Most of the organizations worldwide ask their employees to come to the office on workdays. The office is the place where we meet our teammates, to plan, inform, and tackle our challenges towards common goals.

These challenging days with the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) going viral worldwide, enforce many organizations to embrace remote work. To overcome the challenge of moving from location-based office to a virtual office, organizations need to offer efficient solutions as an alternative.

The challenge - move from location-based office to a virtual office while keeping the organizational productivity.

In this article, I will offer methodologies and toolkits so the organization will not only make your team more productive but also release the team from office dependency in future challenges.

The office Rhythm

Imagine two of your colleagues leaning towards the computer screen to overcome a pending issue. The sensitivity of the location-based office allows you to jump and help when you see others struggle. Furthermore, when they look above the screen and see you, it's simple to ask for help.

In order to keep the efficiency of the business, organizations provide tools for collaboration, communication, and knowledge sharing. By doing the above we help employees organize their work.

The problem with working tools is the decentralization of the organization. Luckily we have the location-based office to help us glue things together. But when we work remotely we find ourselves with many tools to maintain and efficiency becomes a burden that causes a direct leak in productivity.

We need the location-based Rhythm to hold us together while we run towards common goals.

You probably ask -- what is it exactly an office rhythm? Imagine your colleague in the seat next to you pick up a pencil and start tapping on the wooden desk than another colleague picks up a notebook and flipping the papers back and further with a notepad. Now another person from the end of the room turns on & off the lights, and your boss opens & closes the door. Can you imaging the music... now let's turn the sound into daily tasks:

✏️ - Writing an agreement with a new customer.

🗒 - Saving a document with marketing analysis.

💡 - A brand new idea.

🚪 - Capturing data for a report.

This is how an office rhythm looks like... but when you are not in the office, you hear nothing.

Context is everything

Knowledge workers like most of us, are creative people who find solutions based on environmental inspiration. Without understanding the context & doings of others, you might have the wrong idea about common goals. For example, if you're working on a new solution for a customer, the activities of a salesperson in your team might be useful. If you are an IT manager putting down fires, the urgency of matters might change by the current activities of your team.

When moving to remote work, organizations must establish a single source of truth so employees can hear the organizational rhythm

Now think about your single source of truth in life outside work. Where do you get news? How do you get updates from your friends?

Today we have social networks like Facebook that do the work for us. To get the rhythm we scroll in our Facebook feed or similar platforms and understand what people are up to.  

The interesting thing about our life outside work is that many times we might not get everything that we need from Facebook or the news, but for sure we will understand the rhythm.

Recommendations

Enough now with the theory and analogies, let's get practical. Here are a few tips on how to get it done:

1. First things first, make sure that somebody is in charge. In small teams, it can be the manager, in medium-size organizations it can be the COO or similar. In large organizations, it can be the innovation team or somebody in charge of embrace new work methodologies.
2. Analyze the WHAT -  what the organization is doing now - the ongoing projects.
3. Analyze the HOW - how the organization is doing the projects - the knowledge & documents.
4. Analyze how we connect the WHAT & HOW - how the organization communicates.
5. Connect all of the above to a website or a tool that updates each employee according to his schedule and upcoming tasks.

Our case - Tuqqi with Tuqqi

It became our life mission to make the recommendations above simple & easy for every organization worldwide. The current crisis hit us when we are armed and ready. Due to the Israel Ministry of health care recommendations, we move some of the team to work remotely and we are proud to say the productivity stays the same.

In the last few weeks, we onboarded many new customers and helping organizations embrace our solution to stay productive while working remotely during this crisis. To stay even more closely than ever, our R&D team worked night & day and we are happy to announce that we added the option to video chat through the Tuqqi platform.

Due to the current situation, we open a new and quick setup process to the Tuqqi platform. Our team is available online to set up new teams in a quick online session (schedule a call in with this link). In the session, we help you establish a remote work environment in a virtual working space to keep your productivity now and grow it with us in the future.

Stay safe!