What I Learnt in Business - 26th April - Covid-19 Iso Edition

Jasmine here with this week's edition of what I learnt in business last week. And it's a special edition, which I'm calling the inevitable Covid19 Edition of my weekly blogs. Yes, I find myself at home in isolation with my husband and my toddler.

And I've done a complete 180 of what I thought I would be doing this week. I was due to be on location in Melbourne, assisting with a go live with one of our projects along with Kara from my team. But unfortunately we find ourselves separated, at home and attempting to manage a go live remotely, which is a challenge in of itself.

But everyone's been asking very kindly how I am and I'm very fortunate that I have extremely mild symptoms. In fact, I'm almost asymptomatic, so I'm very lucky about that. I'm grateful that I did take a precautionary test because a lot of the work that I do at the moment is in healthcare and I was due to be at a maternity hospital. So myself and the baby, we are a hundred percent fine. But as you know, the challenges of course, of working from home and working remotely when you are in isolation.

So this is our final day of isolation, but there have been some key learnings from what it has been like to work, multitask and juggle while you are isolating with COVID-19. I'm one of the last people I know to have contracted COVID-19, but in case you're wondering what it is like. It's just like working from home, but it's also being the lead educator at home daycare with a toddler!

It has been tricky trying to do a go live remotely with all of that happening around me and also being separated from Kara who is my project coordinator on this particular project. So we've learnt to absolutely boost and enhance our communications with each other. And also with our teams on the ground that are doing the work for the go live. We check in with them via chat, Microsoft teams via text and via calls - this may be excessive - but every half an hour and we check in with them and as soon as we hear things, we also inform our vendor in real time. It's almost as good as us being on the ground! But it's really being diligent and keeping on top of those communications so that everybody is informed at the same time.

The other thing of course, and it's a little bit harder when you are remote, but when issues do happen, I talked about this last week, bring everybody together, everybody on a call, get everybody on the same page so that there aren't any miscommunications or incorrect information being passed between parties. I find that's extremely helpful. Particularly when you are away from the situation, to really understand what exactly is happening on the ground.

That is it for me this week. A few learnings of course, how to boost your communications even more when you are remote. Of course we're learning a little bit of resilience, it's been a big two months. It has calmed down in terms of intensity but definitely not the business as usual plan that we thought that we would be doing. So we've learnt some resilience, some contingency planning and how to communicate super clearly at LVL Up in the past couple of months.

I will see you next week when I am out of isolation and back fighting fit, have a great week.