Remote Work – 153 days in

2020 is the year when the world shifted to working remotely. Employees all over the world are learning new skills and polishing old ones to keep up productivity due to the fairly new (in some cases) remote working models. Real digital transformation is happening in real-time.

In fact, McKinsey’s reporting that many ”Business leaders are saying that they’ve accomplished in 10 days what used to take them 10 months That kind of speed is what’s unleashing a wave of innovation, unlike anything we’ve ever seen” (McKinsey Digital August 2020).

Today we work remotely on 3 continents and our customers, from all over the world. We wanted to learn how our staff was feeling about the shift to remote working models. We asked our employees how well they were adjusting to remote work during this time and the following were the findings:

We asked them what were the top three challenges that they were facing when working remotely

• 21.4% complained about not being able to effectively communicate with coworkers,

• 14.3% said they were dealing with too many distractions at home,

• another 14.3% said that they were struggling with the social isolation that this remote working model brought, and

• 7.1% were each struggling with lack of or subpar physical workspace at home, bad internet connectivity and keeping a regular work schedule.

and then we asked them how remote work was affecting their productivity

• 71.4% of the servicePath™ employees said that their productivity was not at all affected,

• while 14.3% said it had improved and

• another 14.3% said it had declined.

Initially, we thought remote work may have a negative impact in terms of productivity, but we were surprised to find that our staff was able to maintain productivity while spending more time with their families!

Needless to say, working remotely has taught us new skills and etiquette.

Effectively using video conferencing tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom that were previously underutilized has also led organizations to learn to maximize new features such as sub meeting rooms, which really are helping drive remote engagement. Staff are being “meetinged out”; so, showing up on time and prepared, being organized and having a plan set in place are more important than ever to evaluate if you need to be in the meeting. What we are now doing is that we are trying to avoid meeting sprawl and meeting just for the sake of meeting.

Our customer’s quote times have stayed consistent and the ability to launch new products remotely is more powerful than ever…

Leading organizations have benefited on their digital transformation journeys by digitizing their sales enablement and quote to cash processes which have aligned with their new remote working priorities and still allow for revenue agility and strong sales governance. Best of breed solutions seamlessly integrate with the organization’s CRM and billing systems such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and NetSuite.

With a CPQ tool, we would no longer need to have solutions architects involved on small and mid-sized deals, freeing them up to work on strategic opportunities to help us scale.

Jeremy Pease, COO Aptum

More on this here: https://servicepath.co/digital-transformation-and-cpq/

While there seems to be a major drop in the time and added costs of commute and lunch, there also seems to be a growing concern about social isolation and limited employee interaction. Using Microsoft Teams and Zoom for social non-work slots helps reduce the isolation factor and allows people to engage in mandating breakouts and new decisions with new members which are greatly recommended. We all know that it is too easy to hide in the big meeting; leaders need to help drive interaction and engagement.

Daily standups, Wikis, Slack and live assets help people collaborate and share knowledge and feel connected.

As we slowly open our global offices, we are offering our teams the ability to stay remote while some have chosen to return to the office for varying reasons. As we learn new best practices, we will continue to share them with you. While in the offices we are wearing masks, constantly sanitizing, encouraging contactless check-ins and employee logging, we look forward to returning to the office happy, healthy and in great spirits.

Stay safe.