Tragedy can be the source of creativity
We all remember the hit of COVID-19 in 2020 in Tanzania, I remember the first case was announced on Monday, 23rd March 2020. A woman in Arusha was found with COVID-19. I vividly remember the day because it was the day that at Singo Africa we decided to implement full something that we were working on without succeeding for more than a year.
For the company to succeed, it need to work on the three important components among other things, People, Processes and Products/Services. People are the ones delivering the products or services to clients, well implemented and optimized processes to increase productivity of people and the products/services as what can be offered to clients.
Well implemented systems makes it easy for the processes to be adopted by new members and hence enable them to deliver within a short time from the time they join in, it improves the knowledge sharing between the team and hence increase productivity of the company and improve the delivery of the products or services as performance can be tracked, measured and be improved.
At Singo Africa before COVID-19, we were using tools that were meant to motivate team’s communication, platform to manage all the work and projects that were done by everyone in the company, a collaborative and knowledge sharing platform and service management tool to log in all the clients issues and requests to manage our customer services. The usage of all these platforms weren’t that effective as we wanted, we were using Slack for communication, JIRA for tasks and projects managements, Confluence for collaboration and knowledge sharing and JIRA service management tool for customer service desk.
You will find someone bringing a printed document for review while they could share a confluence page or coming to the desk to give you an update that they could send you a message on slack chat or sending you a text on WhatsApp where its rarely you will go back for reference in future. The platforms were used to some extent by other members, but the objective was for them to be adopted by the whole team so that it could bring the total impact that was expected.
We wanted to create an environment were its possible to work anywhere at any time and all the team to be updated all the time, geographical area not to the a limitation of our workforce. So when COVID-19 hit and physical gathering were to be avoided whenever possible, we saw the opportunity. We decided that the whole company will work from home.
From the next day of the announcement up to end of August the whole team worked remotely, this enforced the team to put everything on the platform so that someone will not call to ask about xyz, the usage of slack increased as it became our major communication tool for chats, meetings and presentations. We had our say “If nothing is happening on the platforms, that means you are not doing anything” and this pushed people and as a leader, the daily sharing of projects updates and even the adoption of our clients to us service desk which was the result of the team to effectively using the platform and hence lead client’s adaptation gave the power of information of how the company is performing at any point in time.
From the tragedy we were able to implement the new way of working, for 5 months we worked completely from home, and we had to be creative not to loose the human bond we had by sharing fun stuffs on the channels, sharing scoreboards of some KPIs for team not to loose focus. And when we went back to the office on August, some of our team remained to work from remote up to the moment, meeting physically on all hands meetings. Collaboration and engagement between the team has been among our core values that we live by at Singo Africa.
Not all the time you will get a tragedy that will force you to full implement what you have planned for sometimes, you have to create an environment were the result you want can be enforced, measure it then learn from the result if its a success or not.
For any tragedy or failure that you encounter in business, there is a lesson to be learned, an opportunity to a new way of doing things or to improve some processes. Am aware that at this tragedy some closed business but at the same time some businesses where born, for the former I believe from the experience they got, they learned something, If they think they haven’t they should find it because it is there and the resources spent won’t be a waste.
