Working from home is a new experience for many of us and also a field of struggle. Everyone's struggle is different: According to our observations, the kitchen and armchair are the most challenging zones in the house :) As Tubleks, we have been in the digital transformation process to make many of our work areas manageable remotely for about two years. While making efforts for this transformation, we would not even think of a pandemic. We mostly focused on protecting our customers from possible risks, ensuring business continuity in every environment and leading digital transformation.
During this period, we had customers from many countries. We continue to work efficiently even at different time zones. These preparations were very useful for our customers and us, even in the case of a pandemic today.
The efficiency of Tubleks teams never decreased in this period. Our CPA colleagues, customers, and friends have been asking many questions about how we manage this process. We have decided to prepare this article with hope everyone can benefit, and we wanted to share our experiences during this transformation with you.
In this article, we plan to share some tips and tactics to help you work efficiently and happily at home. We hope this article will ease your work and help you to have a collaborative, productive and healthy period. Here are our suggestions to facilitate this process:
Determine Your Routine
Your routine should be determined. Setting your morning routines is crucial for getting your brain ready for work. You can start by getting up at a certain time every morning. It is not a good idea to get out of bed 10 minutes before your online meeting begins. Getting up early in the morning, getting ready for the day, taking off your pyjamas and wearing different clothes will prepare you for the day. If you wish, you can add a half-hour exercise program to this routine like us :)
The important point is to protect your routine as much as possible. If you were shaving every morning, keep it up. If you were wearing makeup every morning, put on some makeup.
What if I was getting coffee from the corner and listen to a radio channel in my car every morning before the pandemic? Then make your coffee at home, sit in your comfortable seat and open the radio you always listen to.
Speaking of routine… Determine not only your working routine, but also your end of day/weekend routines. At the end of the day, turn off your computer at a certain time. Set up a nice dinner table for yourself or your family, or accompany it if it's already done :) Have a weekend routine such as cleaning, online coffee time with friends, hobbies or exercise.
Establish Your Work Environment:
We do not want to pass over without adding the most important point: If we want to work efficiently and happily, it is necessary to stay healthy. Let's do not forget that exercise, nutrition and sleep are the three most important factors to stay healthy. We wish you healthy days :) entirely on the physical conditions of your home and the habits of other individuals in the home. The point is that you can determine a certain area where everyone in the house will be happy.
After determining this area, you need some materials to be productive:
-Make sure you have a comfortable work chair and a desk. It is not a good idea to work on a soft sofa or bed which you are embedded in.
-Your space should have well lightening. Have a table lamp if necessary.
-Some sounds may keep your brain busy and make your job difficult. Soundproof headphones can be useful if you need them.
-Make sure your computer screen stays at your eye level. If necessary, you can use books to raise the screen. If you are working on a laptop, you can easily install a system suitable for your posture with a second screen or keyboard.
Equip Yourself With New Tools
This is a temporary period of time, why should I deal with this? :) When we return to the offices, these tools will save time. Some tools make our work easier while working remotely.
Here are some examples:
Project Management Tools: These tools enable us to keep track of our team's tasks and to create the team's own to-do lists. Example: Airtable, Asana, Trello, Microsoft Planer, Notion, Coda, Monday Video Meeting Tools: These are the tools that offer the opportunity to meet face to face with our team/customers. Example: Zoom, Microsoft Teams, GoToMeeting, Bluejeans
Instant Messaging / Chat Tools: Slack, Slack for Teams, Rocket Chat, Cisco Jabber
Online Meetings
If you have a large team or big topics, meetings in the offices can take a long time. These meetings will be very frequent and too long in the transition period to online meetings. The good news is that you will find that meetings are becoming less frequent and shorter, day after day, thanks to your developing skills. At this point, it is very important for the team to trust each other and their talents.
If you are a manager, you can discover that you have developed more trust in your team in this process. You may notice that the team is more focused than before. Our suggestion is whether you are working with a team or alone; Divide the topics into small pieces and solving them one by one.
To give an example from our own adventure: Our weekly meetings continue once a week. These meetings, which normally take two to three hours at the office, are now 30 minutes online. In addition, we start our work every morning with a good morning by meeting online. These do not exceed 15 minutes each. When we first have started working remotely, our weekly meetings were about 1.5 hours, and our daily meetings were approximately 40 minutes long.
If your team is three people or more, one must be responsible for the meeting minutes. This person should share the meeting minutes with others at the end of the meeting. In fact, this seems like a method that almost everyone uses in the office, right?
When working remotely, some tools can make your job much easier: We recommend you to take a look at the applications such as EverNote, One-Note, Google Keep, Microsoft Planner, which everyone can access the notes, see the tasks assigned to them, and create their own to-do lists. In the past, it would take quite a while to get a meeting minute summed up (along with the dates to be done and the people to be assigned) and to be notified by e-mail, and even to print out and distribute it while in the office. Now, when the meeting is over, everyone can access the meeting notes. This process used to take a long time.
What Are We Doing?
-Every Monday, we talk about each of our customers' situation and jobs through Microsoft Teams at our weekly meeting.
-We share the tasks. We have combined meeting minutes and business planning: We keep our meeting minutes on Microsoft Planner, we assign the tasks at the same time. The tasks we assign in this application appear automatically in the Microsoft To-Do application of our teammates. However, they can easily organize their own to-do lists.
-In business days excluding Monday, we still start the day by saying “Good morning” to each other on the Teams screen, and we bring the necessary issues to the agenda within 15-20 minutes. If needed, we organize meetings of working groups. Thus, the teams can continue to work together on a single project.
We do not want to pass over without adding the most important point: If we want to work efficiently and happily, it is necessary to stay healthy. Let's do not forget that exercise, nutrition and sleep are the three most important factors to stay healthy. We wish you healthy days :)