Strategy 3: Virtual Working

The pandemic forced many businesses to rethink the work environments of their entire organisation. Overnight plans had to be made to move computers to home office, activate VPN networks, and expand the use of virtual meeting capabilities. The sudden change created home offices on kitchen tables, and in living spaces far from the offices where work was traditionally done. While the shift occurred quickly, for those who managed the shift well, it opened up great opportunities for the future.

In a virtual environment your business can run from anywhere at any time. Costs will go down if you can manage to transition your workforce to a remote workplace. You may even find that employees will work longer and be more productive because they have access to their work more readily and in during this pandemic have less to do...

It’s critical that you upgrade technology and move to more portable work devices such as laptops and tablets to ensure that employees have the most convenient and agile forms of doing their work. Work share programs and project management tools are also important to adopt so that your teams can continue to collaborate and work effectively as a group. Consider implementing new software and hardware needs as you evolve these virtual offices to maximise the efficiency of your employees.

Fighting Isolation & Fear

While remote working environments can open up many opportunities and even expand your business’ horizon, you will have to deal with the negative aspects of working in a virtual workplace. Employees will face a sense of isolation and fear that you will need to address.

Make daily check-ins regular and routine to bring the team together. Best practices include morning huddles, mid-day group meetings and afternoon recaps to keep everyone focused. Consistent communication is vital to keep your teams engaged and reduces the fear of uncertainty. By implementing systematic times and methods of sharing information, employees stay in the game and away from the sense of loneliness and apprehension they are feeling.

Execution is Critical

While high levels of execution are important in any work environment, when your business moves to a virtual environment it is even more vital. To ensure your execution levels remain high, you have to ensure that three pillars of your business are solid; Management, Systems and Planning.

Management

Management is about building confident productive people. Your managers have to be extremely competent. You need to have managers that can shift to styles that fit where the employees are. Some employees need more focused attention and some less. Managers have to be able to pivot and deal with each employee differently to accomplish goals and objectives. The management systems you have in place whether virtual or not, will ensure maximum productivity in your employees.

Daily Reporting:

In a virtual work environment it is imperative that you are able to keep employees busy and on task. Requiring the delivery of a daily task list is a great way to ensure your employees are focused and working on the right stuff. Daily lists may start out as a general to-do list. As you strengthen your team’s abilities, ask them to prioritise their tasks ensuring that they are working on the most important tasks first. Then once they master prioritising, evolve the daily list and ask them to add a timeline or project time duration on the list. This will allow you to see not only how proficient they are getting but also limit them from dragging their feet or procrastinating. Also ensure lists are handwritten as it plants the concepts in the brain more effectively.

Weekly List and Team Huddles:

At the end of the week, ask your team members to hand in a weekly list in which they provide an overview of the major priorities for the coming week. This Weekly list is reviewed and shared during a Monday morning huddle where each team member communicates to the rest of the stakeholders what their priorities and workflow looks like. This way nothing slips through the gaps. This Monday morning meeting may be lengthy in the beginning but as you master it, these meetings should be about 45 minutes. During this meeting, group issues are discussed, debated, and reviewed to ensure that the team as a whole has input, and knowledge about the major challenges, obstacles and opportunities facing the company.

L.I.O.N. Meetings:

The next touch point with your teams is a one-on-one meeting that details what they have been working on, what obstacle they faced, what ideas they have for growth, and that they outline what the following week looks like. This breaks down to L.I.O.N. meeting held on Thursdays. This meeting is held prior the week’s end when about 80% of the critical work has been done and you still have time to impact change. The meeting is broken down into four segments.

L: Last week (the current weeks’ priorities and tasks) Review all pertinent information including KPIs, Goals, Objectives and critical deadlines or project’s progress.

I: Issues (obstacles and or challenges) Let the employee outline any issues of roadblocks they have faced and help them work through those impediments more effectively.

O: Opportunities (challenge your team to bring growth ideas to the table every week) this will focus them on finding ways to improve current systems and processes to achieve business goals and objectives.

N: Next Week (overview of what is to come) This allows you to refocus or redirect your team members if they have veered from the path or projects you feel are most important.

Daily Score:

Establishing daily goals is a great way to keep employees focused. These daily goals don’t have to be complex or intricate. They can be simple yet necessary things that each employee must do to ensure they are at maximum productivity. Asking employees to select and score their performance as it relates to their goals is a great way to focus their attention and establish self-accountability. They can add the goals and score to their daily and weekly lists.

Ask employees to rate their effectiveness in communication or company culture. How fast they answer the phone or how many contacts they make establishes ways to maintain attention to even the most elementary requirements of the job but are critical in keeping a virtual team on task and on track.

Other Ways of Improving Management:

In a virtual work environment, managers have to be focused on ensuring that their teams continue to grow and are maximising productivity. There are some easy ways to improve the overall management in your organisation in addition to the lists and meetings already outlined.

Avoid Superhero Complex and Open-door policy:

If you or your manager feel it is vital that you be involved in every decision and solving every problem, then you aren’t developing your staff. When managers have the 'Superhero Complex' they feel it necessary to swoop in and save the day. They don’t allow their teams to develop skills to handle issues or problems on their own. They actually are training their employees to be less productive because employees know that if it’s broken, someone else will come in a fix it.

It is critical that you position your staff to be more confident and competent. If you solve every issue and every challenge an employee faces, you are stifling their problem-solving abilities and since you are working to fix all the issues and hoarding all the knowledge, you find you are less productive. If you have managers who suffer from the Caped Crusader Syndrome, help them break it so they can build more productive teams.

Unrestricted open-door policies also reduce a manager’s ability to be productive. Constant interruptions and the need to provide all the answers to all your employee’s needs, also limits them. If you are always open-for-business, you don’t have time to deal with your own work priorities. So, guide your employees to bring certain issues to meetings and in other cases meet a question with a question of your own. Asking better questions will lead to less interruptions and more confident and competent teams.

Ask better questions:

Managers have a tendency to focus their questions on WHY something happened or wasn’t done. This immediately puts employees in excuse mode. To avoid this situation, ask questions that don’t immediately garner an excuse response, instead your questions should...

• Move the situation forward - Ask what can be done to move the process or task to a better outcome
• Include a specific time frame - by when should the issue be resolved or corrected
• Ensure your question or questions focus on details –when, how, what details need to be done to correct the situation.

By asking better questions you tap into the skills your employees have and strengthen their problem-solving and critical thinking skills. Developing questions which tap into learning styles and personality styles also helps you get more out of the employee because you are communicating with them through a process in which they feel more comfortable. Knowing as much about your employees learning styles and establishing clear paths of success also strengthen your management structure.

Establish Employee Plans:

If you already don’t have individual employee development plans, now is the time to implement them. These plans help reduce uncertainty, charters a path of success and growth and ensures your employees are focused and optimally communicated with. Employee development plans should include: DISC Profile, Learning style, Education plan, Career plan.

A DISC Profile identifies dominant personality traits, which identify the best ways and methods to communicate with particular individuals. Adding in learning styles methodology enhances communication further. The type of learning style an employee has also helps you in guiding and communicating with them more effective. There are three types of learning modalities; Visual, Auditory or Kinaesthetic.

Once you understand more about your employee’s personality and learning styles it is easier to develop education and training plans as well as career plans to meet their needs. Ultimately, the more in-tune you with your team members are, the more congruent your vision of their job’s priorities and their vision of the same will align. Test alignment by asking your employee to list the Top 10 Things they need to do in order to do their job effectively and efficiently. If your list of the 10 most important tasks of the job match with the employees view the more productive the organisation is. The further apart and the more disparity in the lists indicate where you should focus to bring more alignment.

SYSTEMS

Systems are really ways to; Save Your Self Time Energy and Money.

Organisations that memorise their processes and write down the ways of doing things find their productivity increases. Systems don’t have to be complex and you don’t have to have lengthy manuals. Simple checklist, scripts and instructional videos work just as effectively to ensure employees know the most effective ways to get results. When you find inconsistent results or low productivity, it is likely that a formalised system is missing.

Keep in mind. People don’t run the business. People run the systems that run the business. When you want to replicate and consistently get the same results you need a system to guide your team to success. Virtual environments tend to uncover the lack of systems and processes because the team has no established rules of engagement.

PLANNING

You can’t develop systems without plans. Organisations that don’t plan or only plan once a year can’t possibly be prepared for sudden and dramatic change. We will not be able to adjust quickly to a new environment unless you are planning consistently throughout the year.

Without mastery of daily planning, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual planning have little meaning or success. It is the daily achievement of daily goals that get you to the milestones you need to move the business forward. Trying to plan for 3-5 years in the future without focus on what is happening in the present is a fool’s errand.

Going into business without a business plan is like going on a mountain trek without a map or GPS support, you’ll eventually get lost and starve! -Kevin J. Donaldson

The most important part of planning is the thinking and brain storming phase. The actual written plan is important, but without quality time allotted to actually thinking about the plan and its implementation is just another piece of paper to file. In a virtual world planning and plans are even more critical. You can’t visually see what everyone is doing so you must rely on the written plans, and milestones to get you to the finish line. During a major crisis, plan in smaller increments to ensure you stay on top of changes and can make adjustments quickly. Consider some of the plans you will need to develop quickly.

• 90 day Survival Plan
• 90-day Plan to
• Thrive Relaunch or Grand Reopening Plans
• Long term Plan for new normal operations.

Establish a regular cycle for planning and ensure that every team has a process to follow. Even if you have to toss your plans out the window due to a crisis, you have a foundational process to help develop new goals and objectives to help you survive and ultimately, thrive.

If you put all this actionable advice into practice, in no time you will have your virtual teams rockin'! Next weeks strategy is number 4 - Cash Flow Management. In this article we will be going back to basics, and ensuring your business has a solid foundation. As the popular saying goes, "Revenue is Vanity, Profit is Sanity and Cash is King!"