How can you use the Covid-19 pandemic positively?

I do not underestimate the consequences of the Coronavirus hitting the global society but do strongly believe that crises can be used to review how we go about daily personal and work life.

For years we have talked about pseudo work, why we work the same weekly hours we did decades ago having all the new technology around us. Yes, we have seen increased productivity and new developments, but we still increase our travels, number of physical meetings, wasted time and increased stress levels. I believe we prefer our “old” ways simply because we do not like changes.

The Covid-19 situation is worrying as countries close in order to stop the virus spreading. People are forced to “quarantine” themselves at home for a period. Being at home does not mean being idle as we all know, but it gives you an opportunity to rethink the way you work and spent your time both at work, public and private.

I have worked from home for several years and being in an industry that mainly offers advice and bits there are many advances and few disadvantages in doing this. The advantages are:

1.      Substantial increased productivity and quality

2.      Less stress because the individual person can plan the work/life balance much better

3.      A substantial decrease in wasted time moving from one meeting to the next and chat at the coffee machine.

4.      Substantial savings in rent, facilities and transport time and cost.

The downside:

1.      Difficult sharing news

2.      Brainstorming here and now issues with a problem

3.      Less social interaction lowers the loyalty towards the team and employer.

4.      Decreased social interaction do influence private life.

This pandemonium gives you a unique opportunity to rethink your business and the processes you have used for decades in order to run the business. Business is already showing slowing down which means your employees will have more time to rethink the way they work. There are already numerous examples where companies have lowered the weekly working hours to 30 hours and with the same pay. Most examples show increased productivity, quality and income.

How to go about it?

·        Create small virtual cross functions, teams, mirroring your business/product structure.

·        Describe the process you offer your customers from a-z

·        Find the hidden bottlenecks

·        Identify the wasted time

·        Identify what differential advantages you deliver compared to your competitor

·        Can you expand your product range?

·        Identify obsolete systems, software and find out the value of upgrading

·        Identify future possible savings like avoiding physical trips, time-consuming reports or reports no one reads or act upon. These areas are wasted time and energy.

Use the existing systems like Microsoft team, slack, GoogleDoc to collect the work and wisdom you will be collecting and prioritize the various wordpools or bottlenecks.

When we all are back to normal you will find that there still will be a need for project descriptions, physical trips, meetings and coffee breaks. However, you will change some processes, travel differently and rethinking your meeting structure. And perhaps most important: GETTING YOUR PEOPLE INVOLVED AND BE RECOGNIZED.