Working in times of the Coronavirus
Home office, mobile work, WFH: due to the crisis, many companies have already sent their employees home to work. Numerous other companies will follow suit. Depending on the industry and the degree of digitalization, companies may or may not be able to handle this seamlessly. The development comes unexpectedly and raises many questions. How can I meet the responsibility towards my employees, customers, business partners and society while maintaining business operations? How can I ensure the organization of work while effectively managing my employees from a distance? How can I work efficiently from home? To these questions we from Remote Native try to give you answers and support you in these difficult times.
The novel coronavirus is spreading worldwide. Germany is also affected. The Robert Koch Institute (RKI), which is the central institution of the German government in the field of disease surveillance and prevention, expects a further increase in the number of cases, which will proceed quite rapidly. Overall, it is expected that in the longer term, about 60–70% of the population in Germany will be infected. As there are currently no drugs and vaccines against the novel virus, extensive protective measures are being taken to slow down the spread of the virus. This will buy time for development and avoid overloading our health system as far as possible. These protective measures have a deep impact on our social life but also on economic processes. We must prepare ourselves for this for a certain period of time.
How can I continue business operations?
In order to maintain operations, organisational, safety and communication measures must be taken. To slow down the spread of the disease, it is necessary to reduce the frequency of contact between people inside and outside the company. For this purpose, gatherings of people, such as events, workshops and attendance appointments should be cancelled. In addition, all permanent points of contact between people, such as the entrance area in the office building, printers, elevators, doors, stamp, beverage and coffee machines and washrooms must be identified and solutions for security and monitoring must be found.
The decision to outsource as many employees as possible to the home office is a first correct step. However, this only affects those areas that are not necessarily operationally related. But what about other operationally critical areas, such as production or logistics? How can operations be maintained if these positions are not filled? In this case, one has to think about a possible emergency staffing or group rotation, i.e. to keep the number of people working on site at the same time as low as necessary for the operation.
I have exchanged views with several managers over the last few days and have compiled the following list of measures:
Organizational measures:
1. Establishment of an internal corona task force, consisting of a group of managers and — if available — a physician, whose task it is to deal centrally with the effects and changes of COVID-19 on the company and its stakeholders and to steer the company safely through the crisis;
2. Nomination of a central Corona representative, who is centrally responsible for ensuring that measures are developed across departments and that all employees remain informed;
3. Development of a central catalogue of measures and roadmap for the operational organisation and all employees;
4. Setup frequent communication with managers on how to deal with the crisis so that they can inform and guide their subordinates in the best possible way;
5. Cancellation of all internal events, such as workshops and participation in external events until further notice;
6. Avoid any attendance appointments, but switch to online conferences instead;
7. Forming of a support team for setting up, securing and operating home workstations, including a hotline for open questions;
8. Provide necessary hardware and software equipment for employees in the home office (if necessary, also Internet connection or UMTS sticks);
9. Clarifying legal situation for working at home regarding GDPR and Workplace Ordinance
10. Orientation or reinforcement of agile management methods, such as Scrum, to organize work in distributed teams;
11. Have mail physically opened at least once a week and distributed digitally;
12. Digitalisation of all necessary documents;
13. Access to patterns and templates, databases and digital work tools;
14. Use of digital processes and signatures so that haptic signing is not required.
Security measures:
1. Stop all travel activities as far as possible;
2. Send employees who have previously traveled to crisis areas to the home office for at least two weeks;
3. Immediately isolate infected employees or employees in whose immediate environment infections become known and identify the contact environment for further action;
4. Lock or block common rooms, such as the canteen;
5. Block access to the office rooms for external visitors, if necessary organise security personnel for access control
6. Provide disinfectant at all important contact points (e.g. entrance, washrooms).
Communicative measures:
1. Regularly inform employees and customers about internal and external developments, decisions and new rules by a central authority;
2. Provide links to external information from official, municipal or other relevant institutions, such as the Robert Koch Institute
3. Establishment of a hotline or an e-mail box for inquiries from employees and perhaps also customers who want to inquire about the current situation;
4. Creation of a guideline or FAQ section on the intranet (internal) and website (external) in which important questions about the crisis and how the company is dealing with it are answered;
The list is not complete. Here I would be pleased to receive further suggestions, with the aim of providing a comprehensive collection of recommendations for action and measures for all readers. Many thanks in advance for your participation.
In order to continue to guarantee operations, it is essential to adapt existing organizational processes to the new conditions as quickly as possible. Agile management methods, such as Scrum, are predestined for cooperation in distributed teams and can provide decisive impulses for operational reorganisation. Here you can download the official Scrum Guide with almost 20 pages in 30 languages.
Especially with regard to the meeting culture of a company, workshops and attendance appointments must be converted to online conferences. For this purpose, there are various paid and free tools, such as GoToMeeting, Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, Skype, Slack, Google Hangouts or Google Meet.
By the way: Google and Microsoft are giving away enterprise conferencing tools due to coronavirus.
The changeover to 100% remote is much easier for digital agencies than, for example, for a manufacturing company. But by following certain rules, online meetings can be just as efficient as face-to-face meetings.
Here, as with face-to-face meetings, the right preparation is important. All participants must be informed in advance about the exact objectives and the course of a meeting in order to be able to prepare themselves optimally and make the desired contribution.
Here my collegue Ralf Borchardt wrote an Article about how to use online meetings effectively and efficiently to become even more productive than within personal encounters.
Furthermore, the quality of picture and sound is decisive. These depend on the Internet connection and technical equipment such as webcam and microphone.
In view of the Workplace Ordinance, employers are legally obliged to check carefully whether employees are exposed to hazards at their home office workplace. The aim of the regulation is to prevent accidents of all kinds at workplaces. Physical and, more recently, psychological stress — such as that caused by disturbing noise or ergonomic deficiencies — as well as, in the case of VDU workplaces, in particular stress on the eyes of employees, will have to be taken into account.
In fact, each individual case must be examined separately. It is questionable how one is supposed to meet this requirement in times of such a crisis and what exceptions there are.
Let us imagine a small three-room apartment of a family of three, in which the child and parents live together at home in a very confined space due to the closed daycare centre and the arranged home office, and are also supposed to work productively in these conditions.
How can I manage my employees effectively?
In the age of globalisation and digitalisation, new workplace models have long been commonplace. Here, countless software development companies and digital agencies have already proven for years that collaboration in distributed teams works perfectly and can create added value.
There are now countless digital helpers with which the organization of work and collaboration of employees at different locations can be managed effectively and efficiently.
Many companies have already switched to cloud services from e.g. Microsoft or Google, either partially or completely. This makes it possible to access shared company and project information outside the office network at any time.
With project management tools such as Trello, Asana, Monday and Jira, tasks can be organized and distributed. Collaboration systems such as Confluence, Google Apps or Office 365 allow you to work together on projects and distribute knowledge.
For the changed organization it is recommended to deal with modern working concepts on the topic of agility, such as Scrum. This allows teams to coordinate their work for 15 minutes each day in a Daily and, depending on the work organization and scope, to exchange information more extensively in weekly or biweekly status meetings.
How can I work efficiently from home?
To be able to work efficiently from home, it is important to have a tidy workplace, broadband Internet connection and technical equipment for communication.
You need this to be able to work properly from home:
1. Laptop or stationary PC, including accessories (power cable, mouse and keyboard)
2. VPN access to the company’s internal network (if available)
3. Headset and Webcam
4. Broadband Internet connection
The question of whether the current network coverage at the location is sufficient should not be forgotten if suddenly more people are working from home and are holding video conferences on an ongoing basis.
As stated at the beginning, the current development and the associated change for all of us comes more than suddenly. There is uncertainty about the presence, and above all, about what is yet to come. After the closure of borders, the banning of events, the closure of kindergartens, schools and colleges and the outsourcing to home offices, it remains to be seen which steps will still be necessary to overcome the crisis and how long they will take. Despite all the problems, we must not lose sight of the fact that it is a matter of protecting human lives, not only our own, but also those of our relatives, our neighbours and all other people in our country. All areas of life must be included here. Everyone must participate. It is particularly important to keep calm and not to panic. Thanks to technological progress, there have long been adequate solutions and best-practice approaches for cooperation in distributed teams, so that the daily organisation of work can be managed remotely. It will be possible to find solutions for everything. I have tried to show you some of them for the operational area and hope that you can benefit from them.
About us
Remote Native is an IT outsourcing and remote project management specialist with 25 years of experience in working remote with distributed, intercultural teams. www.remote-native.com
