell) even includes extending your
corporate wireless network into the employee’s home, provides Ethernet connections (and power-over-Ethernet connections for IP phone handsets) so that
it's EXACTLY like being in the office. These devices are fully manageable
remotely and you can push down the same network access policies that you have
on-premise. This option is VERY good if you’ve got the right recovery plan for
your servers and infrastructure. All the VPN in the world will do you no good
if the hardware or software you’re trying to remote into is down.
Management and
Oversight
It is incredibly important to put some sort of
metrics tracking in place so you can be confident that the work is getting
done. If your management style is watching people look busy, then this will be
a pretty dramatic change. While it may make you feel better that Mary or Joe
always look like they're overwhelmed or appear to always be heads down, you
just may be fooling yourself. So, whether you decide to make it possible for
employees to work from home or not, it’s probably a good idea to figure out these
metrics and measures anyway. I would say the best point of entry for beginning
this is during the first two sections above: Processes & and Ditching
Paper. Once you understand what they’re doing, how they’re doing it and how
long it takes to do it, you can put the digital process in place, and
inherently have it keep track. Then you’ll know if Joe processes 50 purchase
orders a day on average with a backlog of 10 and that average suddenly drops to
10 but the backlog is 50 when he’s working from home. Well, at that point it's
time to have a conversation with Joe. Please notice I referred to averages.
Everyone has a bad day, some people take a little longer to adapt to working at
home, and some people (like I did) have family members that take a little longer
to adapt to my work from home occasions. So, dropping the hammer on Joe right
away is probably not the best approach. Consider it a good coaching opportunity
to help Joe get up on plane even at home.
Practice
makes perfect
We
all know this idiom and it’s true here as well. Consider letting your employees
work from home on a semi-regular basis. They’d probably consider it a benefit
and it doesn’t cost you a thing if their productivity doesn’t drop. There’s
some "getting used to it" for the new work-from-home person. If they
can overcome that productivity hurdle before an event requires them to
work-from-home, your organization will be all the better for it.
Collaboration
Whether
you end up with your whole office working remotely or just a few people, being
able to communicate effectively is critical to your operational success. Not to
mention, it totally can get lonely working from home when you’re used to an
office community. There are plenty of tools out there to satisfy this need.
Many are free or come packaged with some of the services you may have moved to
in the "Get off-site" section. We use Office 365 and Microsoft Teams.
They offer chat, voice, and video as well as integrations into SharePoint and
many other Office 365 features. Teams also has a full-blown phone system option
that we’ve recently adopted. Your extension can follow you wherever your Teams
client is. Working from home (or wherever) is completely transparent to the
customers that call you. Video calling is also an important option to consider
in your solutions. You’d think that video calls are an extravagance, but in
work-from-home scenarios, it’s a fantastic way to stay in touch. First, it
maintains a more community-like feel when you see your coworker and they aren’t
just a disembodied voice. Next, you get to read body language. You know when
you thought you could practically hear someone’s eye-roll on the other end of a
phone call? Or wondered if they were paying attention? Now you’d know. Also,
being able to review or work on documents, spreadsheets, presentations together
or simply share your screen with the other person is invaluable. As I
mentioned, our office uses Office 365 and Teams, but these same options are
available with Google Apps and others as well.
 |
| By Jeff Garell, VP of Services |
Finally,
there are some additional things to consider in enabling a remote-capable
workforce that is generally industry related. It’s not too late to get started,
so give us a call.
At
CTG we’ve been helping to develop and design solutions like this and many more
for 15 years. Even more significant is that we use all these processes and
technologies to run our own business. In other words, we practice what we
preach.
