Remote Working - How are you finding it?

How are you coping with being forced to embrace remote working patterns? As leader of a global software organisation like many of our employees I’m used to working from home, however working remotely every day without physical human interaction has its challenges.

At Iptor we are now in our fourth week of having 100% of the workforce working from home. Thankfully in this first phase we had checked that our infrastructure was in place to cope with increased volumes of homeworking (our corporate networks, VPN, virtual communication channels – Skype and Teams), so with the basics in place we’re able to continue to connect with our customers, partners, suppliers and employees. 

What we’re finding is that working from home doesn’t change your day-to-day work, it just means you’re doing it from a different environment. As leaders, what we are finding is that leading and inspiring teams and individuals can be more challenging. We had already started using Saberr https://www.saberr.com/ to transform teamwork and ensure Iptor is a high performance organisation. Now that we are all working remotely this is fundamental to how we are now working daily. 

As CEO of Iptor I’m running sessions remotely to set team purpose, team behaviours, agree our goals and priorities and review these weekly. The way we’re doing this using Saberr is a fun and engaging way to bring people together remotely to focus on what we need to do to drive the business forward during this difficult time. I’m then using Saberr Coachbot to run my one to one meetings with my direct reports, we can collaborate on setting our agendas, capture and follow up actions and I can also see which managers are engaging with their people on a team and individual basis.

So many people are experiencing days without long travel schedules or commutes, is this a chance to reset in terms of how we work and build a culture that allows greater work life flexibility?   

It looks increasingly as if the situation will not ever go back to how it was: many employees for companies who have sent all staff home are already starting to question why they had to go in to the office in the first place.

So, for now I’m embracing remote working as a new norm and looking at creative ways to ensure Iptor has employees who are engaged and focused on doing all they can from their homes around the world for all our customers. 

https://www.saberr.com/blog-posts/manager-guide-to-remote-teamwork