6 Tips to Stay Productive while Working Remotely

While all organizations realize the power of digital transformation, it is necessary to realize that the first step of digitalization lies in ideation & innovation, also known as ‘Ibtikar’.

Developing digital business models requires developing ideas and bringing them to life by identifying hidden challenges, approaching them from different angles, and developing detailed solutions for them that could result in business opportunities. This requires a special one-stop-shop portal that can handle hosting content, submission of ideas, assessment of ideas by a panel based on specific criteria, and putting those ideas into execution.

While that may sound appealing in theory, the execution of this entire process presents a number of challenges. Apart from the fact that literally the entire world has come to a halt due to the Covid-19 pandemic, here are some challenges that may interrupt organizations that want to implement an Ideation & Innovation initiative:

1. Cost

          With everything going on in the world right now, every organization is worried about matching expenses with their circumstance-generated revenues that have fallen way below their normal. This means that they cannot afford recruiting IT service providers to create a full platform to host their ideation initiatives. Creating new platforms will be time consuming, costly, and may require a huge investment in resources to manage it and provide upkeep services.

2. Loss of Important Information

          As a response to the huge investment that they THINK is required to host an ideation initiative, organizations may opt to implement ideation using ‘traditional’ methods. This means encouraging their employees to submit their ideas via email, WhatsApp, Facebook groups, etc. Where’s the problem in that? For starters, those platforms do not have specific purposes, meaning they are used for a multitude of reasons, including personal ones. This most definitely will make the process of keeping up very difficult as ideas get lost in the traffic of other unrelated messages. This will also lead to major distraction as employees are bombarded with messages for other items that may lead to a disruption in their ideation processes. The lack of a centralized announcement channel to reach intended audiences will lead to confusion, uncertainty, and disruption in ideation.

3. Lack of Clarity on the status of submissions

          This challenge goes hand in hand with the one above. If your employees are not using a specific platform for their ideation & innovation submission process, there will be lack of clarity when it comes to how to submit ideas, what topics of ideas are required, how to list them, how to submit them, the status of their approval, and the execution of approved ideas. 

So, what’s the solution?

Keeping all of the above in mind, we knew we had to move fast and create a platform that will cater to these organizations’ needs. StemeXe for Ibtikar harbors employee collaboration and gives employees the chance to engage with the company to uncover new opportunities for the business and co-create ideas to bring them to life.

With StemeXe for Ibtikar, we've brought together all the elements required for a successful ideation process that accompanies an idea from document to real life in one app:

• Announcements to direct attention to intended audience about ideas through one centralized announcement channel within the platform.

• Submission and tracking of ideas through the app. The platform has an automated requests section that allows employees to follow step by step processes to submit their ideas while tracking the status of their approval/rejection process & uncovering the reasons of the same.

• Access to digital library and content regarding guidelines and acceptance criteria for different categories of ideas & innovation through a digital library within the platform with unlimited number of topics.

• Timely support through chat

Does this sound like something you’ve been looking for and you want to know more about it? Let us help you Innovate in your Innovation.

Let the brainstorming begin!

Business continuity has become every organization’s top priority with the recent escalation of the Covid-19 situation. Everyone is consumed with the possibility that they might not be able to sustain operations after orders to work from home have been officially circulated. Survival is on everyone’s agenda, and to survive, you need to diminish any contingencies that may affect operations.

Employees are every business’s most important asset. If your employees are not able to perform jobs or submit requests that require a chain of approvals, you might be heading down a dark road of less productivity, slow operations, no achievement, and incurring losses.

Among the many challenges we have seen organizations struggle with after implementing “remote working”, the biggest challenge yet has been the disruption of operations due to the absence of people to approve requests submitted by employees and to “keep processes flowing”. What happens when your approvers are physically inaccessible?

• Processes are disrupted and come to a complete stop as approvers cannot be reached
  
• Delays and confusion occur as documents are passed from one approver to another via email
  
• Loss of ownership over approvals, causing a chaotic work environment

We believe we have what you need to not only survive, but to also maintain a normal pace of operations and eliminate factors that will disrupt them.

While we at Exceed did not necessarily anticipate Covid-19, we did however, anticipate a shift in operating models. We have been implementing a remote working model since 2014 when we detected patterns in where the business world was heading. To support our vision, we created numerous solutions that will sustain our remote working model, one of which is the Enterprise Submission Platform a.k.a ESP for Employee Service Catalogue & Digital Approvals.  

ESP is a process automation system that empowers business users to create and manage their processes, without having to rely on IT staff to get the job done. As it is easy to use with little to no training, this reduces the time needed to go live and the cost required to maintain and manage the system. This model will make the process of approving employee requests while working remotely much easier to control, track, and manage.

How exactly will it solve remote working challenges?

Step 1:

We will help you map your old traditional approval processes on the system

Step 2:

We will train your business users on how to use the system and create processes, remotely

Step 3:

We will support you in creating new processes that meet the demands of remote working

Our focus with ESP is to provide you with a business process automation solution that can automate all your processes that are currently handled manually and that require approvals, to help alleviate any remote working costs that your business will take on.

While we maintain our promise listed above, we understand that customers may have some underlying questions regarding the solution and so we’ve compiled what we anticipate would be the most common ones:

For more information on ESP, feel free to contact us here.

With no doubt, the latest advances in technology and communication has drastically shifted the standards of traditional work practices. Further, the evolution of social media, its wide spread and availability to almost everyone has reduced the barriers of communication between individuals and businesses worldwide.

Among the most popular new work practices that arise was the concept of remote work, where employees no more attend to office and can perform their tasks remotely from anywhere. Despite the wide spread of this concept and the availability of resources to implement it, some organizations were still hesitant to adopt this work style for many reasons relating to security concerns, office space utilization, employee productivity, etc.

However, with the recent outbreak of Corona virus, and the worldwide efforts to overcome it, things have changed. Until this moment, most of the efforts are focused towards eliminating the spread of the virus through reducing interaction with infected individuals, which means (among other measures), shutting down public places including offices, for some time.

This sudden event has put an immediate end for the reluctance of many companies to implement working remotely, as this sounds a less harmful option to implement than the temporary shutdown. However, they still need to deal with the challenge of monitoring their employees’ productivity and their commitment to completing tasks as required and on time.

With our StemeXe for Remote Workers, this is not a challenge at all. Employers will be able to track the utilization, productivity and performance of their employees without necessarily attending to office. Through its “Activities” module, StemeXe allows employees to log their daily activities and the efforts spent on them in a very easy and effective way.

Every employee will have his own space for creating tasks, updating their progress and reporting their completion once done. Dashboards will also allow employees to monitor their utilization on a daily and weekly basis, where they will see associated scores and percentages of completion. The system will also remind and encourage employees to keep updating their tasks until they fulfill the required working hours.

Managers will also be able to monitor tasks progression and completion, with the ability to approve or reject those tasks and communicate with the employees within the application itself regarding them. In addition to monitoring tasks, managers will also be able to assign tasks to their team members and track those tasks until completion.

With the instant updates of progress and utilization scores through the system, it will not only help tracking employee’s tasks, but will also increase their productivity as they are being continuously updated with the progress and reminded with their obligation to fulfill their working hours.

Don’t wait anymore! Contact us now to start using StemeXe at your organization immediately.

Read more tips for setting up your remote working infrastructure here.