Remote Workforce – what steps to take

Remote workforce what not to do Part 1

Past mistakes

In the early days – that is 10 – 15 years ago being fully on the cloud and paperless was not an easy fete. Back then Evernote came out and a few other role players. I was definably an early adopter with all the pains that went with that. I messed around with quite a few apps (as everybody did) and finally settling on Evernote to scan all my documentations into it. So many other companies got bought, taken over or something in between which wreaks havoc on your processes when you heavily rely on it. But Ive never looked back. I do not advocate to use Evernote, these days there are many different types of notebooks out there than can easily be used. I have found that Evernote still stays my goto depository for paper and other notes. Guess it is a matter of better the devil you know.

Today 2020

Getting to 2020. Things have drastically changed. Covid a household name these days has hit practically the whole world. Previously the risk of not being able to the office was non existent and hardly ever spoken about. It is a different story now. Every company that did not have a remote thought process on teams got effected one way or another.

I am writing this blog not to tell you what to do but what to add to your planning and thinking process along the way. Personally I go with what is practical. In my daily life have no real bias towards different softwares as long as it is useful, can work collaboratively and easily auditable. Obviously as cost effective as possible.

The jump from office, server based though process to cloud is not an easy one. It should also not be taken lightly. However, I have been in scenarios where a client moved over to the cloud within 3 days. This from a fully paper based thought process. It was an aggressive decision from the owner, he has never looked back. To date this has been one of the more successful adoptions to cloud I have seen, and much of it I can ascribe to his leadership around the subject. He just did not back down at all cost.

Questions to review

For me it is key to answer just a few simple questions.
1. Does it work in a team
2. Can they collaborate at the same time in it
3. Do I control my data – what are the clauses
4. Is if fully cloud based (Offline / Online) for me these days is not really a concern.
5. Can you audit with great reporting

What would be your next steps?
For a remote workforce to get going you will need a good central management system. By this I don’t mean get people on a basic task management system. As most companies who jumped to systems like Asana and the likes. Asana is a brilliant tool, I have been part of various teams using it. Where these types of tools drop short is when you start working in larger teams. You need proper audit type overview and reporting. You want to do workflows etc. When you have more than 50 odd tasks that you have to do. More often than not the basic task based systems fall apart when you have more than a 100 -150 tasks you are managing. From the ground up it was simply not designed for that. Although these basic task based systems can handle thousands of tasks, i.e. you can log them in there. The effort it takes to stay up to date and knowing what others have done differs from useless to downright extremely difficult. Visibility to other parts of your company is extremely low.

This is one of the main reasons why I keep coming back to the Koneqt system. It is extremely quick, most of the time faster than a programmed like Outlook that you’ve installed on your laptop. Anything can relate to anything in the system. You can related a Project Task to a company, user, opportunity, timesheet etc. There is no limit in the direction that you can relate things to each other. This is an extremely powerful thought process and methodology.

Relevance comes with relationships.

Adoption of Koneqt is extremely quick. Often it is a 10-30minutes training session to get someone going. An adoption to a remote workforce can happen in one day without issues. You can bypass the use of internal emails almost in totality. Have full audit overview of what people are doing or not doing. It can easily be adopted as your central management system for all your daily tasks.