Business management with feet in the sand – True Story!

Working from the beach. Maybe on an island. Under palm trees. White soft sand between the toes. Glorious summers, mild winters. For many a utopia. But not for everyone!

In the times of Corona, much has been written about home office, remote work and remote leadership. In the relevant media pages, you regularly read articles about how digital nomads work from the most beautiful places in the world.

Readers are often left with doubts whether this works for their own jobs. So what really works? How remotely can remote work really be?

We have learned that there is more to it than meets the eye! Much more!

Imagine you work in a small company in rainy Düsseldorf. You are a service provider. Communication with your employees and your customers is personally important to you and essential for your business model. You are the managing director and are responsible for your 15 employees. Do you think you can just buy a small house on your favorite island, sell your apartment in Düsseldorf and emigrate? Do you think you can continue to run your company just as successfully without your employees feeling abandoned by you?

Sounds completely crazy! Isn't working on the beach something for freelancers rather than CEOs? Apparently not! This is the story of one of our clients who did the same.

He has been living in Madeira with his family for almost 18 months. It was a long-cherished dream. A plan for a distant future. But suddenly the chance to buy a house on the Portuguese island presents itself. It is just as he always imagined: a house with a garden and palm trees, not far from the beach. Eternal summers, mild winters. The circumstances are favorable and he strikes.

But how does he now manage his company in Düsseldorf from thousands of kilometers away? Quite simple: With the right structure and the right tools.

As a first step, he has given his local employees more responsibility, giving them the chance to grow and develop into new tasks.

Regular communication with his employees takes place via common web conferencing tools. Regular appointments ensure that communication does not break down and can be planned for all involved.

Another important tool he uses is qmBase. All tasks that are agreed upon in the appointments are entered into qmBase Projects & Task Management. Clear responsibilities and deadlines are entered for each measure. Now everyone knows what they have to do.

All common and individual goals are entered in qmBase goal management. All measures necessary to achieve the goal are directly linked to the goal. In this way, these important interrelationships in the company are always transparently traceable.

In addition, an internal audit is scheduled every four weeks. In each audit, a different area of the company is discussed in detail with the employees concerned via web conference. What is going well? Where are the problems? What do they want to do better in the future? The results are entered directly in the qmBase audit management. Of course, new tasks often result from the audits, which are then also recorded in the project & measures management. Measures can of course also be assigned directly to the audits. In this way, it is always possible to trace which measure was decided in which audit.

The employees simply enter their work progress in the measures and their target achievement directly in qmBase. In this way, all relevant changes in Düsseldorf can be viewed at any time, even from Madeira. We call this asynchronous communication. 

The coordination of all important documents and process descriptions, such as the release of the new hygiene rules, takes place directly via qmBase document management and the associated release process.

At the beginning, our managing director was still a bit unsure whether managing the company remotely would actually run smoothly. He had planned to be on site in Düsseldorf every few weeks to be on the safe side. Then came the COVID-19 Pandemic and the associated restrictions. He hasn't been back for over a year now. He has learned that with the right structure and the right tools, it works brilliantly, even from a distance.

Corporate management with its feet in the sand, so it does work!

qmBase as a web-based, digital enterprise platform enables you to collaborate with your employees. It makes no difference whether you use a home office or are currently on a business trip or away from a company location. qmBase is accessible worldwide and enables the collaborative, interactive cooperation of all employees - agile, efficient and adapted to your needs.

Individual to-do lists remind each employee of tasks that need to be done. So you don't have to remind your employees and still nothing gets forgotten.

Would you like to know more about the advantages and the extensive apps of qmBase or test the software directly? Then contact us now.