I know that headline sounds like the typical doomsday prediction that’s all too common these days, but I’d like to paint a different picture; our own story of adapting to the challenge of Coronavirus has led us to the most profound changes to the way we work, in more than two decades. Like many business owners, when we first went into lock down, I knew we faced temporary change, but long-term updates that actually improved our business?
A little about our previous setup first though. Before the outbreak, we routinely offered Work From Home as a staff perk. One day per week, anyone on our team could work from home as they chose. As a result we were better placed than many to adapt to the radical upheaval of Coronavirus. We had VoIP telephony in place, a cloud based support and ticketing system, as well as a variety of internal communications tools. With the onset of the pandemic we naturally sent everyone to work from home permanently, and indeed, we remain there today.
From the early days of the pandemic, with so much uncertainty, we began to operate the business as if the change would be a permanent way of working. It wasn’t until we really embraced the remote working mentality, as the only way of working, that we started to see such big improvements to our business. I know that goes contrary to popular wisdom that remote working is in some way detrimental.
Case in point, our development team. We had persistently struggled to maintain routine development meetings in person. Our group of developers would meet and liaise on projects, but not in a consistent way; no one could place their finger on the exact issue, but working together in an office seemed to generate an almost false sense of ‘hey we’re surely all on the same page’ mentality. With the move to remote working, we risked things unravelling. The team came together quickly to solve the obvious problem. Daily meetings became a routine way to start each and every day. Where weekly meetings had been a problem to nail down in our office, daily meetings became a must-have norm during lock down. Where our team had looked at meetings as a time-sucking chore before, they now eagerly awaited the daily chance to catchup and plan the day ahead. The result of this better communication? We’re now rolling out a huge project way ahead of schedule. What was planned for the Summer of 2021 or later, will now be ready before the end of 2020.
Another example was our support team. We thought we had great customer support going into lockdown. In retrospect our support was good, but its arguably great now (based on our client feedback data that is). In the same vein as our support team, the move to enforced remote working meant the introduction of new policies and processes; we had to ensure the work was being done on time and to the level of quality we demanded. The routine review of work, and introduction of metrics became critical. No longer could we sit next to someone and simply listen in to a phone call to review how things were going. The net result of the changes we made to our customer support experience meant we received record breaking support feedback from our clients.
Results like these made us take note. By really leaning into the challenges of Coronavirus and trying to adapt in positive ways, I’d argue our own business has improved, not suffered; so much so we’re going fully remote in 2021 with an eye to making the change permanent in 2022. And that’s just looking at the pragmatic business side of things; the impact on staff morale and happiness can’t be understated either.
I know many businesses have not been as lucky as we have, facing challenges too great to overcome; I know many have sadly gone to the wall. But for those of us lucky enough to have been able to weather the storm, perhaps take a look at reviewing the past year. As vaccines look increasingly likely to come online, before quickly deciding on plans to rush back to the office, maybe ask yourself what improvements you can bring along with you? Maybe you’re not ready to switch to a full time remote setup like we are, but perhaps you can offer you team more opportunities to work remotely or flexibly? After all, you never know what improvements are right around the corner…
By Stuart Melling
Stuart Melling is the Business Development Director for 34SP.com, a UK based WordPress web hosting company. Stuart is a founding director of the more than two decade old technology company and has with a particular expertise in online marketing.