The Covid-19 Challenge: Working Remotely Effectively with the 4D Formula

Facing the great challenge of the Covid-19 pandemic, many businesses have begun allowing employees to work from home to ensure public safety and health. At the same time, this is also a golden period for businesses to focus on strengthening their internal foundation to respond strongly to any external impacts. Therefore, how to work remotely effectively is a problem for every leader today.

Despite the increasing adoption and popularity of hybrid online work policies, some managers and employees find it difficult to adjust to certain factors. Below is the 4D formula to help you maximize productivity, reduce stress, and effectively leverage the online work experience for your entire business operation.

1. Maintain a regular schedule

Without supervision, even your most dedicated employees can become neglectful. Setting a schedule not only provides structure to the workday but also helps you maintain morale and motivation to complete work.

Then set realistic expectations for what you and your employees can accomplish daily.

2. Maintain connection

Extended periods of working from home can also lead to a gradual decline in departmental productivity and motivation. You need to try even harder to stay connected. Plan for online meetings, or highly interactive, regular conversations, exchanges, and discussions between colleagues and different departments/divisions.

However, it’s important to note that you should not overuse work chat groups for discussions and boosting morale, as work information can easily be forgotten and becomes difficult to find again. If possible, find a tool that helps businesses build culture and connect their workforce, like Workplace.

3. Adjust work habits

The reality for your employees when working remotely is constant complaints like “I don’t dare to leave the computer screen,” “it feels like work is piling up,” “I have no private time even when working from home because I’m only worried about work”… 

This raises the question: how do you know the work progress of the sales department to urge them on? How do you know that marketing staff are overloaded and work needs to be distributed more evenly? How do you know if one person is hoarding work while many others are idle?

The leadership team also cannot text each person every day to ask for detailed work updates, which is time-consuming, tiring, and ineffective. Therefore, you need to adjust the workflow, workload, time management, and track individual work reports in a more optimal way using digital technology, such as using HRM human resource management tools.

4. Dare to change, dare to shift to create opportunities

External challenges: The biggest challenge during this time is the Covid-19 pandemic, forcing businesses to work online. In addition, there are challenges from government policies, and partner and customer complaints about attitude and work progress… 

Internal challenges: Employees are distracted, work progress is delayed, statistics are confusing and messy, reports are unclear and inaccurate, financial losses, wasted operational time and management costs while work is not effective…

This is a golden time for business managers to make a breakthrough, change the way the business operates, and apply effective management models and optimized workflows. To do that, every business needs to undergo a digital transformation by using comprehensive business management software.

Among all the prioritized solutions today, 1Office – The comprehensive business management platform is considered by experts to be a solution that brings optimal efficiency to businesses. Accordingly, 1Office integrates a set of 3 tools:

– HRM: A human resource management toolkit that helps manage and store personnel information (contracts, insurance, working hours, professional capacity, KPIs…). From there, it automatically evaluates performance, tracks time, and calculates payroll.

– CRM: A toolkit to support the management of business operations (marketing, customer care, inventory import-export, finance, accounts receivable/payable).

– Workplace: A toolkit and resources for employees to work (Planning, automatic task assignment, supervision, progress tracking, document exchange, discussions, internal communication…).

Currently, 1Office has a promotional program for customers who register for the service in June:

♦ Get 2 MONTHS of software usage for free.

♦ No setup fee for TRAINING and TOURISM companies.

1Office – The comprehensive business management platform is the solution that accompanies every business in every era. Contact us for advice on how to work remotely effectively by calling our hotline: 083 483 8888 or register to receive a remote work demo from 1Office.