My last month in Bermudas
Since 19th March, I am in Bermuda. Now it’s one month and i must tell you how awesome this is. Bermuda is a British island territory in the North Atlantic Ocean known for its pink-sand beaches such as Elbow Beach and Horseshoe Bay.
Except, I am not referring to the Bermuda islands. I am referring to the loose, knee length bermuda pants.
The thought and reality of not requiring to wearing formal clothes everyday is so comforting, physically as well as mentally. I guess this is applicable to all. In one of the tweets, Anand Mahindra also mentioned he attended a few online meetings wearing lungi.
I am coming to an understanding that the whole traditional office working setup and environment sometimes adds to the unnecessary expense and stress. Be it expensive formal clothes, shoes, vehicles, office setups and all that. Most of which can be avoidable.
We as a firm of Chartered Accountants have always been fanatic about the latest tech. And because of our tech adoption, we could work frictionless during last month and we could live up to our promise of 0 impact accounting to all our clients. We even interviewed a lot of candidates for hiring, rolled out a few offers. Not trying to keep this to ourselves, I tried explaining our cloud setup through 2–3 blogs. You can find them here. [https://medium.com/me/stories/public]
During this time, I also spoke with a few friends and helped them explain how they, starting now, can still embrace some tech adding significant productivity and efficiency at the same time remaining frugal.
I think following are some of the things we did:
- Agile management: Offering constant support but not pestering team with micro management. Measuring output than the inputs.
- Collaboration with clients and team members, using collaboration tools to minimise internal emails.
- Keeping emotional quotient in mind, rationalised work expectations from team members. But I must tell you, our team delivered more efficiently that what we used to do while working in office.
- Better project management to ensure deliverables are on track
- Team engagement: Some of the things we did to keep our team engaged aside work was gifting them music subscriptions, having video calls for chai pe charcha and a few others. This helped to strengthen the bond and relax them a bit.
Everyone of us would agree, when the lockdown is relaxed, we all would love to go back to offices. Because, we somehow associate office with work. But I am also sure, more and more professionals wouldn’t shirk to experiment with these new normal methods of work?
What do you think of this?
Feel free to contribute or counter.
@dasarpb [https://twitter.com/dasarpb]
