COVID-19 Corona Virus Is An Opportunity For Businesses

In the last couple weeks, I have been privy to various conversations at my company regarding the realities of the COVID-19 Corona Virus on the business. All scenarios have been put forward, and the preparedness of the company has been centre to all discussions. The possibility (now a reality) of people working form home en mass means that the 200 person company is facing one of its biggest challenges in its 30 year history.


See my next article for tips on helping remote working be more effective.

Why I'm Not Worried

When I was Head of Development at The Cogworks I helped establish processes to work effectively when we had people in 5 locations over 3 countries, with 2 satellite offices. At times it truly felt like a remote-first agency, and I really wanted to see that at Radley Yeldar in a larger scale.

In the past 8-10 months the Digital Department at Radley Yeldar has been organically (with a few nudges) ramping up it's remote working processes. People have been working from home far more often. This has been helped largly by great Slack habits, which has resulted in the Digital Department introducing Slack processes for the entire company.

Another great communication tool has been Zoom, and it has overtaken all other forms of conferencing choices with our clients. In fact, one of our clients was already using Zoom internally, and they were only using traditional conference calls and Skype for Business because they thought they had to.

In terms of projects and planning, Stories on Board integration with Jira has been a true success story with our Scrum practices, we are using Trello more often, and we even started using OneDrive for shared documents.

So in the last couple weeks, while the rest of the company was trying to ensure that working from home was going to be productive, I have to be honest and say that I have been mostly blasé about the "work from home" situation.

Why Is COVID-19 An Opportunity For Businesses?

In my time, I have worked with many companies. I have seen bleeding edge adoption of new technologies and processes, dinosaur companies where they were too afraid to change anything, and everything in between.

As today, the UK Government has recommended that everyone who can work from home should do so. While this is an enormous challenge for most companies, it is a fantastic opportunity to modernise with conviction. For those of you in companies which have been slow to adopt working from home policies, tools, and processes, this is an opportunity for you to help your company modernise.

Adapt or perish! What might have taken years of unbearably slow incremental changes is now literally happening within a matter of weeks. This is an exciting time for innovation and ideas. Companies now have the motivation to try new things, get real input from their employees, and create meaningful actions to help people work from home more effectively.

After the dust settles, my hope is that most businesses will hold on to the new processes, and allow people to work from home more often. This could be a catalyst for remote working becoming mainstream.

Remember The People

While this is a great opportunity to modernise, you need to be aware that you have real human people working for you. Working from home is definitely not right for most people, so you need to be aware that isolation and depression can settle in very quickly. You need to actively encourage communication with all of your team, and have routines which facilitate this.

I outline some tips in my next article.

Final Thoughts

I hope that I have given a positive spin on this ordeal. This doesn't need to be a burden. Businesses truly have a great opportunity to modernise and become more efficient. With this challenge, please remember that the happiness of your staff is the most important thing. You need to help them adapt to these rapid changes.

In my next article, I outline some suggestions to help remote working more efficient.