At this point, it looks like working from home will be around for a while and may become the new norm. Thankfully, working from home is not new to our exec team (that I now call ‘The Bizagi Bunch’ following all our Zoom calls on gallery view!). In this post, I’ll share advice from myself and ‘The Bizagi Bunch’ to help you up your work from home game.
The past 10 weeks haven’t actually seemed all that different to me as I have been working from home full-time for about eight years. I’ve found that it is a skill that must be honed, just like any other. A big part of my success is creating a daily routine, or process. That includes a work-life balance, collaborating with colleagues, and socializing, as well as time to take care of some personal responsibilities.
I decided it was time to extract my work from home process from its hidden location in my brain into Bizagi Modeler so it can be seen by and shared with others. It all starts with planning out your day!
“Get up at the same time every day, set time aside to get that super critical first coffee, meditate, catch up on news, or whatever you like to do in the morning.” – Richard Dufty, CRO
In addition to planning out your day, you’ll also need to be well connected. Not only will this enable collaborative working, but it’s also essential for morale.
“My first concern when I realized the gravity of the situation was for the health and morale of all of our people at Bizagi across the globe. We started planning very early to put processes in place to help them as much as possible.” – Gustavo Gomez, CEO
With our new virtual work environment, you will need to ensure that you take the time to check-in with employees, co-workers, and managers daily… and don’t forget to put time aside to keep up with family members too. I have updated this part of my daily process to ensure that business is taken care of, no matter how unusual the day, week, or year turns out.
As well as checking in with others, remember yourself. Be sure to schedule time to get away from your home working area. You may also have some new personal responsibilities with everyone else staying at home with you.
“One of the kindest things you can do for yourself is to take a bit of time off work and enjoy some downtime to recoup and have some time to rest and relax.” – Laura Whittingham Jones – VP of Human Resources
One of the easiest ways to remove distractions from your day and keep productivity up is to schedule your new responsibilities in advance. Dogs need walking and children need feeding and teaching with e-learning resources. Part of my daily process is to make sure I update my calendar to ensure there will be time for these necessary activities. Scheduling for these responsibilities in advance helps you make the most of your day.
If you and your team are properly supported by the correct technology, you will be equipped to carry out day-to-day tasks. It starts with basic things like a good desk setup at home and an external monitor; we had monitors shipped out from one of our offices. Above that its applications like Teams, Zoom, OneDrive, and Sharepoint that continue to help work together efficiently.
We were already using many of these tools at Bizagi, but the pandemic has pushed us to use them in new ways and to test out undiscovered features. We also brought in new technologies such as Kahoot to help us have fun together at a distance.
“Technology, including our own platform, has been an essential part of collaborating effectively as a globally dispersed team.” – Laurie Ehrbar, CMO
Many businesses have discovered critical manual business processes that just came to light with a 100% remote workforce. So once you’ve sorted your new daily routines and technology you can invest time in creating new processes that enable the rest of the business to work from home more effectively.
This could be as easy as documenting how to deal with a new set of exceptions and circumstances, or new standard operating procedures, providing employees with guidance on how to get things done properly. Or, possibly, new regulations and products have come about that need immediate action, clarification, and means of executing them.
“Being a process-driven company has really helped us to quickly put measures in place to limit the impact that these challenging times have had on our day-to-day operations” – Nick Taylor, CFO
When reviewing your current business processes, consider how you can make them flexible. The global situation is constantly changing, and your organization will have to change and adapt accordingly. So, agility is more important than ever as organizations across the globe are finding new ways to work.
Like I have above, you can Use Bizagi Modeler for free to draw up new processes and reflect these in your internal guidelines. With Bizagi you can even turn those diagrams into tactical automated processes or grow them into enterprise applications.
If you’d like to find out more about how to ensure business continuity for your organization, watch my recent webinar on ‘How To Accelerate Business Automation In The Time of Covid-19‘ and download our 3-Step Guide to Business Continuity. You’ll find out how to design new processes for collaboration, reassess your risk management, and automate processes for greater efficiency.
