Originally published on businessnewstips.com
You may be ready to leave your desk and pack your bags for a trip or vacation away from work. However, your mood may sour if you receive a call or text about an emergency at work while lying on the beach. What can irritate you more is that these calls could have been prevented if more safeguards and measures were in place. To fully keep your business operations running smoothly, even when you are not at your desk, it is crucial to have the necessary plans and automation established. Here, Adam Ferrari, CEO of Ferrari Energy, shares several ways to automate your business operations while you are away.
Everyone needs to disconnect and unwind periodically. This is especially true for those in high-pressure, stressful positions, such as running a company. Time to decompress is essential to mental health and family relationships, but if you’re worried about work the whole time you’re away, what have you accomplished?
Even if you’re not on vacation but away from the office for work, you will be less effective if you attempt to complete every task just as if you were sitting at your desk.
Two crucial keys to achieving valuable time away from the office are delegation and technology.
Delegation
Regardless of how much high-tech gadgetry you deploy to forward calls, texts, and email, your attempts to unwind, disconnect, or be productive on the road will ultimately fail if everything still falls on your shoulders.
Before, long before, you take off for that long-anticipated vacation or business trip, examine everything you do while asking yourself, “who else could do this while I am away?” Don’t let your ego get in the way. Don’t assume you are the only one capable of doing what you do. If it is indeed the case that only you can do very much of what you do, you need to restructure your business. Too much dependence on any one person, even you, is not healthy for a company.
Once you have identified every conceivable task or activity that may occur during your planned absence, create a written plan that describes who and under what circumstances others are to fill in for you – without reaching out to contact you if possible. If done correctly, there may still be a few emergencies – think the building is on fire – that will require your involvement. Technology will help you deal with those issues.
Technology
Technology is a beautiful thing, and many innovative solutions have provided flexibility in the workplace for the past few decades. For many, the workplace has become virtual. Working from home is nearly ubiquitous, and #WFH is a trending hashtag.
VPNs, text messages, WhatsApp, Zoom, Google Meets, and a host of other applications can be deployed to give you an instant and in-depth insight into what your business is doing while you are away.
Use these tools to give you the level of connectivity needed to provide peace of mind. As mentioned earlier, keeping your level of involvement low will enable you to get the most from your time away, but you must also have confidence that all is well at the office. The ideal situation is to construct an environment where “no news is good news” while you are away.
About Adam Ferrari
Adam Ferrari is an accomplished petroleum engineer and is the founder of a private oil and gas company, Ferrari Energy. Throughout various roles in the oil and gas industry, Adam was inspired to learn more about property rights and the inner workings of petroleum exploration and extraction. After gaining expertise in the energy sector, Adam obtained knowledge of the financial industry through his time at an investment banking firm. He then pivoted to bootstrapping his own business from the ground up as he blended his energy and finance knowledge.