Remote Planning
Government advice is to work from home whenever possible. An online scheduling tool remains accessible from home, allowing planners to manage schedules remotely.
Remote work for on-site employees is often more challenging. They are restricted by location and available materials and machinery. You may need to rotate teams or assign resources to specific locations to minimize infection risks.
It's essential in scheduling to have a clear view of available capacity. In vPlan, you can quickly and easily input the presence or absence of resources, ensuring you know exactly what capacity is available. Displaying attendance in your online schedule helps prevent miscommunication.
If you're currently using physical boards, spreadsheets, or printed schedules, now is the time to consider an online solution with all the conveniences.
Remote Communication
Unnecessary personal contact should be avoided. This requires alternative communication methods. Within a task or assignment, you can quickly and easily communicate with your team. Tag your colleague if you need something. Attach files digitally to avoid unnecessary paperwork.
Receive automatic notifications of status changes and mentions to stay informed. You can even use our app to have your schedule always available in your pocket, minimizing personal contact as much as possible.
Flexibility
The current uncertain situation requires flexibility in scheduling. You need to be able to quickly and easily adapt to these changes.
Employee leave should have an immediate impact on your capacity. In vPlan, you can see the available hours per day and possibly per department/phase compared to your planned hours. With clear signaling, you'll know if you're optimizing your resources.
If you're dealing with limited capacity and need to reschedule tasks, vPlan allows you to quickly move cards to another day, status, or resource.
In short, vPlan offers a lot of flexibility and speed, eliminating the need for cumbersome changes in your spreadsheet or manual updates to your whiteboard.
Quick tip: Temporarily lower capacity warning levels. If you're planning two or three weeks ahead, don't plan anything above the first warning level, so you have space in case capacity decreases. And if possible, leave some room in the first few weeks to handle urgent tasks.
Other tips:
Organize online stand-ups and meetings with your team.
Leadership and guidance are crucial to making remote work successful. To support this process, it's handy to hold daily and weekly meetings and stand-ups. You'll find that such conversations are more effective remotely since casual chats at the coffee/lunch table are absent. It's admittedly a bit impersonal, but you have to make the best of it.
Stand-ups and meetings can be held using various online tools such as Coligo, Zoom, or Whereby. For example, schedule your stand-ups and meetings in a vPlan board so all your employees are informed.
Standups en meetings kunnen worden gehouden via verschillende online tools, zoals Coligo, Zoom of Whereby. Plan bijvoorbeeld je standups en meetings in een planbord van vPlan, zodat al je werknemers op de hoogte zijn.
Ensure flexible work schedules
40% of people working from home find flexible scheduling the most significant benefit of remote work. Having remote workers but then binding them to a fixed schedule can be... well, a bit counterproductive.
The tasks of remote workers can look different at any given time. Therefore, your scheduling must be flexible, allowing you to quickly apply changes. You can make these changes swiftly within vPlan.
Set expectations and deadlines
If you don't effectively communicate your expectations, your remote team will deliver poor performance. Remote work can sometimes be less structured than working in a traditional office space, but it doesn't have to be. By setting clear expectations and deadlines, your remote team, regardless of location or time zone, will have the structure to be successful.
In vPlan, you can document tasks on cards. Set an end date for the tasks and schedule the card in your board. This way, everyone has an overview of what needs to be done and when deadlines are approaching.
Managing a remote team is not an easy task, but the results of effective collaboration can be remarkable.