Richard Phu

Helping Solopreneurs & Small Businesses to Free themselves from their own business to be doing more of what matters most

Creating a Harmonic Orchestra in Your Remote Team

TLDR: Tried to hide from my old Management Consultant days of not drawing up process flow diagrams, only to realise it’s exactly what is needed to build a harmonic orchestra that is our remote team…

Now if you didn’t know about my past I spent a good 6 years of my life out of university working at KPMG (one of the big 4 accounting firms) specialising in their IT Audit & Consulting arm. For much of my time, I would be reviewing process flow diagrams of major MNC’s to see how they performed their operations like this…

Image courtesy of https://momstinct.wordpress.com
Yet so often I found that what was on this paper never really matched up to what was happening on the floor. This was the same for the Standard Operation Procedures (SOP), huge lengthy overly complicated documents used to basically be the manual for anyone performing the process. So for a long time, I dismissed the need for having such materials because sooooo often I noticed that either:
  1. People don’t know it existed, thus they make up their own process; OR
  2. People don’t read it at all and just blindly follow what is already in place (or make their own)

What I realised in this learning was that people are just inherently lazy. How many of you actually open up a new toy and bother to read the manual?

To be honest the only thing I read is the IKEA manual when I have to build that new coffee table or drawer!

Ok maybe I didn’t create this from IKEA
Image courtesy of edharringtonillustration.com
So this influenced my thinking and when I started out creating processes for entrepreneurs I skipped the need to draw up a process flow diagram. I just straight into modernising the SOP into a short bite-sized video form (5-7mins) long to help skill up my Virtual Assistants (VA’s). This was working well when it was just me and a VA, heck it worked ok for me and up to 3 other VA’s…

Yet things started to change when we transformed into an agency with 10+ people. It started to change where I couldn’t just get away with the micro video SOP to show someone how to do a specific task. I had to now integrate more than just doing tasks, I had to let my team start thinking for themselves…

This is where I realised I couldn’t just do video SOP’s anymore. While they are great for specific click here go here tasks, it didn’t provide the framework for the Project Manager who needed to see the whole picture. It didn’t allow the Creative Director to see how his delay in decisions/approvals would impact the delivery team.

So it wasn’t until Ibu Hanim’s training that highlighted back to me how important it is to create this macro process view for everyone in the team. Rather than keeping them purely focused on just their task. They needed to know what happens before their involvement and how their results would lead to other processes.

So our team then underwent a few days for each team lead to personally draw up their own process flow diagrams for their core activities. So what are these core activities?
For example in Delivery for a Marketing Agency it could be:

  1. Client On-boarding
  2. Client Setup
  3. Target Avatar Interview
  4. Research & Analysis
  5. Content Production
  6. Content Distribution
  7. Funnel Campaign
  8. Influencer Connection
  9. Backup
  10. Client Satisfaction/Delight

From here we’re able to dig in deeper into each and show the exact steps that need to occur in each process, who is in involved and who are the decision-makers. Having this alone is enough to be a great start to letting your team know when it’s their time to play. Here’s an example of our client on-boarding process.

An orchestra needs a conductor to lead them, but you’ll never see a member of the orchestra without their sheet of music… It’s the same for your team, you need to create that master sheet for each member to reference and to know what is going on. It’s even more critical for a remote team (which I’m finding out) since it’s not always easy to just ping someone to ask as they may be in a different timezone.

Once you’ve done your flows the next step in having your remote team running fluidly is to create work instructions/SOP’s for each task, which I’m going to be unveiling in an upcoming post!

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