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Lesson Two: The Business Fitness Plateau

Lesson Two: The Business Fitness Plateau

This is the second in a series exploring Dr. Kristen Lee’s (Northwestern University) nine lessons in personal and collective fortitude. Seen through the lens of a business operation, each lesson has application in the current health and economic challenges, and for successful endeavors in the future.

For years, fitness experts have been telling us that stressing our muscles makes them stronger. When we hit a fitness plateau, we’re told to challenge ourselves. Run a little farther, lift a little more weight, change our routine. That change is inevitably painful, but our bodies adapt. And after the discomfort, they are improved – faster, stronger, more resilient.

The same principle applies to the “fitness” of a business. A successful enterprise often falls into routine habits of doing business, just like a fitness plateau. Innovation and creativity are set aside in favor of “business as usual.”

Today’s economic challenges can seem like a too-heavy lift, unless we think of them as an opportunity for improvement. We have a chance to break out of the routine, dust off our creativity, and invent new strategies for business success. Consider some of the new ways you might do business:

  1. Make telecommuting a permanent part of your operations. Support teleworkers with electronics and remotely-accessed imaged documents. You’ll reduce the number of workers in the office and keep that ideal 6-foot separation.
  2. Re-shape your facility’s interior to accommodate social distancing.Condense your documents and supplies into a high-density storage system that reduces storage space and provides more area for personal space.
  3. Establish additional services or products to bolt on to your current ones. For example, add delivery to manufacturing, as many restaurants have. Or add installation to design, as some interior-fixtures companies are planning.

This period in our history may feel like an enforced “time-out.” But like switching up our fitness routines, today we have an opportunity to apply our innovative instincts, do something different, make a change, and grow stronger. Break out your business imagination!

 

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De-Densify the Workplace Without Expanding the Footprint

De-Densify the Workplace Without Expanding the Footprint

Until there’s a COVID-19 vaccine, social distancing is the new workplace normal – either you’ll have fewer people in the office, or your office space will have to be increased to achieve a less dense workplace.

Now that businesses are looking at ways to open up again, maintaining social distancing in the workplace is a top priority. Densely populated open plan layouts were the norm before COVID-19 struck. But open plan workstations of 60-70 square feet per person are far too small to maintain 6-ft distancing. Bringing everyone back into an old-style open plan office is simply not workable.

De-densifying the office is vital. Clustered workspaces have to be spread out. Separation structures have to be put in place. In-office traffic routes have to be re-arranged to preserve distancing.

All of this adds up to a larger office footprint. But even if additional space is available, increased real estate costs are something every organization wants to avoid in the current economic climate.

Telework is the answer: With fewer staffers in the office, it’s easy to decrease density without increasing the office footprint.

Telework has become a way of life for many of us during the past months, and we’ve learned some valuable management lessons. One is disaster planning; our companies’ emergency plans have been tested in this crisis, and we’ve learned what works and what doesn’t. Another lesson is telework capacity; many businesses or departments may have done some limited telecommuting prior to the pandemic, but were not prepared for a full-scale switch to 100% remote working.

As many of us discovered, access to documents was an ongoing obstacle to getting work done remotely. Paper documents are easy to share in an office, but hard to share remotely. Document conversion is essential to productive telework. Imaged documents are accessible to everyone who needs them, regardless of location. And they have the advantages of findability and searchability: Documents can be found in seconds, far faster than searching in file cabinets, and key words or phrases can be searched for and located with digital speed.

The new workplace normal doesn’t have to mean new real estate costs. Take the lessons we’ve learned from these challenging months, and translate them into action – support telework with document conversion, and de-densify your offices without expanding your footprint.

 

Photo ©Fizkes  / AdobeStock

Lesson One: Intellectual Humility

Lesson One: Intellectual Humility

This is the first in a series exploring Dr. Kristen Lee’s (Northwestern University) lessons in personal and collective fortitude. Seen through the lens of a business operation, each example has application in the current national health and economic challenges, and for successful endeavors in the future.

Business leaders often find themselves having to venture beyond their fields of expertise in order to make management decisions. These decisions have far-reaching impact, negative or positive, upon an organization’s future success, and there’s usually little time to research all the available data. The stakes are high, and as business leaders, we are expected to know everything. But that’s an unreasonable expectation.

Isaac Newton said, “What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.” Say, for example, your organization is shifting to remote working. What you know is this: Your remote staff will need access to information currently contained in paper documents. Therefore you plan to convert paper documents into searchable digital documents.

What you don’t know is this: What conversion software should you use? What metadata fields? What file format? How many levels of security? How is the digitization actually done? Exactly what is “digitization” anyway?

It can feel humiliating to say, “I don’t know.” But there is no shame in calling upon experts when faced with a decision that is outside our training and experience. In fact, it’s the smart thing to do. Great leaders recognize their weaknesses as well as their strengths. They reach out to others to fill in the gaps in their knowledge.

We are comfortable with calling upon doctors, lawyers, and accountants to advise us, because they are experts in those fields, and we are not. Other operational areas should be no different. Consider how you chose your business’s law firm or accounting firm – most likely, through your spheres of social and business influence. If these challenging times are pushing you to make decisions far outside your comfort zone, reach out to a colleague who can steer you toward an expert.

 

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The Silver Lining of Mandated Telecommuting

The Silver Lining of Mandated Telecommuting

Many of us are working from home these days (kudos to the heroic first responders, healthcare workers, and essential-business employees keeping us safe, secure, and supplied!). It has been a disruptive transition for the many enterprises unprepared for telework. Even businesses that already had telecommuting policies and procedures in place have found their remote-work systems stretched beyond capacity. If you’re new to telework, your staff may be scrambling to stay productive while setting up alternatives to face-to-face collaboration – building the ship while you’re sailing it.

Despite all the disruption and anxiety, there’s a silver lining. On the upside: Businesses with established telecommuting routines are learning where the weak points in their systems are. Now they have an opportunity to fix the shortcomings of outdated VPNs and low-capacity internal apps.

A second positive consequence: Businesses that were previously reluctant to adopt telecommuting are now discovering that their organizations may actually benefit from remote work. One study in the Harvard Business Review found that telecommuting employees start work earlier, take fewer breaks (no “cake in the break room”), and work more diligently, as much as an extra day per week.

To make telecommuting work, however, the right infrastructure needs to be in place. As some organizations have discovered, there are plenty of productivity tools they can quickly adopt to support telework. Zoom, for video conferencing, and Slack, for remote collaboration, are two of the most popular.

But what about all the paper documents in file cabinets back at the office, the ones that need to be accessed routinely by teams? Companies in the finance, insurance, legal, and government sectors are especially paper-reliant. Telework is a challenge when the nature of the work requires paper documents.

That’s where document digitization fits in to the productivity picture. Digital versions of paper documents, stored on secure internal servers or cloud servers, can be accessed and shared among remote workers. In combination with other collaboration tools, digitization gives teleworkers the infrastructure to be even more productive than they were in the office.

Telework is upon us, like it or not. With the right tools and systems we can make it work to the benefit of our individual businesses, and the economy as a whole. And when the current crisis ends, telework will have proven itself to be the work style of the future.

 

Photo © baranq  / AdobeStock

Telework: Removing the Document-Sharing Bottleneck

Telework: Removing the Document-Sharing Bottleneck

Telework has unquestionable benefits – employee satisfaction, health, and productivity are often cited – but without easy access to business documents, those benefits may not be realized.

Forbes reports telework savings averaging $11,000 per employee per year, including the value of healthy, productive employees and the cost savings of reduced real estate and other facilities expenses.

But teleworkers need access to information in order to work efficiently, and that includes access to data which may currently be available only in paper form. Remote sharing of physical documents is obviously unwieldy. Teleworkers must to come to the documents’ location or the documents must be delivered to the remote workers. And if teleworking team members all need the same documents, the logistics get even more complicated and expensive.

All the teleworking productivity gains are wiped out by the paper document bottleneck.

You might think that a simple PDF of a physical document would be easy to share with any teleworker who needs it. That’s true. But what if there are hundreds or thousands of pages that teleworkers need to access? Further, what if they need to search for specific individual elements within those many documents?

That’s where enterprise-level digitization becomes a vital component of teleworking productivity. Digitization, also termed document conversion, creates “smart” digital documents – secure, searchable, and shareable via cloud computing. When paper documents are converted to a smart digital format, teleworkers’ productivity is preserved. Digital documents remain secure (have paper documents ever been lost or destroyed in your business?). And managers can monitor staffers’ work and support their collaborations remotely.

Some businesses have the time, expertise, and resources in-house to plan and execute a comprehensive digitization program. For many, however, an experienced outside vendor saves them the time and cost of a long learning curve and the personnel to administer an digitization program. If your business is making a move to telework, and time is of the essence, talk to a trusted digitization vendor about the best way to convert your paper documents and avoid the information bottleneck.

 

Photo ©James Steidl  / AdobeStock