Item: Predica
Author: Tomasz Onyszko

Blog

3 MIN READ APRIL 15, 2020

The initial dust has settled after the shock of COVID-19 hit us all. Most of us are already home, safe with families, and working.
For some, it was a big change. For others, it was an adjustment.

One thought is with me all the time now: This will change the way we work and live, and it will stick. Often, the changes we introduce today stay with us for the long-term.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

How can your organization stay efficient while operating remotely?
What are the ways to support your employees during this change?
How to effectively measure remote work productivity?

This is a part of an article series we created to help you implement a remote-first work environment with the help of MS Teams and Azure. Here you’ll find valuable tips to keep your business secure and efficient. See the additional articles here:

I took part in many calls with customers over the last few weeks. There is one common theme in those conversations. They often ask:

How to be efficient as an organization
and measure this efficiency in a remote environment?

As a company, we’ve already tested out some ways of achieving this. Here are the tips, tools, and methods we’ve been using for years to remain efficient while being remote.

Scale your adoption

The key is adoption and communication. Here is a good adoption pattern we know works for any organization size:

Choose ambassadors of new tools like Teams
Train them with help from your best people or external support
Put them on the front lines of the company to train others
Keep your IT resources in the background to support your ambassadors.

We know it works. And with the Adoption Toolkit for Microsoft Teams, you can’t go wrong.

Need practical tips on managing adoption, fast? Check out our rescue kit. Find out more

Measure adoption and usage

With all-new services, people can get lost. If they do, it can lead to lost efficiency. Use the tools available to know if someone is struggling to maintain remote work productivity, such as:

Office 365 usage analytics
Microsoft Teams analytics to track cross-team and per-team communication.

Built-in tools can also be integrated with company-related HR metrics. The benefit? You can easily spot the places in the business where users are falling behind in adoption and usage. Use your trained ambassadors and approach those who are struggling with real use cases.

Tomasz Onyszko CTO

My name is Tom and I’m really happy to see you on Predica Blog. This is the place where IT professionals meet to not only deepen their knowledge in Microsoft technologies… but also to find innovative IT solutions.

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Get extra insight – find your influencers

Digital tools have one advantage – you can analyze them and spot the “hubs” of your community. Use it!

Get to know what are the popular topics and who is a communication starter. Who engages in conversations? With the right service, such as Yammer, it is easy to find blind spots in communication.

Find out more by reading our case study from a pharmaceutical company.

How to know what people are working on when everyone is working remotely?

It is a major recurring theme. This is a huge topic in its own right, but here are some quick tips on how to approach it:

Focus on the outcome rather than on tracking working time
Use async tools for planning and tracking delivery
Measure people’s time use and categories (more on this shortly).

How to do it?

You can use Planner in Office 365 to build tasks and track execution
For development teams, we recommend Azure DevOps as a planning and communication tool (see more in this article: How To Run A Delivery Team In The Era Of Remote Work?).

This should help you with managing tasks.

What about tracking time and remote work productivity?

What are we working on, and are we getting things done?

People will work on different schedules, take care of kids and home… How can you know who is overloaded? Or who has a smaller workload because of the shift in duties and business?

There are many solutions; I’m a big fan of the simplest ones possible. We have built such a system using one familiar tool – the calendar. People use it to track their tasks by assigning them to categories, such as project work, admin tasks, or marketing.

Monitoring remote work productivity with Power BI reports

Power BI reports let you monitor remote work productivity

It is easy to gather this information and analyze it using Excel or Power BI.

With Power BI you can also view and evaluate project times

We combine it with one extra element – a catalog of skills and availability for all the people in the company.

A demo view of our skill search tool

If you want to know how you can put it in place, just let us know. We will come back to you with the details.

How to measure your organization’s #productivity during #remotework? Or make sure your #people are making the most of their #skills? Check out #Avianah, our new platform we developed to help your business thrive. See more at https://t.co/b8Xb4j6NfS pic.twitter.com/VSaxiTKsHr

— Predica (@PredicaExperts) April 16, 2020

Until next time!

The steps and tools described above are what we use to make our organization efficient while remote and on a flexible schedule. I hope you’ve enjoyed this post and found this information useful. And if you have, keep following our updates!

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Key takeaways

Introduce new services gradually, with the help of internal ambassadors.
Measure adoption and usage to see which areas are functioning well and where your people are falling behind and need more support.
Find your internal influencers and let them help you identify problems with communication.
Focus on planning and monitoring outcomes, rather than tracking hours.
To ensure balanced workloads, you can adopt a calendar-based tool to help you gather insights on work time.