Flume Has Gone Remote
COVID-19 has quite literally asked businesses to adapt in ways that have never before been required. As part of our commitment to our staff, clients, suppliers, and country, we have decided to go remote. Obviously, it can be a fear for any business to all of a sudden pull the trigger and recommend to their staff to work remotely. Being a digital business we feel we are already primed to make this work; however, below is what we have shared with our staff – and something that you may find useful for your own business as success measures.
1. Team Stand-Ups
It is important to run weekly company-wide catch-ups. At Flume we call these Pow Wows. We run these every Monday morning and we’ve decided that it’s critical for these to continue virtually.
Daily team stand-ups: the teams’ leads will be running daily stand-ups at 08:30 in the morning and again at 16:00 in the afternoon – again virtually.
2. Platform and Tools
In a digital era online tools are the way to go. We’ve asked our team to be available and connected on the following platforms that we already use:
- Slack – All of our client projects and personal DMs run via this platform. In fact, we do not use email internally at all. Slack is our official platform for company communication. It’s radical, as it helps us communicate effectively and efficiently.
- Google Business Apps – When we launched Flume, we launched using Google Business Apps, which honestly is the best decision we ever made. Our business literally runs off Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Drive and Google Hangouts. Collaboration is simple and effective. We’ve decided to use Google Hangouts as our tool of choice for internal stand-ups.
- Magnetic HQ – This is our project management, job, opportunity, tasking, invoicing, HR and time-tracking platform. If everyone is tracking time accurately, it’s very easy to slot jobs into the system and generate accurate views of what’s going on in real time.
3. Communication
- We’ve asked our staff to overcommunicate, and often.
- We’ve asked our staff to overexplain; ‘it’ is a swear word. Example; “I’ve completed it”. What is “it”? Be specific and overexplain what you mean. E.g. “I have completed the uploading of the commercial content to Facebook.”
- We’ve asked our staff to tag team members in communication. If you require actions then @ your team member on Slack and Google.
4. Home setup
It is important that staff members have what they need to get the job done at home.
We have made sure that everyone has internet connectivity – if they don’t, Flume will subsidise data. We have also made plans for UPS systems for home use that we are also going to subsidise for staff.
Lastly, we have made our offices ‘safe’ zones. We have decided to let staff work from the office if they literally cannot work from home. However, we have limited it to one staff member per boardroom as a means of isolation. After all, we have a generator at the office that allows for no electrical interruptions.
Conclusion
We’ve told our staff that this is an opportunity not to relax but to prove why remote working can work. We’re confident that our productivity will increase as a result and our clients will be well looked after.
