How working from home has boosted team support
Richard Brewin • May 22, 2020
Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been conducting surveys of accounting teams to gauge how they are experiencing working from home and what lessons can be learned.
An interesting fact to come out is that a very high proportion of the teams, over 85%, are finding that the support and training they are getting from line managers and colleagues is at least as good as, and, in many cases, better than they get when they’re all together in the office.
If you think about it, when you’re in the office, a lot of the interactions for support, guidance and help are unplanned. Someone wanders into the room and says “Have you got a minute?”, “What are you working on right now?” “Can you help me”?
Neither party is ready for the conversation that is required. Often they end up rushed, ill thought through, short of data, even rebuffed.
Compare that to a similar situation when both parties are working remotely. An email comes in: “Can you help me with xyz problem?”.
“Sure. Let’s book a video call in 30 mins and we’ll go through it. Summarise what you’ve done so far, ready for the call”.
30 minutes later and the call takes place with both parties focussed on the problem, uninterrupted, prepared and with time allocated. By sharing their screen the ‘teacher’ can better demonstrate what they are talking about, take the ‘pupil’ properly through the steps.
Okay, so the help wasn’t immediate as it would have been, possibly, within the office, but it is of a far higher quality and much more effective and efficient as a result.
Through the forced nature of lockdown we are learning what we already knew…that a bit of planning and preparation goes a long way. Working from home means that we can’t take the short cut habits that we’ve all got into. We have to plan and prepare for things better, communicate arrangements more effectively, think about what our next step is rather than just react.
Lockdown has made us focus on how we communicate with each other, how we share information, how we track progress.
Of course, you don’t need to be working from home to work like this. You just need to take the discipline you apply when working at home and apply it wherever you work.
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