Working Remotely – Crisis Within a Crisis
posted on Wednesday, March 25, 2020 in Grow Cedar Valley
Written by President & CEO, Cary Darrah
Working Remotely – Crisis Within a Crisis
As we all adjust to the (unfortunate) new normal the COVID-19 crisis has dealt us, there are many changes that businesses and organizations are considering – ones that hadn’t ever been on our radar screen before. Unique changes like canceling traditional and new events, locking the doors to customers and partners, sending employees home to work remotely and then managing their work and input from a far – changes very foreign to how we’ve ever worked before.
There are many resources for working remotely available for our businesses to consider with more and more coming online daily. But what about the “crisis” within the “crisis” that is being created by this pandemic? Working in a non-traditional way for our organizations can easily cause corporate misalignment and it’s causing us to have to establish new goals to help us navigate working remotely.
I’ve had the pleasure to work with an executive coach – Steve Hopkins with Jordan River Group – and his input helped me understand the need to refresh our goals. I’d like to share with you what I learned -- goals and tactical activities:
Goals in working remotely:
- Achieve connectivity with the team
- Reinforce goals to maintain synergy with our mission and between team members. At Grow Cedar Valley our number one goal it to understand the resources available to help our business community through the COVID-19 crisis, and then make connections.
- Establish clear direction on executing the plan
Activities:
- Establish regular virtual communication with the team and call it something different than other regular meetings – for GCV it’s called our “huddle”
- Include roundtable input from every member of the team
- Plan routine and intentional one-on-one calls with members of the team
- Encourage small or sub-groups to establish routine communication outside the huddle conversation
- Identify actions and member responsibilities to execute goal/plan implementation
As mentioned, these are tactical goals and activities specific to Grow Cedar Valley to help us get the work done for our stakeholders – there may be other formats relevant for others to use. The bottom line is that working remotely may be a new way to get work done and if we can embrace it as the new routine, we could replace “corporate misalignment” with “corporate realignment” and remain strong!