Full-remote work is neither our priority, nor our objective

#5 - How COVID and remote-work changed our way of doing business, how we cope with it.

Hi,

I'm glad to have you here and can communicate with you weekly. Although it's free for you to read and for me to build my own media, we often fail to recognize how technologies impact our lives.

Welcome to issue #5 of Odoo Trailblazer, our journey to become the #1 Odoo partner.

I’m thrilled but tired, as I visited our teams in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, and Singapore last week. It’s great to see people and many colleagues we never met physically after so long. Even better when we can enjoy great Vietnamese seafood together!

We have managed a global business with distributed and remote teams for a long time, so when COVID hit in 2020, the transition to full remote didn’t impact our daily operations, at least not directly.

But over time, we started to see the side effects, and we are now in a hybrid model, while still figuring out what is the best way to manage a team in 2023.

In this issue, I’m sharing my own experience with COVID and remote work, how we are managing it, and my vision.

Agenda 

1. Q1-2020, what changed when COVID hit?

2. The need to connect with our teams around the world

3. Cloud software helped us, but…

4. Our current hybrid model

5. What can we do better to connect in 2023?

6. Conclusion

Q1-2020, what changed when COVID hit?

We have been doing some kind of remote work for a long time before COVID, as some of our clients are in remote locations, and we rarely visit them.

We were also used to delivering projects with remote and distributed teams, as our engineers and experts are based in our Centers of Excellence while they collaborate with our frontline consultants, located closer to our clients. 

When COVID hit in Q1 2020, it immediately impacted our business as some customers cut their IT budget due to market fear.

For example, in Indonesia, then our largest branch, revenue dropped by 50% in just 2-3 months. But it didn’t drastically change our way of working because we were used to working online.

• Cloud Software: since our beginnings in 2015, we used only cloud base tools, such as Google for Work as the office suite, Odoo to track most business processes and transactions, or Gitlab to share the code base between developers.

• Online meetings: instead of doing 70% of meetings online, we were now doing 100%.

We didn’t implement new software or tools, as we were already designed to work remotely.

Cloud software helped us, but…

Using the right software tool is a must, especially to embrace hybrid work models, but we also learned that it’s not enough.

We had the tools to control our businesses and get a lot of insights. We use Odoo CRM to track our leads, Odoo Sales & Project for open projects, and Accounting to track our invoicing, expenses and payments and analyze our financial performance.

The most valuable functions of Odoo we use at Port Cities are:

1. Timesheets because it helps to control the profitability of our 200 employees and the 300 concurrent projects budget.

2. Order-to-pay (Sales order, price list, invoicing, and accounts receivable) because it streamlines and standardizes our business process for revenue and cash collection across ten countries and 250 active clients.

3. Multicompanies accounting because we automate a lot of intercompany flows and manage bookkeeping in one consolidated system for our legal entities. And because Odoo accounting works as it should.

We could easily control our business performance and operations from our ERP software before COIVD.

We run our operations on the cloud, so we don’t need to be in the same office:

1. We don’t need to be in the same office to ask for business information or data because most of it is online, in our ERP (Odoo).

2. We don’t need to be in the same office to share files because they are all on Google Drive anyway.

3. And we don’t need to be in the same office to attend meetings because we do most of them online.

That was in theory, but in practice, we also observed a lot of side effects of full remote work:

• A few of our employees got signs of burnout, and one was seriously affected.

• Some employees weren’t as motivated and productive as before.

• Some junior employees struggled to find a role model and build connections.

• And some teams were not aligned or not working on business priorities.

Some of our employees managed the change well, but it wasn’t easy for everyone. Of course, such problems may occur in any work environment, and some full-remote companies manage it very well. But at least for us, such negative consequences occurred.

What can we do better to connect in 2023?

Three years after COVID, we learned what works, or at least what works for us. We don’t have the perfect formula, but here is our plan to create a strong team in 2023:

• Organize more travel between offices: ensure some people travel to visit other offices, connect emotionally, and understand each other better.

• Create hybrid workplace policies to give opportunities for employees to work from home if they want while still meeting often enough with their team in person.

• Better leverage online communication tools: newsletter, social media, company online meetings, and simple updates by email. We created many “communication” and “social” tools, but most companies, including Port Cities, are not using them enough.

• Focus more on team and individual objectives: although it has always been a good practice, setting clear goals is even more important when people are working remotely. If your colleagues are not beside you to guide or motivate you, clearly defining objectives for your team and yourself may help you be as motivated as before.

• Coordinate the way people meet: regular one-on-one, daily stand-up, and quarterly reviews are some of the regular meetings that companies and teams organize in all companies. Improving the ways our team meet is even more critical with remote work.

Let’s look at some of them.

Travel between offices

I hadn't met the leadership teams of half of our offices until last summer when I began travelling again after two years of travel restrictions.

This year, we want to reconnect - online and in person. I first visited our office in Mexico in January, my partner Charles visited Australia in February, and I visited Vietnam and Singapore last week (early March). 

We do it to reconnect with our teams and understand the individuals better.

Shaking hands is not enough, but it’s part of our plan to connect our teams better and build a strong culture to become the world's #1 Odoo consulting firm.

We also encourage organizing some travels when remote consultants work on large projects, at least to meet their colleagues and clients once. We noticed that when people actually meet their team, they feel engaged emotionally and work better.

Organized hybrid workplace model

In the initial two years following the COVID outbreak, regulations were constantly in flux and varied from country to country. Therefore, we granted each country director the flexibility to enforce rules that were most suitable for their local circumstances.

We thought that full remote might attract more talent, but motivating employees may also be more challenging. We noticed both were right by looking at what happened in our offices worldwide.

We also looked at what other companies were doing around the world, and our guess is that an extreme solution (fully remote or fully in-office) is probably not the best for most companies, at least not for now.

We can see that even companies embracing remote work, such as Salesforce partially turned around on hybrid models. The first two links Google gave when searching for “Salesforce remote work” are why they embraced full-remote work in February 2021 and then why they are moved to hybrid work nine months later.

Today we encourage all our country leaders to implement hybrid models, but in an organized way, with all employees coming at least twice a week to the office, preferably on the same days, if possible. We also encourage our leadership team to come more often than others to the office.

What matters is not just to be physically in the office, but to connect to each other, your company, and your team.

Conclusion

At Port Cities, we remain flexible with hybrid working arrangements, constantly seeking new ways to enable our employees to perform at their best. We prioritize the comfort and productivity of our employees and will continue to improve in that regard.

With that said, I'm curious to know what new practices did you implement after the COVID-19 outbreak?

Thank you again for reading. I will catch you in the next issue next week.

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Follow us on LinkedIn for more updates: Gaspard (Founder & CEO), or Port Cities (our company page).

To know more about Port Cities and how we help companies to use Odoo (business software): https://portcities.net