Coronavirus is still raging strong, with upwards of 70,000 people per day being infected. Businesses around the world, including logistics providers are struggling to maintain operations amidst the pandemic.
Working from home is the most common way to let your employees continue working, but stay isolated in a fashion that prevents the rapid spread of covid19 through an office life setting. Particularly for many logistics professionals working from home can be a challenge as so many logistics providers and shippers have a mix of facility based personnel that need to be at the company facilities and personnel that can work from home utilizing their phone and computer. Many logistics operations and supply chains heavily rely on team work which presents a further challenge to building a successful work from arrangement.
Here are a few tips we’ve found that work well when it comes to working from home/remote:
Give your employees and team members the resources they need!
Make sure that your employees have the computer equipment they need to work from home successfully, even if this means spending a few thousand dollars per employee to set them up with some basic office equipment and a fancy desktop/laptop this is well worth it if they remain productive and keep your company operating effectively. These investments will pay off with increased productivity and less wasted time.
Setting up a proper “workspace” at your house with a desk, comfortable chain, decent sized monitor and comfortable keyboard will give you the “work station” you need to “ go to work” in your home.
The last thing you want to be doing is sitting on a couch with a laptop, this will set you up for failure when it comes to productivity and staying focused.
Communication and Managing Remote Teams
This is one of the hardest aspects to working remote especially switching to remote work seemingly overnight. It is critical that you remain connected to your team on a nearly daily basis. Schedule a mix of one on one and group conferences to focus on tasks at hand, progress, obstacles and successes. Make sure at least once a week to schedule a wider company conference to get everyone on the same page and present any company news. While working remote it is very easy to lose communication with team members outside your own project or your direct co workers. It’s important to stay aware of what other parts of your company are doing and maintain a basic level of communication across the company.
Your firm’s ability to continue to provide solid customer service and reliable operations depends heavily on your team’s cohesiveness even while working from home, so inter team communication must be strongly prioritized and encouraged.
Setting hours and boundaries
Just because your team is working from home doesn’t mean you can call them at 850pm on a Friday unless a real crisis has occurred. Respecting work hour boundaries is important to maintaining trust and productivity. Be very clear about what you expect, your goals for the next day, week and month. Also set clear guidelines about what tasks need to be completed and by when. As long as your employees hit these deadlines try to give them some slack as to the hours they actually work.
As a remote work employee, maintaining regular hours can be hard, try to keep work and personal time separate. Take a lunch break and don’t let work distract you during it, but also don’t constantly get off topic during normal work hours. After all you want to show your company how productive the team can be working from home. It’s very likely for many companies that if productivity is maintained, work from home at least several days of the week will be continued following covid19.
Maintaining Productivity
A daily routine is important to staying productive while working at home. You save time overall by not having to commute and find parking etc, so at make a point to finish tasks by their deadline. Studies have shown that waking up a consistent time with a standard morning routine promote a more productive work day. Try completing the hardest most intense tasks first. Research has also shown that more work is completed is a small amount of time if the toughest tasks are tackled in the morning.
Ultimately you want to complete your tasks in the most efficient way possible, and staying focused can drastically increase the amount of free time you have as well as increase overall productivity.
Instead of replying to emails as you see them, give yourself 2-3 “email times” throughout the day during which you reply to your emails. This keeps you from constantly getting distracted by answering emails.
While it’s all too easy to get into the habit of not getting dressed or taking a shower before “work”, this will help you start the day in a productive way.
Utilize Technology
Make sure that your team has the tools they need to work from home without wasting time texting each other or emailing all the times. You’ll be spending a lot time on your computer talking with customers, carriers, your team, billing etc. might as well make it as easy possible. These are some of the online tools we’ve been using quite a bit recently.
Google sheets and google docs are the backbone of most remote teams, providing a simple and easy to use collaborator excel and word style that can be a great way to get some more basic stuff done. I bet more companies than you realize rely pretty heavily on google sheets and docs.
Zoom is also a mainstay of the work from home arsenal, providing easy video conferencing for multiple people with easy screen sharing as well. We use this way too much within our own company and with customers as well.
Be sure to also setup a good cloud storage system to more easily allow your teams to share files. This is one of the absolute most core technology services you need to effectively work remotely in any industry especially the supply chain industry. G suite, dropbox, onedrive and even google drive are all solid options to fill this need.
If you want to keep more accurate project progress reports and planning consider using something like asana and trello as well. They are both good project management/time management softwares that can help to keep a remote team focused on the goals and tasks that need to be completed each week.
Working from home permanently?
Who knows how long we’ll be working from home, and many companies will likely be more lenient in the future allowing team members who are able to, to continue working from home in some capacity. The supply chain industry is such a team driven and collaborative environment it can be tough to nail the same level of productivity team cohesion working from home. Maintaining the same level of customer service and sales goals is also an ongoing challenge. Pay extra close attention to setting goals and being clear about communication. The supply chain industry is facing more disruption now than it has for at least ten years. Hopefully the country including retailers, and all the supply chain providers we work with can slowly continue to get their operations back to a normal level of operation.
Maintaining consistent logistics operations are key for retailers, restaurants and many other facilities that provide the day to day goods we need. Companies are still moving vast amounts of cargo on certain lanes and cross border trade with Mexico and Canada has increased over the last year or two. Positioning your company for growth is key during this time as that will help take advantage of the higher volumes as the pandemic finally starts to subside. Maintaining team productivity and operations will help you ready for future growth going into next year.
Zmodal provides comprehensive supply chain solutions that are data based and focused on optimizing your supply chain logistics plan for better reliability and efficiency. We focus on a multimodal approach to building resiliency that is backed by a first class team that provides 24/7 support and the technology to keep your supply chain connected and visible. Our technology provides shippers easy access to convert over the road freight to intermodal. If you want to talk or want a completely free initial consultation, give us a shout!
