Leadership Series | Making Virtual Collaboration Work

 

In this ever increased digitized world, everyone has energetically collaborated with one another – be it social media, online apps, or any other virtual platform. With the rapid growth of smartphones and tablets,communication has become simpler and easier. Honestly speaking in today’s world especially after witnessing the pandemic, ‘remote working’ or ‘smart working’ is not something new.

With this COVID-19, our world has witnessed a completely new normal style of living. In Healthcare and RCM industry like ours where work from home is not a practice due to HIPPA compliance, our AR vertical started remote working from the second day of the lockdown. Almost 300 people started working from home and handled 48 processes seamlessly during this lockdown period. Our various collaboration tools and platforms such as iAR, Remote Desktop, DPR’s, VDI,VPN, Mobile App Telephony, bundled with setting up governance on Google Suites, Hangout and Microsoft Sharepoint helped us to deliver seamlessly even during the lockdown. The logical combination of all the tools evolved a makeshift ecosystem and governance,thereby providing a conducive work from home environment that absorbed the tremendous increase in demand and met client expectations. As a leader, it is indeed a proud moment for me.

I would say that today virtualization helps us run multiple operating systems and their applications on the same computer at the same time. Instead of a physical server being dedicated to a single application, a server can now accommodate many virtual machines, each with its own operating system and applications.

My vertical, my organization & I currently reap the benefits of virtual collaboration. Today I can say that virtual collaboration always helps us to work seamlessly. So, virtual collaboration happens when you:

1.       Set database structure: The basic of ensuring any virtualization model to be successfulis to ensure that we spend time in setting up the database of employees which we can use as a single source for all activities involved in setting up work from home workflow. Database structure will ensure that information to every tool is seamless, thereby avoiding any chaos. In the absence of a database structure,the  leadership team will spend maximum time on reconciliation.

2.       Get your team together: Focus on virtual team building. Schedule inter-personal meetings and re-connect regularly.  Set up a structured layer of communication and group. The best practice is to ensure that we have a group by leadership hierarchy to manage communication and update details systematically.

3.       Clarify task and process, not goals and roles: Since during a crisis like this all our team members are not co-located, it is important to focus more on the details of the tasks and the processes. As a leader, I suggest that ensure there is clarity about the work process with specifics about who does what and when.

4.       Commit to a communication process:The only way to avoid pitfalls is to be extremely clear and disciplined about what your team will communicate with the clients. Create a process that will include guidelines on which communication modes you and your team will use and in which circumstances. Say for example whether to reply through an email or whether to just talk to your client during a client catch-up or whether to create and share a document with clients.

5.       Build a team with rhythm:It is easy to get disconnected if your team is working from different locations. Hence, always have clear agreements and transparent communication and maintain timelines. This will help you to spread the load equitably and work together.

6.       Clarify and track commitments: When your team is working remotely it is difficult to track engagement and productivity on regular basis. So always have your deliverables dashboard prepared. Like the one we have in our AR vertical – DPR (Data Productivity Record). This is a workflow system that helps all my Managers and TLs to reconcile their WFH data. It not only helps in tracking but also helps in data sharing with the clients.

7.       Create a virtual water cooler: It is always important to have informal interactions to reinforce social bonds. Start your meetings with a quick check-in on how each member in your team is doing, how they are coping with the challenges, what’s going well with them and so on. Remember virtual team meeting means to inject some fun into your regular routine.

8.       Foster shared leadership: Assign responsibilities for a special project to your team members, ask them to take ownership, assign them to help onboard new team members, ask them to run a virtual team-building exercise and so on. This will not only increase engagement but will also take some of the burden off your shoulders as a manager.

So, as a leader,I would say that always use the right tool and the right method to enjoy the best of everything. It is important to study the past and define the future accordingly. It is even more important to be resilient and be prepared to reap the benefits of personal interaction, successful collaboration, and productive work from home environment. This is only possible with the right tools and knowledge for virtual collaboration. So continue making virtual collaboration work.