In just a matter of weeks, Coronavirus has had a significant impact on the way we interact with our colleagues and the way in which managers lead and coach teams.

Whilst occasionally working from home may be standard practice for the majority of organisations, working permanently from home isn't, and therefore businesses may need to quickly adapt their current approach in order to ensure they remain as operationally effective as possible.

Due to an increase in both remote working and multi-regional business interactions, virtual meetings are also widely accepted as standard practice, and with an increasing number of teleconferencing applications such as Zoom, WebEx, Teams, and Skype - people are meeting virtually more than ever.

As virtual meetings have been around for some time, it's easy to fall into the trap of "this is the way we've always done it". Over the last few weeks, I've been working with teams across Resource Solutions to challenge old behaviours and introduce a structured approach to their traditional team meetings, some of which were exclusively face-to-face prior to the current pandemic.

Introducing Virtual Huddles

In brief, virtual huddles are short (~15 min), action-focused sessions that utilise visual management to display almost real-time information. They follow a consistent structure and incorporate 4 key principles – known as the 4Ps:

1. People: Colleague whereabouts, capacity, skills, and performance.
2. Process: Displaying the key process steps across your end to end service enables issues to be easily identified. Improving the flow of activity and enhancing the customer's experience.
3. Performance: Make past, present, and future performance easily visible at a glance.
4. Perfection: Whilst you'll never truly achieve 'perfection', promoting a culture of continuous improvement is a sure way to move your business in the right direction.