Tips From the CVG Community: Maintaining Business Continuity During COVID-19
On March 20th, CVG assembled our community of Investment Partners, current assessment clients, and Incubator Program participants for a virtual roundtable. We shared our experiences and observations from small architecture firms around the U.S. involving remote working, technology, pipeline concerns, staffing, etc. Below are a few excerpts from the conversation that others may find helpful:
“Remote work is just a different method that requires you to be a little more thoughtful. You won’t always be on someone’s schedule. Also, I find I’m working more because I don’t have to commute.”
“We’ve been doing virtual lunches at 12:30 p.m. every day. It seems to keep people from feeling so isolated.”
“Our staff did want to work from home, even before we got the order. So we set up some guidelines early: set up a space to work that’s not in your living room; be responsive to communication; keep your regular wind-up and wind-down routines.”
“This isn’t just remote work, it’s the reality of this time and what each of our individual home lives demands. We tried to say everyone needs to be online at the same time, but that’s not going to be possible for every person equally. There’s an extra imperative for project managers to be organized, and then assigning people intensive tasks for half or full days. This workflow is working better for us. If you’re worried about junior staff’s productivity, set really solid expectations and intensive tasks they can sink their teeth into.”
“We’ve been giving everyone the opportunity to work remotely one day per week for the last year and a half; so we were set up for this transition of working from home all the time. It was just a matter of keeping people focused.”
“We’re using remote desktops right now, and purchased a product called TeamViewer. The biggest issue we’re finding is that we’re doing a lot of technology stuff that requires integrated software. So to put all of our files on the cloud, we didn’t have time to work through the bugs of figuring that out. So thus far, this remote desktop is working now. We’re worried about local internet providers stretching local bandwidth in ways they weren’t facing before.”
“We had no one working from home until a week ago. Now people are using VPN to access our office network. What’s been nice is that as partners, we’re in the office and everyone’s office computer is live and we can see the work they’re doing on it. So we walk around to each person’s desks during conference calls to process and troubleshoot. But we’re quickly transferring our office culture to being more oriented towards goals and task check-ins at specific times. Much of our time as partners though is giving feedback and coordinating.”
“Our area has not come to the shutdown that other parts of the country are experiencing right now. So we’re having talks internally about what working from home would look like, but as of right now none of our staff wants to start transitioning. We do have a plan in place for it, though, and a server that people can access. We’ve only had one or two clients that have called about project pauses. A few clients are asking about emergency projects, though. I don’t know if we’ll even get to a forced work from home, but we’re taking steps to prepare for it.”
Do you have questions about business continuity for your small architecture firm? Or would you like to learn more about CVG’s knowledge-sharing Community of Practice? Schedule a free consultation with us:
If you’d like to join CVG’s upcoming free webinar about “Business Development in COVID-19” on 3/27, register here: