How to adjust our business life in times of crisis. |

Thank God for online tools ... but don't let them run your show

#agileorganization #designthinking #crisisplanning #disruption #doingbusiness #microsoftteams

As we are daily coping with a situation unbeknownst to any of us, I would like to share how we try to continue doing business as best we can. I hope you will give your feedback and share your best practices so we can learn from one another.

Our "normal" jobs is to help our business unit transform with agile methods. We found it particularly challenging to apply this to ourselves and our clients in the present context

Online is good but not good enough

As we shifted from normal business life to quasi seclusion in a matter of days, we rapidly re-discovered that technology is just a tool, not a substitute for organizing and much less running your business life. This is something we have been advocating daily in our missions but we seemed to have overlooked in the present situation.

The idea that you can simply replace normal meetings with online meetings is shortsighted: How do you allow for break times now that you don't have to move from an office location to another? How do you get non verbal feedback from participants as you would being in the same room? How do create interaction rotating around a virtual table? and many other issues. Simply moving from meeting to e-meeting is tantamount to ignoring all those issues.

It's time to go back to square one: identify the objectives of your actions and plan your e-meetings accordingly; the outcome / deliverable you want to reach and how you will achieve that.

To make a long story short: make sure that the tail is not wagging the dog

credits: https://newsphonereview.xyz/tail-wagging-the-dog-cartoon/

Adjusting your business life

So what are "five commandments" of confined online business as we see them -please note they are not carved in stone but rather in marshmallows and subject to frequent updates. We'll see how they evolve as time goes by.

#1 Keep up with your schedule as much as you can | move existing meetings online

A common tendency is to cancel or "postpone" planned meetings or seminars -we'll come back to the specific case of seminars later-. We rapidly realized that this was more adding confusion than helping us find new solutions.

We found it key when so much has to be re-scheduled / canceled / done differently- to keep a semblance of milestones.

• Our first principle was to transform each meeting into an online meeting by default (in our case a teams meeting). This helped everyone to grasp at familiar straws, allowed us you to get feedback -albeit imperfectly- from our partners
• We could then move rapidly to the adjustments required and plan our reorganization more efficiently.

We use Microsoft Office 365 - Your Office in the Cloud? tools at Group level including Microsoft_Teams So we could quickly move meetings online to transition to our new -physically confined- world. Many other online solutions exist (Google Hangout; Zoom Video Communications to name just two.). The purpose of this article is not to discuss their comparative merits but to explain how we dealt with the tools at hand.

#2: Keep regular e-touch points with your team

When in normal time you would cross or call you colleagues ten times a week, you might easily find yourself not interacting with many in the present situation. Our boss Christophe Lienard has instituted a daily 15' coffee time (online) meeting at 9:00 am which proves very useful to keep up good team spirits and check on those in less favorable confinement conditions. It is also good to maintain your TGIF team drink if you have one. Many online applications help you create fun moments and even share a drink or play games online. https://app.houseparty.com/ is one of them. Pierre Mustiere the CEO of Bouygues Asia our Asian innovation and business development outpost out of Tokyo has planned to maintain new employees welcome party in online mode.

#3 Remodel your schedule. Do not spend your day online | empty large swath of your schedule for other activities ... and on the short term come up with a new daily "routine"

Contradictory though it may seems to our first point, we found it very important to re balance our schedule. Discussing with colleagues who are facing crisis response tasks, they told us how exhausting it was to spend the day online in back-to-back meetings and eventually became unproductive.

In a "normal" office day you would have so many occasions to stretch your legs; move from one office location to the other; visit a client or site, grab a coffee with colleagues ... that can not be replaced with clicking out of one call and on to the next.

The good news is that the situation will help you arrange that. Many meeting will have to be canceled for obvious reasons; your personal life also has to be remodeled from the ground up. Take time to plan and execute this change

• In a nutshell: get your ducks in a row and teach them to be alert and agile

#4: Make the most of online tool | Once your ducks are in a row, reassess your use of online tools

Now that a- you have your priorities in order and b- are lucky enough that your colleagues are getting more familiar with online tools it is time to rethink your usage of those tools. Here is what we are progressively putting in place.

Sorting information and assessing priorities are more vital than ever.

• We found it useful to a- limit exposure to unnecessary information and to dedicate or strength to key projects
• That's why we try to keep the use of email to a minimum by shifting all project discussions to a collaborative toll: MSteams for our company. When we start a project with a client, we automatically create a dedicated "teams" and we suggest all exchanges be kept in this environment. This has proven very useful to keep everyone up to speed. The online meetings are also very straightforward in teams as well as files and documents sharing. Why does this help?
• When you have to split your day between several projects, you know that when focusing on one, you will find all necessary information and discussions on this specific project in this dedicated "team" ... and nothing else.
• Regarding company wide information sharing such as new internal regulations / changes in our process imposed by the situation, We use Yammer at company or group level to share information on a one to many mode. This will help you get your rules of the game quickly to the field

• Prepare, modify, store and share our documents online (via sharepoint in our case).
• Working on and storing files in your individual computer is very time consuming and inefficient when working with distant team members. It is better that files should be stored online, accessible to all contributors. Local sync on your individual computer makes it very smooth to work with. This exactly what Sharepoint is offering

• Keep using your phone and call people one on one to keep contact. In a blindly virtual and digital world, it is important to keep on on one communication and exchange in a more traditional and less organized way.

#5 adjust your meetings organization | a meeting online is -very different- from a physical meeting.

• The first idea we applied (see point #1) was to keep as many scheduled meetings as possible. We rapidly realized two things: a- you need to plan less e-meetings than real meetings b- you need to adjust the way you run meetings. This is more tricky than it seems. Here are a few pointers:
• Make e-meetings shorter (the attention span is shorter when you are stuck behind your screen and / or distracted by your environment - "Daddy how do you spell bee?"
• Interactions are less fluids (you can't see everyone at a time; there might be a short lag in voice ...).
• We found it useful to apply the following rules: Make sure somebody is anchoring the meeting, passing the baton to others. Make use of the "chat" stream and ask participants to do so. Everyone will see how people are reacting and the host can give the floor to certain people based on their contributions. Use the "meeting notes" segment to share the agenda and decision points. Make sure you end the meeting by sharing the actions and everyone agrees on the next steps (verbally or in the chat).
• In the case of collaborative seminars; the preparation and running of the meeting are even more tricky. We don't have much experience yet but here are a few ideas : Use the proper tool (for instance in Teams use the Webinar tool rather than a simple meeting (and don't forget the online training beforehand!). Make sure you intersperse group sessions (seminar time) with "homework" that smaller group will work at their own pace in a set amount of time (for instance 2 hours) before you share and enrich in another seminar session.
• Keep using your favorite creative tools such as such as https://klaxoon.com/ or https://canvanizer.com/ but preferably ask people to use them on a separate device (their smartphone for instance) while keeping the online meeting on their computer. If you are co-hosting the meeting with a colleague -as is often the case with seminars - make sure you are used to working with them and save a separate communication channel (private chat or whatsapp) for adjusting nuts and bolts during the meeting.

Work in progress

That's all for today folds, a few tips we found helpful to adjust or business activities. Of course this is work in progress and very subjective, hence this article and hopefully your comments / contributions ??

Vince