Top Remote Disposal Issues and Business Readiness
In one day we transferred all offices to a remote format
63% of companies, according to the results of our customer survey, are satisfied with the remote work format.And 41% are ready to continue this format.At first it was a little surprising. Although there were forecasts in this regard: that everyone would try remote work and understand that there was nothing wrong with it, after which mass bankruptcy of office buildings would begin. It is clear that not all companies and people are ready for this, but in general everything is not bad.
The majority said that the main problem with remoteness is the lack of personal communications.In second place is low motivation andinvolvement, in third place is the difficulty of control. For the vast majority of clients, Bitrix24 has essentially become the main tool of work, because they have lost the opportunity to work offline. Considering that we are facing exactly the same situation, we had a huge responsibility. Firstly, we had to ensure a fairly large influx of clients and workload, since the tools began to be used much more and more often, and secondly, we had to comply in terms of the product situation: what do we give to clients so that they can interact in this format.
Video calling culture and office in every home
Due to the current situation, we have changedupdates of mobile and desktop applications.This was important to, firstly, give the opportunity to communicate with more people, since before that we had a maximum group call of four people, this was due to the architecture and load on the channel. We had to redo everything, and in April we opened group calls for 12 people, today they are available for 24 people. We also worked on “Tasks and Projects”: we released effective “Mobile Tasks”, as the load on them increased greatly, and a large number of our clients began to use this service, giving each other tasks and monitoring them. The next part that we put forward in our plans is working with online sales. Due to the transition to online, the demand for them has become very high. Then we released a tool called “Sales Center” and “CRM Terminal” - this is the ability to issue invoices for payment in any chat, immediately accept it, even to the point where a courier without a cash register through the CRM terminal can accept contactless payment from him . All this diversity was dramatically revised, because we needed to give our clients the opportunity to work in new realities, and not look for other tools. In addition, we have removed the limitation on the free plan. Previously there was a limit of up to 12 people, but now the number of people on the free plan is unlimited.
Everything has moved to video calls, video conferences and chats.Previously, we had an offline component when wecould meet with colleagues in meeting rooms, you could go up to a colleague, sit next to his computer and look at the details, discuss something, look at the code and make a decision, help or ask for help, but now all this is inaccessible. Despite the fact that we are already a fairly distributed office, the amount of communication was great, because the marketing department constantly communicates with each other, and the developers, who are on different floors, and it is easier for them to talk via video conference than to go to each other. Well, the offices communicated with each other online in the same way. Today, the number of communications has grown significantly and is of great importance to us. Business processes are also important to us. Those things that we did the old fashioned way had to be transferred to digital format.
Our task was to make the person, being at home and continuing to work on their affairs, feel the effect of being in the office.That is why we have such a culturalThe rule is that we can make a video call without warning. That is, as we used to do: we wrote in the chat and asked to dial, but now we can call each other without prior approval. This keeps our employees on their toes and allows us to maintain the effect of presence when any comrade can come into your office just to talk to you. A mandatory morning call at the beginning of the workday for most of our teams that work together in one way or another in order to greet each other and quickly discuss a brief plan of action. We have a huge number of calls and communications to discuss any issues; the number of communications has increased dramatically. Another interesting feature, at least in our Moscow office, is the story of informal communication. We used to have a tradition: at five o’clock in the evening we would gather in the kitchen for 15–20 minutes, just to drink tea and chat about abstract topics. We have kept this tradition, but now it happens online. This works great, it keeps people involved in the team, there is always something to talk about, share personal or work stories and maintain personal communication, which is so lacking in remote work.
We have converted a lot of logistics processes into digital.For example, on signing contracts that we haveThey go on constantly. The number of events that the marketing department conducts during this period still remains the same. All this also needs to be organized, contracts signed, bills and closing documents paid, and exchanged with all counterparties. For the majority, we were able to transfer turnover to an electronic document; where we could not, we digitized everything internally to the maximum. And today, for example, in order to agree and sign an agreement, I don’t need to do anything except what I can do in my mobile phone. That is, I receive both the text of the contract and notes on agreement with lawyers. I can look and make sure that everything is in order with him and check the “Sign” checkbox, and the contract will be considered signed. The same applies to my colleagues who work with these documents. They do everything online: they upload these documents, which enter the approval chain and come for approval. We have transferred most of our logistics operations online, and today, in order to get documents (about 10%) that still remain in paper format and arrive at the office at our address, we have to sort them out by hand, we do everything else digitally.
24/7 support and benefit from your own tools
The transition to a remote work format even increased the efficiency of development and the speed of release of modules and codes.For most of our counterparties, my partners, these formats have also taken root quite well. Therefore, remote control is not as scary as they initially said.
In order for everything to work well, we have to support a fairly large infrastructure.The cloud service should always be available on100%, which is why we have distributed our infrastructure across nine countries. Now there are more than 16 data centers, in every location, in every country where we are present in terms of infrastructure. Today, more than 6 million companies are registered in our service around the world. We work in 18 languages and in every country in the world: this is a separate source of pride; you probably cannot find a country or territory, or unrecognized territory on the globe, where there is not at least one of our clients. In addition, we have two independent data centers. We managed to build a fairly efficient infrastructure; now there are more than 600 servers, designed for millions of clients. At the same time, we are practically among the ten most loaded services in Russia.
We are now just over 450 people, and we are all distributed around the world.We have our main headquarters inKaliningrad, because our company comes from there. Most of the employees work there. In addition, we have offices in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kyiv, Kazakhstan, Belarus and so on. Several offices are located in the USA and Europe; in addition to offices, we have also had a significant staff of remote workers for more than two years. They were needed to provide customers with 24/7 technical support, because serving customers around the world, we have to “close” all time zones, and for this our support team is very geographically distributed. Most of them are in Russia, and we have many, including native speakers of other languages, to communicate with clients around the world.
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