“Black belt track for professional stuntmen” – Executive thoughts on the quarantine period

We ask BPiON managers what they learned from the quarantine period. Tamás Kovács, the managing director of BPiON in Hungary, was the first to respond.

BPION MD at home office

For me, perhaps the biggest surprise and experience of the quarantine period was the increasing inefficiency. I expected the overall home office at both the corporate and individual levels to be accompanied by a reduction in performance and response time. But not. Indeed! Of course, some issues are still easier to address within the framework of personal contact, but it is just a convenience factor. Overall, our solutions and tools of remote working have proven to be very effective.

It turned out, for example, how much could be solved without meetings, either with a quick call or a few emails, saving a lot of time. If we do choose the meeting, it can be done even more efficiently and does not require a personal presence. For this, our digital platforms were perfect

And now we must speak about multitasking. It can be a double-edged sword and it goes against the “deep work”, “be in the flow” trends, but important nowadays. There were a lot of days when I also had 8-10 meetings a day, but colleagues on parallel channels – regardless of the greater empowering- were still waiting for a quick confirmation from me. Taking the risk of not progressing within the perfect dedicated attention, I feel I suffered minor losses by being able to give my colleagues quick reactions in multitasking, which in turn allowed them to move forward comfortably.
The point is that it is a black belt track and you cannot use whenever, but there was info sharing meetings, I was just a passive participant, but my presence was important and then – as we were moving on the same integrated platform ( eg. Teams) – I was able to quickly switch channels and handle other topics in parallel. Regardless, I only recommend this to “professional stuntmen”, I also made mistakes, but I lived it positively overall. If it all happened in a physical environment and I sit all day in a meeting room and a colleague is looking for me in the office on some matter, surely, we couldn’t have progressed at that pace.

However, this period also brought me a lot of personal recognition and lessons. (I guess I’m not alone with that…)

I didn’t even think on New Year’s Eve 2019 that in a few months I will be a company manager, a teacher, and a kindergarten supervisor at the same time, and if someone says I was going to have fun with my friends via video conferencing, I would laugh … One of my favorite quotes was that the “perfect is the enemy of done”. I did not make it perfect, but I managed to get a lot done.

However, it is important to say, I think that in this situation too (unfortunately) the women had the lion’s share of the task and all the respect for the ladies who have taken it all the way through.

By the way, the kids now at least guess what Dad does when he works and what “conf call” means. 

Béla Kakuk, CEO of BPiON, also talked about the challenges of the quarantine period caused by the coronavirus, it is worth reading.

Read more from Tamás Kovács on our blog.

Contact:

Rafał Nadolny
MD Poland,
Partner

Daniela Zsigmond
MD Romania,
Partner

Tamás Kovács
MD Hungary,
Partner


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