How to Prevent Failure in Working From Home to Address the Covid-19 Coronavirus Pandemic

So many organizations are shifting their employees to working from home to address the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. Yet they’re not considering the potential disasters that can occur as a result of this transition.

An example of this is what one of my coaching clients experienced a few months before the pandemic hit. Pete is a mid-level manager in the software engineering unit of an entrepreneurial startup that quickly grew to 400 office-based employees doing Electronic Health Records (EHRs). He was one of the leaders tasked by his company’s senior management team with shifting their employees to a work-from-home setup, due to rising rents on their office building.

Specifically, Pete led the team that managed the transition for all 400 employees to telework, due to his previous experience in helping small teams of 3 to 6 people in the company transition to working from home in the past. However, the significantly larger number of people they had to assist now was proving to be a challenge.

So was the short amount of time available to this project, only four weeks, before the company had to pay a lot of money for a month-by-month temporary lease extension on their office building. Ideally, this transition should have taken several months, but…