How to ensure the effectiveness of remote work

The remote work format for “office” businesses and non-production units is effective not only in force majeure circumstances. This is evidenced by the experience of companies that have made this decision for a long time. Their recommendations on the organization of remote work are shared by their owners.

REMOTE WORK allows you to reduce operating costs for rent, utilities, cleaning, office equipment, often - even for computers and equipment. Depending on the type of business, savings can be up to 30% of the monthly expenses of the company. What will be very important in the next couple of years: because of the prospect of repeated waves of the epidemic and the expected crisis. But having accepted the new reality, you need to make remote work effective.

Formalization of job descriptions

“The main secret is to initially prepare the job description with the person or team that will carry it out,” says Sergey Shcherbakov, owner of the Shcherbakov SMM Agency. The remote work format has been practicing for a year and a half. The staff of 15 employees. Even if you already have a job description, Shcherbakov advises:

• Gather everyone she will touch and write a new one to reflect the real situation.
• Immediately after preparing the instructions, determine who will take over the function of its control. It is desirable that this was a person from the same team.
• Agree on rewards and penalties (not necessarily financial).
• Get involved in control in person. According to experience, it takes about 2-3 months for a team to develop a habit (certainly not 21 days). During this time, colleagues need to be returned to the framework of the agreements and reminded that they themselves were their source.

How to find and implement RDS

RDS is the result of the employee’s activities, which directly affects his salary. At the seller, this is not the number of calls, but the number of transactions made, leads attracted, or goods delivered to the customer’s doorstep within 120 minutes from the time of ordering, etc.
For example, the RDS for an employee who is involved in the integrated management of social networks at Shcherbakov SMM Agency is as follows: “the number of projects conducted on an ongoing basis in which a plan (financial and procedural), approved in advance with the customer, is executed or overfulfilled, resulting in a client prolongs cooperation (preferably) or leaves, but remains satisfied with the profitability of the project and the service provided. ”

Formalization of working hours online

“People during quarantine unconsciously enter the regime“ One way or another, I didn’t choose to stay at home, what do you want from me ?! ” Subordinates will resist management and sabotage the expectations and tasks that someone else formulates for us. Management should become more directive, as always in a situation where there are many complex and important tasks, ”explains business psychologist, consultant Julia Kriventseva.

The introduction of task managers is a necessary element of the "remote". Task Manager systems such as Trello, Jira, Worksection show all running processes on the computer. In them, you can create projects and tasks, assign executors, designate deadlines, estimated time to complete the task, receive reports on the programs and applications used to solve the problem, and schedule tasks for a long time. Such systems allow you to organize work tasks into convenient boards (boards with materials, questions and answers, various degrees of access).

At Shcherbakov, SMM Agency started with Asana, now they use Trello, but there are dozens of variations. “An important nuance. Establish a written statement of objectives and written reports on them. No in Trello - no need to perform. This will accelerate collective awareness of importance, ”says Shcherbakov.
“Bitrix24 suits us - simple and inexpensive. In it we keep records of all tasks, communication on them, store all the files that relate to the tasks. If the task is not in Bitrix, it can be omitted. Every Monday everyone reports on the status of each task in the comments to it, ”says Dmitry Derkach, owner of Planet Kino.
Create a shared chat for the team
If you need to ask a question now and immediately get an answer to it, it makes sense to create work chats for the whole team and for work groups for individual projects. Usually they use Telegram, Slack, Discord, Massanger and Work Chat from Facebook. The "Planet Cinema" is very actively using Telegram. “We have many different groups for different occasions, on different topics, projects. We have constant communication in the messenger. We practically no longer use mail, ”notes Derkach. SMM Agency is testing Discord. This is a game messenger that provides excellent communication quality (both audio and video).

Development of checklists and regulations

Some implement strict work time control systems such as Yaware.TimeTracker, which record the beginning and end of the working day, lateness, breaks, shortcomings and processing, automatically monitor the programs used by the employee, applications, sites and their productivity, and even take screenshots showing what busy employee at the computer, and take pictures from a webcam.
Shcherbakov advises taking a repeating business process (for example, the client’s movement from the moment of signing the contract to launching his project into work) and recording the process step by step, “cutting” to simple monosyllabic tasks. It can be a simple exel table. “Indicate which points are critical and which are not. And also make a separate column for progress marks. This saves you hundreds of hours of work time per year by repeating the same items with each new customer, ”he says.
If you are preparing instructions for the sales department - collect the most frequently asked questions of customers and give written answers to them in order to turn them into scripts and pass them on to the entire department for implementation. Or maybe send it to the newsletter and publish it on social networks. All this will significantly save staff time. Even creative business processes, such as logo design, can be templated. The checklists of project managers should include a draft discussion point with the client every 3 days (so that he sees the intermediate stages of work and feels control over the situation).

Single window for customers

Using different CRMs (Bitrix, Amo), you can collect calls to landline office phones and messages in different chats (built-in online chat, Telegram, Viber, FB Massanger), and mail from a single window. Software builds a queue for operators, keeps statistics, sets up answering machines. From there, managers can bill. “We have a number of operations (for example, in accounting or a contact center) that can only work on the local network,” Derkach says. - For some processes, you can configure access through a local VPN (this is your internal VPN, for your company). An even more radical way is to leave the computer in the office turned on and configure remote access to it. ”

Training

“Analyze how the staff worked in the first stage - during the quarantine period. Make a simple SWOT of the observed situation. Of the minuses, for example, there will be an increased tendency to organize their work at their discretion, not to reckon with allies. Risks - failure of obligations to customers and a decrease in liability, a possible increase in conflicts in this regard. Opportunities - we can increase management competency in a situation of changed conditions, see which segments of the processes work poorly, ”advises Yulia Kriventseva. Engage in staff training and make your own online university, Dmitry Derkach advises. Each company, especially in retail, should have an introductory course for a new employee, scripts, standards. It's time to transfer all this to online mode, to take video lessons.

From temporary to permanent

If you decide to leave the team at distance work and after the end of the necessary measures, then this will be stressful for employees again. People need to be “met”, given a couple of weeks-a month to enjoy the lost social communications and “normal life”. Take an inventory. Redistribute office equipment, devices, documents, literature, material values, depending on the tasks, to employees for home use. “Unnecessarily” to hand over to a warehouse for individual storage (for example, http://svoysklad.com/). Hold a series of meetings, prepare staff for a new phase of remote work. Business psychologist Julia Kriventseva advises: “Having made the decision to switch to permanent remote work, spend the first month once a week at the office, or at least face-to-face meetings and meetings. Then gradually switch to meetings, meetings or conferences once a month, already in alternative locations. Even working remotely, you need to build a real, not a virtual community, in order to return employees a sense of security and control over their lives and a sense of company unity. ”