More and more people are working remotely or working from home due to the current lockdown and the spread of the novel coronavirus. It’s important then that a small business owner should consider becoming a remote-first company – when the majority of your workforce works from home.
This is more viable than ever before, thanks to great technologies like conference calling software, cloud-based systems, superb task management software, and a whole host of other things. There are so many benefits that this type of business structure can bring you. Far less cost on overheads, real estate and even employee salaries to name a few. Here’s what you would need to do if you’re serious about this.
How Your Business Can Become A Remote-First Company
The remote-first company concept is a lifestyle
Just as you would at a real-world office, you need to stick to a schedule and enforce it so every employee is abides by it. Firstly, you must establish remote processes, which involve your heads of department. You will need to set up a cloud-based project management software, have daily and weekly meetings with all management staff, create briefs for projects and, have reviews of the work that has been done before you give it to a client. It’s so critical to stick to this kind of process because it can be very easy to lose track of who is doing what and what projects are being left to slow or become stale. The tools you use need to have a series of things incorporated into them, such as communication (both text and voice) as well as being able to send documents and links fluidly.
What kind of software?
If you’re going to become a remote-first company, you need to have one giant software that is encompassing most of your operations. Why? It simply connects most if not all of your different software, applications, and projects together. Toggl is a company that is brilliant for remote working and it allows you to track the life cycle of each project. It also gives you reminders of what needs to be done and in what kind of time schedule. As a bonus, you also get to see how much time, effort, and money each project is costing you so you can make changes to your approach. Employees have access to this software remotely, tying in whole teams to different projects. Other software choices are depending on the kind of company you have, such as GitLab for more design and software companies, and Automattic that builds open source software for your needs specifically.
La’ grande platform
To be able to handle the larger demand for scope and scale, you need to stop using a shared server. With even a cheap vps, you get far more speed, space, and bandwidth than most other of your options. The VPS power package is just 19.00 euros but you will be getting 8GB of RAM, 100GB of SSD space, and 4 CPU cores. With this in mind, you will be able to become a fully remote-first company and manage all your systems and software with greater control.
The Covid-19 pandemic has really shaken up the world. Remote working is going to become the norm among the millions of business owners in the country.
Work from home is becoming a new reality. The post touches upon the basic offerings such as platform and technology solutions which many WFM firms would need in a new world. We need to adapt to the digital world to be able to survive storms for its reality with augmented capacity. Very well explained, Corinne.