Leverage Productivity and Skills while Working from Home
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the world at a scale and speed that we have only seen so far. Something that started as a slightest humor, now has farthing impacts on all sectors and sections of market and society respectively. Surrounded in these situations, it’s rather commendable, the world has united to fight these odds, all the sectors of societies have been contributing in their ways, here more specifically discussing of corporate-business sectors who have taken measures to overcome this.
Direct Business Impact
The COVID-19 has forced most of the countries into lock down, which has given room to most of the internet companies for adapting remote working options which also is the need of the hour. Though companies would be able to utilize remote working options, they would be likely to prepare their employees who are accustomed to remote working to navigate the challenges involved. This would of course include few factors, which are non-exhaustive of, physical environment, creating support networks to make a successful transition to this new work structure, helping employees with a clear objective about the productivity expected out of them, and building mutual trust, etc.
Leveraging Productivity
Employees are seldom bewildered while working from home of how they are required to contribute to the business adhering to their work responsibilities, what is the nature of flexibility, what are the expectations set and how do they work towards achieving it and most importantly how they are expected to remain productive while not being present in the physical office environment. Given the current situation, Immediate Reporting Managers have a crucial role to play to help their team mates understand their role and objectives to be fulfilled. A concrete plan to work collectively on leveraging productivity and assisting employees with a skill development program, works in favor of everyone involved.
Sectona has always encouraged employees for enrolling to various trainings, keeping oneself updated within Training and Development program. With the outbreak of this pandemic and as a reflexive decision of opting for “remote working”, it was not much difficult for our Team Managers to curate Skill Development projects for their respective teams. As an organization, we take pride in being meticulously process oriented and working from home would not hinder that. Our managers followed an exclusively mutual process to help individual teammates take up new projects considering their interests and capabilities.
Open & Transparent Communication:
Sectona believes first key to managing remotely is to maintain good lines of communication. It might happen so, as employees are not available around, they might be unclear and uninformed of certain ongoing working aspects, wherein communication bridges the gap. It also helps managers to set up right expectations with regards to working from home, the amount of productivity required. Sectona has never believed in micromanagement. One way that our managers keep in constant touch is getting on a quick call while starting the day to understand the agenda and once in the evening to assess the progress. Keeping the teammates engaged and informed and being accessible for them is essential for our managers.
Goal Setting:
It is vital to understand individual interests of employees and whether they are aligned with organizational goals in assigning a skill to develop for teammates. This is only possible, with different layers of managers being involved who are also well aware about the engrossment and inclination of employees towards a certain topic in concern. Managers at Sectona had one-on-one interaction with their respective team members to setup a definite plan of skill development while working from home and keep the employees driven with a set goal to achieve and help them be motivated throughout the process.
Within an organization each functional department have collaborative tasks to perform whereas for an individual productivity it is essential to curate projects that are in line with the defined goals. To share a precise example, Sectona’s Quality Assurance team has been collectively working and assisting Product Development team through Manual Testing, however utilizing this remote working situation, the QA Team Manager identified a project that can be performed in an automated environment and have continued working towards the same while maintaining the manual testing patterns.
Resources
Resources become a necessity while deviating from basics that we’ve been doing, towards experimenting new skills and ideas. Sectona has setup online forums, training modules for employees to help make their process of skill development smoother. While not just through virtual platforms and recorded trainings, fellow teammates, seniors and managers can contribute and share their experiences and strategies within the team to assist each other.
Time Management
During such tough situations, of course a right balance between work and personal life is extremely crucial for our employees. A stress free mind is more productive when compared otherwise. The core idea followed by our managers is to allow flexible hours yet maintain consistency. Here, the concern is to avoid over-burdening employees while keeping them equally productive and organized.
Two way Process
“Individual commitment to a group effort-that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work”- Vince Lombardi. Complying with managers’ guidelines and views, employees at Sectona have well adapted to remote working and equally contributed to smooth functioning of all the business aspects. Needless to mention, all cross functional teams have been working in unison to keep the work unaffected, while Implementation and Product Support team has gone out of their way to help our customers experience an unrestrained remote working process through our PAM Solution product, matching the time zones of clients and customers across globe, extending an online-remote support through video-conferences and much more.
Amidst these sturdy situations around the globe, Sectona is aiming to get the best out of this situation and support our clients. However, as we make remote working hassle free for our clients through our PAM Solution, it gave us an opportunity to leverage our product and experience it firsthand. We have exposed PAM to the internet of our office premises, which helps all the required cross functional teams have a remote access to their systems. While doing so, we focus on Access Permissions, Risk Management, wherein access is restricted to certain servers and leaves no room for copying or leaking the data. Additionally PAM is able to track the time duration of working on the server, which makes the remote working experience simpler.
To keep it lighter and positive, we have been encouraging managers to conduct weekly video calls to engage with their teams, also conducting “Weekend Friday E-meetups” to ensure each other’s well-being, to exchange ideas on general know-hows and proposals to collaborate as a team and much more
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