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Quarantined small business: panic is the enemy of reason

Let's face it: leave employees to work at home in these few weeks - on the one hand, it's cool, humane and right, even out of panic, out of a stream of garbage from telegram channels. And, surprisingly, it is much easier for Yandex and other large companies than for a small business that sits on a constant production-promotion-sales cycle and whose profitability is tied to 2-3 main business processes. Therefore, many now experience not panic, not fear, but confusion: it is not clear how to live on, how to survive, how not to stop the matter? Or stop and wait? In fact, everything is not so scary - the main thing is to save the mind, rationally use the time, not to get money and keep human relations in the team. We have some tips.


Do not torture cats! But take the office flowers for a while home or do not forget to water with a margin :-)

This article was not in our content plan, and frankly, the pandemic situation is not the best time for peppy publications. But two things bothered us: the confusion mentioned above and the flow of advertising from several online services. Here we will not engage in moralism and catch by the hand, just talk about remote work and its risks to the company. Moreover, we have remote employees in RegionSoft, and this has never once in a few years prevented them from effectively selling, presenting and promoting our products in some places - RegionSoft CRM and the ticket system ZEDLine Support .

All right, stop talking - to the point.

We will not talk about trading companies, cafes, non-food stores, etc., that is, about the B2C sphere, they will have a hard time and the tougher the situation, the more problematic it will be to keep the company in the form in which it entered into this year. Our text is for small B2B companies that are engaged in development, advertising, production for business and so on. 

Do not panic and assess risks


Yes, the situation is not very pleasant right now. Due to the development of a variety of media, the blogosphere and micro-communications, it looks many times worse than the situation in the same year 2009 - simply because almost everyone can speak “expertly” on the topic and contribute to the panic. However, do not drop everything and make hasty decisions. The fact is that in the case of telecommuting, and even against the backdrop of a general economic and social crisis, the company will probably decrease sales, increase costs and, as a result, reduce maneuvers, but it will be necessary to fulfill all obligations to staff, customers, partners, suppliers, etc.

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Quarantine in a company should not be a fashionable measure, but a rational, objectively necessary decision, which should be determined not only by the state of affairs in the country, but also by the general epidemiological situation in the city. This is still an extreme measure. Remember: quarantine and remote work will certainly affect the level of your revenue, so correlate and calculate the risks.

However, if the quarantine decision is made and you decide to bring employees to the home office mode, you need to act as competently, rationally and even economically as possible. This is the situation when all resources should be focused exclusively on the work process: I don’t have fat, I would be living.

Don't leave people


It is important. An employee who worked in the office hardly transfers to remote work, moreover, two extremes most often occur: 1) the employee falls into desperate workaholism and works all the time that does not sleep; 2) the employee is blown away from freedom and he is actively immersed in home tasks, starting up work on the side and only staying in touch in chat rooms. But usually, outside these extremes, a person in the first days of a home office is confused, tired, depressed mood and even depression. Because the familiar environment has changed, the level of communication has changed, the usual routine has gone. There was isolated loneliness or a battle for the right to work inside the screaming-reproaching horde. 

Therefore, be all together, communicate in an informal chat, start a new unusual working period with the most simple, “overclocking” tasks, be in touch through channels familiar to your company: from a chat room over the phone to skype or corporate messenger. There should be a sense of team unity and the maximum working environment.

If you feel that your colleague or subordinate has begun to fall out of working reality, talk to him one-on-one, find out the reason and help solve the problem. You need to understand that work must continue. 

Alas, the quarantine will put something in its place and “effective managers and grow-hackers” who spend days behind meetings and micro-rallies will sit out without work. You will immediately see loyal and disloyal employees, you will be able to evaluate how the team and the psychology inside it are arranged. But this does not mean that you need to fire such employees! Give them a chance: load a new volumetric task, entrust coordination of work and ensuring communication, etc. All disassembly leave for the office period. 

Comply with labor laws. If you decide that your company continues to work and does it as usualif possible, do not cut wages, do not delay payments, do not shorten the day. Nothing motivates sad quarantined employees like wages falling on a card in time. But if you have decided to reduce the working day and reduce wages for this time, do it in accordance with the rule of law. Here is a good instruction for those who want to transfer employees to a remote location strictly according to the law .

If necessary, help employees transport home the necessary equipment for work (from the office!), Send a VPN, set up telephony. In no case do not put on the working and especially your own PC employees of the system for tracking working hours, tracking, different keyloggers and other advertised nonsense there. Trust and respect are two things that will make any remote employee work for you, even on the moon. And if there is no trust, then your time trackers do not care. As the saying goes, the wolf and a few sheep steals. Save only the control tools that were in your company at the time of the decision to work remotely.

Take care of data security


Any remote is a blow to security, because you have practically no control over employees and network connections. It’s not so bad if the working time is spent on TV shows or household chores — worse if commercial information is actively transmitted under the cover of a coronavirus night. Therefore, follow a few rules.

  • Log everything that can be logged at the software level or access to the central server.
  • Close access to critical information during quarantine.
  • If there are unsafe business processes that can be temporarily ignored, discard them.
  • If you are not sure of the reliability of any employees or there were precedents, delegate them other tasks that do not require any special nuances of security settings.
  • Set up two-factor authentication for all external and internal services used in the work, including corporate mail and instant messengers.
  • If you have a good system administrator, let him set up a VPN - this will work somewhat more conveniently, and control over the movement of data will be more transparent.

The main thing is not to allow problems in the team and conflicts so that there are no offended and uncontrolled dismissals with the withdrawal of important commercial information.

Work as usual - whenever possible


No need to fundamentally change the procedures for interaction, familiar channels of communication, even lunch break. Let everything be as it was in the office, quarantine is not the time for innovation. However, do not forget that employees will free up more time from what was spent on chatter, coffee, etc. Do not demand hard work from them, but make a surprise - for example, subscribe to training courses on the profiles of departments or give e-books that will need to be outlined and tell colleagues after leaving the office.

So you will kill three birds with one stone: increase engagement, pump each employee and immediately get a tool for effective return to the office, which begins with a discussion of useful topics and a mini-educational set.

However, do not force anything: if one of the employees personally asks you for an hour and a half for personal questions (for example, communication with children), do not refuse. One FIG no one in the office for a total of 8 hours not working :-)

Work on missed tasks


The company always has tasks for which something was missing. For example, the formation of a sales system, the revision of business processes, and even the testing of a new technology stack for a project! Since you still quarantine part of the work routine in quarantine, devote time to these “burdensome” tasks, dividing them between employees or pairs of employees who can most easily communicate with each other.

Ask employees to suggest solutions to problems and share them, for example, in Google Docs, where everyone can make edits or comments. As a result, you will get a bunch of new projects that can be used in further work. 

Important: work on such tasks in brainstorming mode. That is, new proposals should not be discussed, criticized, and even less denied; they should simply be supplemented by proposals. All discussions and heated debate will follow in the operational and working environment of the office.

Does business automate?


To a certain extent, now is even a good time for automation - because against the backdrop of a downturn in the routine, you and your employees will have more time to learn new software, learn and fill in the data. This thesis is confirmed by many years of experience: our desktop RegionSoft CRM proved to be excellent in the work of distributed teams (especially if we talk about the ticket system ZEDLine Support , the cloud is a cloud). 

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  • Do not be alarmed by the horror stories of advertisers! Nothing happened to your team, just the tables are not in the neighboring offices, but in the neighboring houses or on the neighboring streets. As you worked, so work, but you should not stop developing. On the contrary, debug business processes, master automation and outperform competitors as standing.  

Right now is a great time for two things - choosing a future automation tool and reviewing business processes for an excellent implementation. Choose several CRM, ERP, support systems, etc., slowly contact the vendors (who will also lose their workload and will have much more in communication) and begin to test demos with the staff and discuss options. 

Along with this, instruct everyone to describe in detail all the business processes in which he is involved and honestly indicate the weaknesses and strengths in the process. Then collect all this data and transfer it to an experienced and immersed in a business employee to bring processes together. When you have a map of processes, you can begin to optimize and review them. As a result, quitting quarantine, you can implement the software you need according to the formed requirements and not waste time on this process. This will be a great start to a new “new” working year if you decide to work remotely for employees.

There is an important plus in these tasks: employees are not damp and are in a state of responsible solution to a new problem.  

Don't do stupid things


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Everything in this world has a beginning and an end. Just recently we celebrated the new year and hoped for the best, and in early January we looked at a world that seemed to be about to unleash the third world. Does anyone remember this now? No. The same will happen with the epidemic - sooner or later it will subside or disappear, even earlier we will all return to our offices, which will still be safe and cozy. In any extreme situation, it is important to remain human, to maintain human dignity, to support each other. The virus will pass, but people will stay. And let everything be the same and even better.

And ... be healthy!

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