The whole world has had to adapt to the sudden changes and new norms that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought. The necessary explosion in working from home – as individuals and as teams – has been a major cultural adjustment for many companies and staff. 

At Inbotiqa, remote working is part of our DNA. From the outset of writing our first prototype YUDOmail software, we have been working remotely. Today, with a larger team now spread across three continents, the blend of remote working practices we have followed and learned throughout our journey continues to help us be a productive and tight-knit team that delivers, and with a spring in our step. 

During this challenging and indefinite period, we wanted to share our best practices for team remote working in case all or any may be of use.

Stay safe and healthy

First off, we’ll reiterate the importance of self-isolating and social distancing to break the chain of the spread. We are all helping to keep each other safe and healthy.

Develop a routine

A work routine at home is naturally going to be different to an office one. We encourage embracing this and making the most of the opportunities and flexibility working remotely offers, but also to find a personal daily structure to help maintain focus and productivity. Experiment to figure out what works best for you then maintain your optimum work/life balance. 

For team members with children, work routines will naturally need to be more flexible. Devising a routine for children that compliments work times helps provide stability and a timetable for schoolwork and exercise plus clear time for you to be productive or join video calls. Colleagues are understanding and even if routines can’t always be stuck to, they provide something to work around. 

Communicate, communicate, communicate

Communication is perhaps the most important part of being effective as a team.  When working from home this becomes very different from in an office. Fortunately, we live in times where there are various modes of communication – Email, Chat, Voice, Video. It’s important to use them in synergy otherwise it’s easy to succumb to over-communication hell.

Quick questions? Use Chat

We respect other colleagues’ time and always start with ‘do you have a moment’. Keep conversations short, to the point, and only to get your questions answered. Avoid forwards, good morning messages, and such. 

If it’s formal, use Email

Naturally, Email is a communication tool that’s close to our team’s hearts, and its benefits truly shine when it comes to conducting official internal and external transactions remotely. Over the years, Email has become a de facto tool for formal communication – agendas, minutes of meetings, organisation notices, requests letters, and so on. Remote working doesn’t change this.

If it’s urgent, pick up the phone

Phone calls can be distracting and break focus so use them only if it’s urgent. Before you call your colleague, consider the urgency of the call. Can it wait? We also encourage messaging just before calling to give your teammate a heads-up.

Face-to-face meetings

It’s easy to underestimate the power of face-to-face meetings. A large part of communication is non-verbal and video calls allow us to maintain that impact. Being able to see colleagues can expedite outcomes, strengthen our sense of connection and enhance team social times. Not every team member needs to be on every call, though. We keep it to key personal for each task and share relevant outcomes with the wider team later.

Planning and to-do lists

In these trying times, it’s just as important to have definitive plans, to-do lists and due dates as we do in regular circumstances. There are so many tools out there to help with planning – spreadsheets, task tracking, workflow tools, wikis, shared documents, Email, Chat, online whiteboards, etc. A combination of these is likely necessary but be wary of utilising too many different tools as this can end up making tasks and projects harder to keep track of.

Find your zone

The current period offers an opportunity to find your zone. It’s important to be conscious of our environments and different people work better in different conditions. Natural light and tidy surroundings are known to help with focus, though. There is the chance now to experiment with what helps you get in the zone, to curate your surroundings to improve productivity, innovate and learn new tools or skills. 

Social conversations

Last but not least, in the present climate it’s all the more important to bolster our human interrelatedness. Social interaction is a crucial aspect of our remote-working practices and we encourage friendly banter in team meetings. Check in with colleagues as you would swivel your chair round in the office and ask how their weekend was. Keep everyone engaged and involved with dedicated online social gatherings. 

Working remotely as a team is not just manageable, it can be highly successful and enjoyable. The Inbotiqa team has developed practices that work extremely well for us, and our experiences have even contributed to the development of our combined Email and workflow tools solutions. So, embrace the opportunities of working from home, build a routine that works for you, stay connected, and check in with your colleagues. You’re all still one team, no matter where you are in the world.

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Before embarking on my journey with Inbotiqa, I spent several years as a technologist in charge of developing and managing workflow solutions in the banking industry. My team was often responsible for automating business processes that involved collaboration between several groups.

Whether it was processing loan applications, trades or even responding to customers’ queries, it was as if the data associated with that process was being passed through, to borrow from manufacturing paradigm, an ‘assembly line’. The various groups involved were the ‘skilled craftsmen’, tasked with doing parts of the assembly.

But what about the conveyor? – the other key component of the assembly line.

As desktop computers replaced typewriters, email became the conveyor. Email itself has now been around for more than two decades and is now omnipresent, an essential tool for enterprises. An email address is one of the first resources that is allotted to a new employee. All sorts of communications, from reports and approvals to holiday applications, are routed via email.

Email addresses are not limited to personal work email addresses. Teams or sometimes even whole divisions and departments have email addresses and distribution lists to allow for dissemination of information beyond just individuals. Often, such email addresses become essential parts of business processes. Then each email that arrives on such a team email address is not just a piece of communication – it is a task or a to-do. As such, it has implicit requirements such as an expectation of response or a timeliness of completing the action.

However, email lacks inbuilt support for the distribution of work, reporting or audit. Of course, here the argument in favour email is that it always meant to be a channel for the dissemination of information – and it is extremely efficient at that. That said, these additional expectations have led businesses to look for alternative solutions to cater to these expectations. Workflow solutions cater to exactly this need, whether readymade or developed in-house.

I spent years developing several such solutions, which almost always catered to a specific problem or businesses process. I call these “point” solutions. Each point solution worked efficiently for the specific process and improved efficiency, time savings, cost savings and so on.

“Despite moving the core process out of email

into a point solution, we ended up

integrating the point solution with email.”

 

These point solutions would result in applications that would have a separate internal conveyor for flow of information. End users were expected to look into the application for information associated with their specific business process. Over time, we observed that we would get requests from end users such as notifications of new tasks and status changes – via email. There were even cases where the arrival of an email at some specific address was the starting point of a process.

Then there were managers who would rather check reports delivered to their email account than check them by opening the business application. So despite moving the core process out of email into a point solution, we ended up integrating the point solution with email.

Today, most employees in large organizations start the day by checking their email. It’s an essential part of every employee’s routine. The aforementioned problems with email continue to exist and so do the point solutions that attempt to solve them. It’s almost as if there is an impending need for convergence of both.

At Inbotiqa, we recognized this need for convergence of email and workflow. One of our first steps in product development was a seamless integration with email. YUDOmail now provides not only a workflow solution but something that can totally replace team mailboxes or distribution lists. YUDOmail was not the first solution to address this need, but it created the next evolutionary step. And with the addition of YUDOsmart to the Inbotiqa platform, the next leap is made. Suffice to say, as email itself enters its 50s (as suggested by wiki entry on email) the stage is set for some exciting changes.

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