Working from home - How to mitigate the effects of Covid19
Matt, Stoyan, David & Jack converse with a remote Peter during a production meeting.
“Working from home” is suddenly a buzzword - mainly of course because of concerns over Coronavirus COVID-19 and the means by which we might all best limit the speed of transmission.
Remote working is something that can strike terror into business owners, administrators and line managers – and not without good reason; we all have tales to tell of coworkers going AWOL whilst supposedly hard at work on their home terminals.
But we live in uncertain times – specifically with regards to the coming late Winter / early Spring months of 2020 as the Coronavirus takes hold here in the UK, and we all need to have solid plans in place that accommodate concerns – real and perceived – and afford our Health Service the opportunity to operate below its maximum service threshold by slowing the spread of the disease.
To that end I thought it timely to pen a brief outline of how we as an agency are looking to utilise the various processes and tools we’ve been implementing and building upon for some time. These tools mean we’re confident we can continue to operate at full capacity and output whatever restrictions imposed on us in the coming weeks.
The first and most important of the 3rd party tools each and every one of 3B’s staff use every moment of every day is Slack – the extraordinary internal communications tool, coupled with extensive use of Zendesk (mentioned later), that has meant an almost total and complete drop off in task-related client email (see https://www.3bweb.com/blog/the-good-news-is-email-is-dead).
Online messaging tool Slack has the occasionally disquieting effect of making it seem that staff, contractors and clients (even if they’re the other side of the world) seem as though they’re sitting right next to us – with the added bonuses that there are paper trails of every conversation, immediate asset and link sharing, as well as private channels. If there’s any single tool that we use here at 3B that gives me confidence in our ability to operate going forward it is Slack.
We’ve added significant functionality to our Slack account since inception, including:
Instant alerts of security updates (RSS, Twitter, email alerts all funnel in) for the various web tools we use, to a #security channel.
Daily updates of calendar entries: meetings (Google Calendar), staff absences (Timetastic) etc.
Morning and evening “stand ups” (with the Olaph app) which ask people what they will achieve and what they did achieve in their day.
Animated gifs via Giphy into the #random channel to let off steam.
We have a #deals channel, which people drop local or online deal links into, as well as various email newsletters which drop in there automatically (see, reducing email is a theme!) from the likes of Travelzoo and Jack’s Flight Club - makes sure the team make the most of their salaries and time off!
We use StatusCake to monitor all our client’s sites and online services, and as well as a 55” status dashboard in our office we have site outages reported instantly in Slack.
Tweets that we send drop into Slack so the whole team sees them, plus replies and mentions land in there too so we can respond quickly. No need to monitor the Twitter account or get email notifications.
We use SmallChat to offer live chat on our website for prospective clients - again this links to Slack so there are fewer systems to monitor, and any member of the team can jump straight into a chat.
Recently we have started using the Slack audio/video calls feature for comms with off-site staff, and if using the Slack desktop app that also gives the ability to screenshare. No need to rely on separate accounts (and convoluted sign-in methods) for Skype, Zoom, Google Hangouts etc.
For our most communicative customers we sometimes provide guest channels for them, so they have quicker access to our team than going via the helpdesk system (more on Zendesk in a mo…). This has reduced email comms and also phone calls (I challenge you to find a developer that likes taking or making calls!).
We have integrated Slack with our GSuite/Gmail so we can press a couple of buttons in Gmail and send an email into Slack for team input.
Any new clients added to Zendesk are automatically added to Toggl and Google Drive by Integromat, which then reports the success or failure of that automation to Slack:
A schematic of how we at 3B have our Zendesk -> Toggl & Google Drive -> Slack integration set up.
In terms of managing the delivery of services to our clients the front line is Zendesk – another first-class collaborating environment that does away with the need for emails and their inherent inability to manage multi-person conversation threads.
We’ve custom built our own Zendesk plugins that facilitate time tracking and hour block management and so any one of our developers or designers need only log in to a particular ticket to see what’s needed and track billable (or otherwise) effort to deliver that requirement.
We also have Zendesk ticket updates sent into Slack, which further reduces the need for email.
All tickets are automatically prioritised as per the Eisenhower Matrix, so our monthly retainer clients’ tickets are all marked as “important” and all tickets receive treatment of “urgent” when appropriate. When a 3Ber goes in to check their tickets they’re already automatically ordered for them so it’s clear what to work on next.
Our directors and accounts access the online accounting package XERO from anywhere they happen to be. The sending (and payment of) invoices need not be delayed, and paid-for time can be allocated against Zendesk tasks.
We have iOS shortcuts to allow us to scan a receipt on a phone and have it automatically sent into the “Files inbox” in Xero, for subsequent reconciliation.
We use pdfconvert.com and Gmail filters to allow us to automatically forward email receipts and invoices, have them converted to PDF and again dropped into Xero.
We have the Mac app Hazel automatically process staff payslips, splitting and renaming them for us, then they are dropped into Xero and the appropriate folder in Google Drive.
Augment these services with online project management tools like JIRA and Trello and you have an ecosystem capable of withstanding pretty much anything coming down the line.
We have set Trello up so that each team member has private tasks and a company-wide board of tasks. With one press of the Q key you can see only the tasks that concern you, and can add anything for anyone else.
We have all JIRA tasks linked to projects or Zendesk tickets, so staff can track time and clients can see how much time they have left on tap.
Of course, JIRA tasks also drop into Slack, alerting appropriate staff and making them easily and centrally searchable.
While there’s nothing quite like having everyone at the coal face in the office, helping each other and enjoying each other's support and company, 2020 has thrown us all a curve ball and we need to do all we can to slow the spread and “Flatten the Curve”. I hope other companies know that using the tools available to us all these days, playing our part need not come at great corporate cost.
