The shift to remote work hit us like a ton of bricks. In March 2020, our entire base of clients shut their offices to visitors and only allowed a small portion of their employees in the office. Stopping the project work in progress was not a reasonable option for our clients. A merger needed to be completed, systems needed to be implemented, and management wanted access to critical information. Our consulting teams had to pivot quickly into a virtual world. This meant significant changes in how we engage with our clients. Our high-touch consulting model was threatened, yet we miraculously found ways to keep the work going without putting timelines at risk.
The first task at hand was to shift the cadence of meetings and working sessions. Our typical approach was to get a bunch of people in a room for 6-8 hours and hammer through a design session, conference room pilot, or Kaizen event. Attempting the same long workshop with a large audience working from home with dogs barking in the background and no way to know who was really engaged wasn’t going to work. Therefore, our team divided and conquered. For example, an eight-hour conference room pilot with 12 participants was divided into four two-hour sessions with 3-4 attendees each. Following the working sessions, a smaller group of consulting and client participants met for 30 minutes to exchange notes and develop an action plan for resolving any discrepancies between sessions. Interestingly, we found very few discrepancies. Using the experience from the first two-hour conference room pilot, we were able to make subsequent sessions more efficient, reducing total time in the conference room to six hours instead of eight.
In the past, when a quick decision or question arose, one of our consultants could pop into an office and get an answer. In a virtual world, we had to figure out how to get quick answers without setting up meetings. Sending an email and expecting a quick response was not feasible as inboxes became more polluted than ever with the remote work. In most cases, a text or Teams message sufficed, but a live conversation was often warranted. To address this, we developed a rapport with the client team to make conversations quick and to the point. For example, our project manager had a direct line to the Controller to get quick questions answered. When she made a call to the Controller, she got a quick answer—usually in under two minutes. People (like the Controller) are more likely to pick up a call when they know the call will be short and sweet.
The adage “work expands to fill the time” inevitably applies to meetings. When was the last time you attended a meeting that ended early? During all our meetings, our goal was to give people time back and finish early. This required discipline and setting a specific output expectation for the meeting. Once the output was achieved, the meeting was over. Anyone who wanted to hang around and talk more could stay on, but it wasn’t required. This also meant following each meeting with a list of what was decided and the assignment of action items. Our acquisition integration team had daily stand-ups with the business unit team leads. We rotated who facilitated the meeting, and there was even a sidebar bet on who could facilitate the shortest daily meeting.
Many working sessions inevitably require visual aids. In person, the king of visual aids is the whiteboard. Videoing a real whiteboard is not effective and the fancy $10,000 digital whiteboards aren’t easily transportable from house to house. There are whiteboard apps out there, but if you face limitations with those or don’t want to purchase yet another digital tool, we found an alternative. We began preparing whiteboard mock-ups in PowerPoint or Visio prior to the workshops. For example, we had a data design session with the executives and mocked up an example design ahead of time. During the session, our team was able to quickly edit the data design. We did the same thing in Visio for process design sessions. Ultimately, this allowed for quicker answers and more efficient workshops. The team also leveraged Asana to track project tasks and progress on a real-time basis. At any point in time, all open and completed tasks were visible to the project team so they could quickly pivot if issues arose.
Trenegy is now prepared to support our clients who require a 100% remote work model for any time of management consulting services. For more information, contact us anytime at info@trenegy.com.
