Many companies have begun to work from home. How to ensure the collaboration and efficiency of “remote work”
Editor’s note: This article comes from WeChat public account “ Lake University ” (ID: hupansanbanfu), author: Ming Yun, founder of Ren Xianghui.
The epidemic situation is still continuing, but starting today, many companies have begun their home office models. How can the collaboration and efficiency of “remote office” be guaranteed?
At present, the toolbox for remote office and online collaboration has been very rich, from comprehensive nails, corporate WeChat, to Zoom, Slack, Mingdao Cloud, graphite documents and so on. Many companies provide their own products for free during the epidemic phase, which can support group chat, online document editing, voice and video conferencing and other forms.
Various tools are available, but how well remote collaboration works may depend on many other factors.
Isolating your home office is a special scene in a special period. In this special scenario, people who are adapted to the traditional office environment suddenly enter the “self-management” mode, and may face many challenges.
For example: Missing goals-due to the cessation of some business activities and changes in customer needs, colleagues who are isolated at home may not know where to start; communication barriers-problems that were originally solved face-to-face in a few sentences and become online Intermittent replies on office software; inefficiency-most people stay with their families, it is difficult to avoid being disturbed; lack of temperature-if there is no training before, most people are always talking to computers and mobile phones, which is easy to cause Impatience and anxiety.
In this regard, Ren Xianghui, a student of Lakeside University and founder of Ming Daoyun, gave some suggestions based on his experience in the industry. He feels that there are three things to be solved for the enterprise remote office: 1. Clearly what to do;
2. Contracted collaboration methods-the biggest factor affecting the effectiveness of remote collaboration is not how much the tools areAdvanced, but it comes from the prior agreement of the collaborative method and whether everyone adheres to it;
3. Everyone manages himself. This is different from person to person. For example, Ren Xianghui, who loves drinking water, puts a huge water cup beside the computer in order to reduce the movement of taking water at home.
The following is Ren Xianghui’s suggestion:
The epidemic will eventually pass, but online collaborative office may be the choice of more and more companies and more and more excellent people from first-tier cities to return to their second and third-tier hometowns, and it may become a mainstream mode. In view of this special isolated office collaboration scenario, I recommend that you try to achieve the following seven points:
01. Clear working hours
Even if you are at home, you need to have a time standard for commuting to make the process of “arriving” and “leaving” more obvious. Working from home saves commuting time and gives the team more flexibility in scheduling. After the service team is scheduled, it may be possible to provide longer external service time.
02. Clear job tasks
In order to improve the effectiveness of collaboration, remote work usually requires a clearer structure for the assignment, reception and communication of work tasks. Once it can be clarified once, it will not be scattered.
A relatively complete job task information should include: 1) the purpose of the task, 2) the task description, 3) the result to be achieved, 4) the time limit for completion, 5) the membership, including a single clear responsible person . If there are conflicting tasks, you also need to give the task priority.
Once the task is accepted for execution, the communication around task execution progress, issues, and plans should be based on this written record. Through unified use of a task collaboration platform, related communication content can be unified together.
03. Clear response and feedback time
The most obvious resistance to telecommuting is that colleagues’ expectations for response time have become uncertain. The negative result of this is that members will be afraid to ask questions and increase anxiety.
The most important communication habit to solve this problem is to “clearly specify the response time requirements”, for example, the initiator should say “This is the demand of customer A, please feedback the feasibility before 3 pm”.
Of course, the feedback and response are not always as fast as possible, but are reasonable based on the nature of the work.Buffer time. Because there may be a lot of cooperative relationship chains in an enterprise, this agreement should generally be carried out from the bottom up, rather than uniformly stipulated at the company level.
04. Clear reporting mode
Reporting conventions include reporting frequency and reporting content. The frequency can be determined according to the nature of the work, but there is a public way of reference for the report content, that is, the work completion content (Progress), work problems (Problem), and the next cycle work plan (Plan). The job of any post, using this framework for reporting, is certainly not bad.
In addition, the work report also recommends openness and transparency in a certain range, so that everyone knows the content of each member’s work report, instead of just a pipeline report to managers.
05. Inspection and supervision cannot be completely absent Even in Internet companies that advocate “self-management”, “Supervision” cannot be completely absent. Because it is difficult for anyone to achieve absolute self-discipline. And the nature of self-discipline comes from “other laws”, which means that our degree of self-discipline is largely derived from the scruples of others’ attitudes.
So, each remotely cooperating team can agree on an inspection and supervision mechanism in advance. This convention can be as simple as submitting the work product or it can be as harsh as an hourly video check-in, depending on the nature of the work and the team’s goals.
06. Special agreement in advance
Special circumstances, such as the illness of a colleague, the impact of an epidemic situation, and the need to leave work during working hours, etc., these issues should preferably have a prior plan and agreement. For those that cannot be listed in advance, there can also be a comprehensive interpretation mechanism.
07. Clearly communicate “office appointments during isolation”
In a variety of ways, clearly communicate new work tasks and office appointments during the isolation period to everyone in the team. Remote office, remote tool operation, collaborative communication booking, and time management during the epidemic are also an excellent scenario for training team members to “self-manage”.
In addition, due to the reduction or cessation of some commercial activities during the epidemic, the work tasks of some companies and employees will vary greatly. It is recommended that during the isolated office, in addition to the daily work, you can also focus resources on: understanding customer needs and developing new customers.
In this extraordinary period, knowing the customer ’s situation and needs is the most direct guide for adjusting the product and service methods-nothing is more accurate than picking up the phone and communicating with the customer one-to-one. In addition, according to the actual situation of the industry, we can offer tangible discounts to old customers through prices and terms of service, while more focused on finding and acquiring new customers.