EzyLearn is a Virtual Organisation according to an Australian Federal Government Initiative back in 2013. We were a partner in this initiative and it was driven by the massive increase in broadband internet speeds.
It’s one thing to simply count the hours that you work and charge for them but you may not be able to work from home on that basis alone.
The Australian Federal Government created a Questionnaire and Assessment Guide that helps business owners, Managers and even employees assess their ability to manage a business where the staff work remotely from home and you can get it from us.
Our Internet speeds may not be as good as we expected but the Australian Federal Government did a lot of good work to help Australian become a leader in the new Digital Economy.
Over the coming weeks we’ll be publishing information and guides that help both employers and employee assess their suitability for remote work and take action to implement work from home policies and procedures effectively.
There are a few lessons that we learnt in the early days and most of them come down to systemising our business operations and procedures.
In an office you can lean over and have a chat to your co-worker or have a water cooler conversation about a situation, but online it’s all documented in writing.
These are the challenges we had to overcome and then improve on:
We had several people working on the document at the same time and because our operations manual didn’t need to look pretty we migrated away from Microsoft Word and onto Google Docs where we found it easier to collaborate with several other team members.
We migrated because version control became a nightmare when several team members were doing live editing at the same time. Using SAVE AS and creating files with different version names and numbers that included the initials of the person editing the document became unruly and now version control is managed by Google Docs.
For these tasks you can use the following software programs:
Some of these project and team collaboration programs seem a bit complicated at first and you may do better just to create a Gantt chart using Microsoft Excel.
The hard work associated with using project management tools is that you have to do all the planning first, sometimes for things you don’t know yet. Figuring out what needs to be done and then understanding and documenting the logical steps you need to take to get there is the equivalent of building strong foundations for a high rise building development.
Some people struggle with this, particularly if they are experienced but NOT used to writing these steps down.
With this in mind it’s good to know that plans and strategies are not perfect and can change from week to week. These project management tools give you a way of keeping everyone informed about changes in the project and why they’ve occurred.
See what’s included in the EzyStartUp Training Course
You don’t even need to use a project management tool for this because you can put it into your Calendar using Microsoft Outlook or Google G Suite.
See the Study Calendar available to all EzyLearn Students
We’ve put an information page together (it’s actually been there since 2013) and added some extra information about working remotely (and studying remotely) from home.
Learn more about working and learning remotely with EzyLearn
Jerry Lame is a serial entrepreneur and loves shiny new objects. He was a corporate…
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