What started as a health emergency in East Asia, Covid-19 is now been classified as a global health emergency as a pandemic. Drastic actions are taken worldwide to prevent the spread of Covid-19 or Coronavirus after being detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December. Business establishments are increasingly adopting remote working options for employees, where most of these organizations are still figuring out how to efficiently handle their business remotely. As a software product engineering services company, Perfomatix has been able to cope with the times with our tried & tested remote working strategy.
Seamless integration of different departments in the organization can avoid business interruptions and maintain a steady workflow while your employees work remotely. Sometimes it takes a disaster for organizations to realize that remote working works and employees can be productive and engaged when working from home.
“Business resilience is becoming a strategic driver for remote working ecosystems”.
Here are some examples of how companies are responding to the coronavirus outbreak;
- Remote work apps in China are witnessing a boom as millions are confined to working from home according to data from the research firm Sensor Tower. During the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s, the country’s e-commerce space saw a boom similar to the present times.
- Ride-hailing firm Grab in Singapore has launched a dedicated service to take hospital workers home.
- The Courage Fund in Singapore has pledged to help those affected by infectious diseases, it has received over half a million dollars in donations.
- General Electric (diversified industrials) – their healthcare team is currently prioritizing servicing of equipment, new equipment deliveries, particularly to the Wuhan hospitals. They have made a significant donation of patient monitors and ultrasound equipment to help the care providers there. They are focusing on being an efficient partner in providing solutions in China amidst this tragedy.
- Becton Dickinson (medical supplies) – they focus on making sure their people are safe first and foremost. The company is also creating contingency plans and working with the Chinese government to implement them. Their instrument called BD MAX, has helped the Chinese government to take advantage of the flexibility of that instrument to create a diagnostic test for coronavirus. So they are sending more instruments to China to help them with the diagnosis.
- Kone (elevators/escalators) focus on 2 principal objectives – first, health and welfare of employees and to continue to serve the customers. At present they are focusing on servicing many hospitals and other similar buildings which are critical that they continue to work.
- Levi Strauss (apparel retail) has temporarily closed roughly 50% of our fleet and has stopped all employee travel in and out of China. While they accept that this will dampen their growth in China in the near term, they expect it to return to normalcy soon.
In 2013, the City of Calgary in Canada experienced one of its deadliest floods. The city identified the need for business continuity and resilience after the flood. As a result of some fundamental projects, the city evolved a productive and engaged workforce that can respond to citizens’ needs and keep businesses running. Calgary was named one of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities. Such examples show us the triumph of resilience in businesses. By adapting to cloud-based process-oriented workflow, and by managing employees in multiple geographies – organizations can thrive through such contingencies in future.
“Amidst the health emergency, businesses are embracing remote working and are willing to hire top talents from different countries.“
At Perfomatix, our team initially struggled to handle the quarantine and it was challenging to maintain operations in such an emergency. But, our workflow and years of experience in cloud-based IT operations management helped us. Operations are designed in a way to minimize one-to-one calls, face-to-face meetings. We achieve this by using real-time tracking tools and pre-defined processes to execute projects efficiently. If you are clueless like most business organizations regarding remote working tools, process, and the security concerns that arise from it – our strategies and workflow for business continuity might help you navigate through these tough times.
Clarity in roles and responsibilities
Irrespective of the strength of your organization, it is inevitable to clearly distinguish roles and responsibilities among employees. Divide different teams and departments and assign tasks to each team member. The clarity in ownership of tasks gives them a sense of responsibility and accountability to managers or decision-makers.
- Set up clear project roles and responsibilities
- Discuss with team members their specific goals in the project to keep everyone accountable
- Document the working schedule, holidays, meetings and other ground rules of teams
- Track KPI of each employee
Cloud-based operations
Our operations in the cloud help us manage & deliver services and infrastructure to our internal and external user base. Cloud-based operations allow for scalability in terms of capacity on the cloud, it is distributed and operations span all across the world.
Their lower dependability on in-house servers facilitates remote working conditions, any employee can work from anywhere taking work from home to a whole new level. The decentralization of data storage and automation abilities of cloud ease the whole process. Even though there are certain vulnerabilities associated with the cloud, the future is undoubtedly cloud-ruled. With usage-based accounting systems in place, those leveraging cloud resources can then allocate the costs accordingly.
Time management is crucial for good communication
While managing remote teams living in different locations or countries, one needs to be aware of the different time zones. Team building across multiple locations can be a challenge and you need to be prepared to avoid poor communication over a distance.
Good communication strategies for remote working environments:
- Daily Standups
- Find the right communication tools and arrange daily standups that are quick and efficient. Daily catchup helps us evolve cohesion between team members. We use Zoom for our communications across different geographies.
- Schedule and plan team meetings
- Use google calendar or calendly to set up meetings. Make sure the time chosen is comfortable for all the team members.
Here’s how a typical day at a completely cloud-based workspace looks like;
- Morning scrum meetings (remote)
- Status reports (CRM, project management tools)
- CRM tracking, assigning action items
- Scheduled calls (remote) with clients, departments
- Daily status review using different tools
Perfomatix is a fully integrated cloud-based operations company with 100+ employees in more than four countries. We have managed to maintain our workflow in software product engineering services uninterrupted by integrating various departments in different geographies for the past six years. Adapting to this unforeseen crisis has been definitely difficult for us, but the process and workflow that we followed helped us navigate through this.
Do you have a similar workflow?
Are you looking to upgrade your business to the cloud?
Let us know and we can share our expertise in this area.
