Change is one of the few constants for businesses, teams, and customers everywhere.
VirtualPBX has changed tremendously over our history, and the change has accelerated thanks to the demands of both our customers and team members.
The biggest challenges in this environment are maintaining focus and coordinating efforts to deliver on our mission — to deliver excellent service where and how people need to get things done.
How We Maintain Focus at VirtualPBX
The loss of focus creates stress, impacts morale, and can create a snowball effect that impacts the delivery of service, completion of projects, and most importantly costs your business time.
At VirtualPBX we strive to maintain focus for our team by reigning in meetings, carefully separating team communication into channels, leveraging our own platform, namely the VirtualPBX Softphone, to communicate the availability of team members, and automating certain tasks via Zapier. We have written about the use of Presence before, and it is critical to understand who is available when you want to speak with them – especially for remote teams.
For meetings we have a firm rule, any meeting lacking a published agenda is canceled, the default meeting length is 20 minutes, meetings start on time regardless of the presence of all attendees, and meeting recordings are used liberally so team members are on vacation or unavailable can catchup.
Coordinating Teams and Processes
We use Slack and our own platform for chat, and over the years have learned to use specific channels for specific topics, to minimize distracting team members.
Coordinating teams is an age-old management challenge, we find maintaining focus requires clearly defining how we manage processes — in our case the use of Notion, Monday.com, Pipedrive, Zapier, and our own Collaboration tools to keep everyone in sync, motivated, and able to perform at their best.
With constant change comes the need to consistently reassessing how your company and team execute. This can drive improvement in your business and your products, like it does for us every single day.