Brave new business world (part1) - experiences with home office

Hi everybody. Welcome back to my blog again. Today I would like to give You some insights into the experiences which I have made during the last three months regarding my new business routine with working permanently in home office. 

If somebody had told me in february this year, that I - the same as the grand majority of all our administrative and indirect employees - would soon no longer be able to work at my office in our factory in Itatiba and that I also would not be able to travel any more this year, without any doubts I would have immediately called an ambulance for taking him to hospital. But sometimes fiction turns into reality, as in the present Covid-19 case. And all this has happened almost overnight, without any prior notice, so that we were practically overwhelmed by the new circumstances and did not have a chance, to prepare ourselfes for what was coming and happening so quickly around and with us.

Not too long ago, a situation like the one we have right now would have interrupted almost all our business processes and rendered any productive continuation of our industrial and general business key functions - mainly because of inefficiently functionning communication and decision processes - restricted, if not impossible. Nobody really noted this attentatively before, but even in countries like Brazil, where this always was a major deficiency and everybody complained endlessly about it, the internet has become widely available, very fast and impressively stable and also the mobile fone networks work almost perfectly - where they are available. And this seems to be the same situation all around the globe in practically all other countries on all continents, at least in the major cities.

In Brazil we can clearly and proudly state, that most companies, which are continuing to function throughout the whole Covid-19 crisis, are perfectly carrying out their normal, fundamental business processes and routines without major limitations regarding their functionality and performance. In the contrary, during conversations and experience exchange with several MD colleagues from other companies I have gained the impression, that in general many of our routinary work processes have obtained measurable efficiency increase and that the efficiency and productivity of many administrative and indirect employees has substantially augmented. And this is exactly the same sensation which I have gained referring to my own work efficiency and overal productivity. When commenting this to others, I use to say "I work and live double since Covid-19 has hit us and changed our world and at the same time I also enjoy double my time and my activities". 

This might sound crazy, maybe even cynical, but please think about it a little bit more profoundly. Like it or not, how many totally unproductive hours for strictly unnecessary activities (Toyota people would call this "waste"), which formerly during a normal office day were keeping us from focussing on what we really wanted to do, did we spent every day, as f.e. driving to the company, going out to a lunch restaurant by noon, driving home again in the evening etc ? If You live in a city like Sao Paulo, You can easily follow my thoughts about this - admittedly cold headed and somehow provocative - statement. 

If I had tried to invite business partners in different cities or even in different countries and on different continents for holding online conferences earlier this year, bevor Covid-19 appeared, the majority of the people which I would have liked to invite, would most propably have refused to participate. 

Not many people were really open to participate in such modern meeting and communication modes and much less of them were anyhow already familiar with the utilisation of state-of-the-art online conference tools like Teams, Zoom, Cisco Webex and all the others, which we altogether nowadays use freely, widely and without any reluctance. I am meanwhile seriously convinced, that the importance of personal, fisical meetings for business purposes has been way too much overestimated and that many people just have used this as an excuse for not wanting to confront themselfes with modern communication tools and technologies. 

No doubt - it is totally clear for me, that my individual situation and experience with all this has been very special. First of all I have mostly been travelling globally during the last decades and thus anyhow already got used to lead, accompany, control, motivate, correct, motivate etc our company and my management team over long distances separating us fisically during most of the time, with normally only a few weeks or days of personal, fisical presence in my office at our company resp. factory between all these travels. 

This was only possible for me without any risk to loose control, because I could fully trust my management team members and all our employees in key functions within our company. By the way, 5 years ago I have oficially appointed almost 30 of our in total 200 Vulkan do Brasil employees in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico in all different business areas and on all different hierarchical levels of our company executing key functions for our business, oficially as "key players". I will explain this quite interesting and extremely important and successful organisational and leadership concept in a future post here in this blog. 

Actually our management team has been established at the end of 2014 during the early stages of the restructuring project, which I had initiated immediately after my arrival as the new President of Vulkan do Brasil. This wonderful, highly experienced and motivated top management team of our company has never changed since then. 

Each of us knows and accepts all other team members perfectly with regards to the individual personality, experience and work style. This easens enormously our colaboration, as well as our productivity and efficiency as a team. 

When Covid-19 became publicly known as the big new threat for each and everybody here in Brazil, we immediately established a "Covid-19 team" (Luis Trauzola / VP Admin, Ferdinand Senske / VP Operations, Marco Santos / HR & Special Projects Director and myself) and set up prompt protection measures for all our employees and for our company and business as a whole. 

One of our first decisions mid March was, to sent 70 administrative and indirect employees into home office. To be true - when we decided this, I had major doubts, whether and even if, how efficiently this would work in the daily practice and over longer periods. But already after the first days of practical experience with it, all my initial concerns became obsolete. Communication continued uninterruptedly and completely unharmed with all of them, the same as between all of us and all our external business partners, means customers, suppliers, service providers and our colleagues at all international, globally distributed Vulkan Group sister companies. 

During my countless conversations with many of our employees doing home office meanwhile since more than 3 months, the great majority confirmed, that they feel very comfortable with it and that they by themselfes do also feel a substancial efficiency and productivity increase in most of our internal and external work processes. 

During one of our routinary online "Covid-19 team" conferences we took the decision, to formally measure this now and we have just asked all our employees working in their home offices, to participate in a employee survey, in which we ask them, to answer more than 20 questions related to the new home office practice and it`s functionning and impact on each of them, their departments, our whole company  and also their famillies. After the internal evaluation of the results of this employee survey, I will share with You some insights upon the survey results and also upon our conclusions during one of my future posts. 

What I have found out with regards to our new business reality, the performance of the new communication styles and tools at our local brazilian company applies identically to our multiple projects in different other countries on all continents, where I am actively involved. None of these has been seriously affected or even completey stopped. 

During my new work day routine, I participate very often at 5am in webinars and conferences with organisations, associations, companies and all kinds of people - general business contacts, customers, friends, colleagues etc. - in Africa and Europe, during the day I am almost uninterruptedly busy doing communication with my brazilian and latin american employees, customers and many other contacts and in the later evening I am very often talking to Vulkan colleagues, customers and other contacts in Australia and in China, with whom we work closely together in several interesting projects and - for sure - related to requests for quotation and with respect to already received customer orders, where we supply the products from out of our brazilian factory. 

The world - and this definitely includes the business world - has not been interrupted, as much as some of You might imagine, by Covid-19 and many exciting and important activities continue locally, regionally and globally. The only real new situation is, that almost everybody in the business world has been heavily affected by Covid-19 and needs to adapt and optimise his processes and culture quickly, in order to be able to continue with the persecution and realisation of his objectives. 

What really hits many people, economies, industries, companies and countries much more than Covid-19 itself, is the economic recession which Covid-19 is increasingly causing. We don`t know, until when and how in the end this Covid-19 crisis will finally impact and change our world, life and business. But it is anyhow already clear, that lots of people, companies, businesses, economies, political systems and whole countries will suffer massive damages and get thrown into new environmental situations with regards to econmy and politics. 

What this means concretely for each of us is not predictable at all. But no matter the current (?) unpredictability of the future, the only way for trying to avoid the worst and to bring about new hope and light in the tunnel, is to maintain our positive fighting spirit and to never surrender and continue trying to do the very best, which each of us and we altogether are still able to. 

I hope, this gave You a good idea, of how we at Vulkan do Brasil find ourselfes confronted with this terrible Covid-19 threat and that we are all but inactive with regards to our fight for survival and ongoing achievement of our short, mid and long term objectives.

See You tomorrow here again for sharing with You my post "Brave new business world (part2) - experiences with not beeing able to travel".