I had remote work experience for the entirety of my 30-year engineering consultant career. Since starting my company 5 years ago, I transitioned to a more traditional office space. As we grew, an open office concept worked well. With component furniture we were able to reconfigure easily as we added staff and changed focus.
Now, after 6 weeks of planning, we are all working remotely. The once “bursty” office is now dark and empty of life and computers.
I believe we are going to be successful in our transition. We have experience with this, and we planned. When the coronoavirus was still largely a Chinese issue, and the experts were talking about how to address it, we held a staff meeting to discuss the “What if?” scenarios associated with business and personal disruption that could occur with this virus.
We do annual strategic planning meetings with most of the staff, and we know that even though we are small, our Achillies heel is communication. We have a staff of independent thinkers who like to do. That is a great place to be and the challenge is to keep all of us heading towards the same goal. That means clearly setting goals, planning to achieve those goals and talking about progress across the team on a regular basis. Planning is another one of our trouble spots. These became the two areas to consider software to help address.
In our group discussion, our first concern was the disruption of childcare and school for our team members with young children. Then we discussed the isolation and quarantines in China and determined that remote work would be our plan. From this point we started getting ready. This included:
- Ensuring critical staff had company asset computers they could take home with all the software needed for continuity of work
- Making a backup of all information critical to our business and a plan for keeping it up to date
- Incorporating tools to help us in the areas we need help with (i.e. Monday.com, and better teleconferencing software)
- Developing policies for employee safety while still at work; for intellectual property in a remote work environment; for remote working
Our forecast regarding the fragility of childcare occurred earlier than we expected when one of the team’s mother was told by her doctor to stop caring for her grandson. So we adapted to a home-working plan for that team member right away. It was supposed to be for a month, and only impact Monday-Wednesday afternoons. That lasted two weeks, and then childcare centers and schools were closed. At that point half of our full-time staff was working remotely.
Then came the series of emails and phone calls two weeks ago notifying us that conferences, speaking engagements, and contracts were being postponed or cancelled. Our next two quarters pretty much vanished in three days. It was expected since we were watching the progress of the virus and what was happening in other parts of the world but it was still hard.
Our value as a company is in our product and our people. Keeping my staff safe is as important as keeping client satisfaction high. So last Friday, as the State of Florida closed beaches, bars, and restaurants, we decided to transition to a fully remote workforce and emptied the office of everything we needed for continuity of work.
We are in the process of pivoting our products hard to the new reality. I can see that the planning we did ahead of time is paying off. Our transition out of the office into remote work has been very smooth and we are running hard, working together, to survive this disruption of business.
We have been benefitted by having frank discussions with our suppliers regarding our revenue disruption. This has resulted in our kind landlord reducing our rent by half for two months, our housekeeping service supporting us by agreeing to clean monthly rather than weekly, and our clients calling us for the online products we luckily beta tested this fall.
We are hanging on for a rough ride. But I’m hoping that by the time the ride ends, we will exit it having grown from the experience.
