Following up on our series, Judit Gudman, Client Service Director, head of our accounting and payroll outsourcing services in Hungary, speaks about the experiences of the compelling home office period.
Joining the line of thought of Béla Kakuk and Tamás Kovács, the most positive message of this period for me was the great performance of BPiON corporate culture. Also, our previous strategy has been confirmed: Start building a company from the beginning as if you serve hundreds of clients and have hundreds on your payroll as soon as from tomorrow. Implement the IT systems, the operational processes, and build the management in the way and volume which will be suitable to achieve your most daring dreams. We invested the most in this and now life has proven that it wasn’t wasted. Together, the company culture and stable technology foundations supported a smooth transition.
While nobody expected this virus to come into our life that overwrites the daily routine, it was an advantage that our staff was used to the continuous changing environment caused by the market forces, or the natural changes of a growing company. Most of our employees are open, adaptable, and consider innovation a challenge. I think we’ve gained another experience over the last few months, which has forged the team further and strengthened the loyalty of our clients.
I remember that Friday 13th… In the morning, on the all-staff meeting, we announced that we were moving the company to full home office from Monday. We had prepared for it, thought it over, provided all the technical and theoretical conditions, but it felt like preparing for war and nobody knew what would happen next and how long it would take. Still, we had a good feeling at the same time, the feeling of the team building force, as everyone contributed to this transition and faced it with enough openness and confidence.
After we were over the first thrills of “moving home”, we made one mistake which I would do differently if we started again. We were too naive. In this situation, we thought that everything would slow down and there would be enough time for the housekeeping tasks that we had kept putting of. Since we don’t like to be inactive, we set off to do the tasks waiting at the bottom of our todo-list. For example, we got involved in new projects. Of course, it quickly turned out that we were wrong, everyday life didn’t slow down at all!
We focused on finding the pain points where we could help our clients in this situation, so we followed the Hungarian governmental bulletin, the news, we were thinking about which industry was affected and how, and what the next step could be to provide support to our clients. We undertook a lot, we started with great energy and in addition to the above, we launched further developments, new projects.
It was the human side of things that we might have underestimated. We tried to help colleagues who stayed at home in different life situations and faced private challenges as well, while we did the same and managed the daily tasks surrounded by our children’s textbooks and taking part in their kindergarten activities, and negotiating with our partner over the use the apartment in order to ensure a quiet spot for a call.
What was a very pleasant surprise for me regarding our processes, in addition to the above, is the fact that we were able to onboard new colleagues and clients seamlessly through our technical solutions. Everything worked from full remote. This is very good feedback that our systems, which we “drafted on paper” before, are working perfectly in reality and in such a crisis. Plenty of elements have been implemented and ready to use now, which should have waited for long but for the recent emergency.
Last week, Kata Karó, Accounting Manager spoke about her experiences, worth reading blog as well.
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