Operational Efficiency in Remote-First Companies: Lessons from Zoho Ecosystems

Operational complexity isn't new to remote working. It simply made the already present problems intractable.

With a team in the same office, there is an inherent inefficiency. Someone approaches and asks a question. A manager realizes two individuals have two identical roles. The process is visibly broken and someone repairs it before it turns into a chronic issue. Being in close proximity to each other results in what most companies were unaware of, an informal correction system until it went away.

That's not something that a remote-first organization has. If a process is broken, no one knows that it is. If there's no hallway conversation, then there's no communication. If the teams create different solutions to the same problem, they don't have a common ground on which to notice their differences. 

When teams are spread apart, proximity is a key operational issue that makes things problematic in the office becomes a real problem.

It has nothing to do with the companies that found better tools to communicate.To the contrary, the companies that are successful as remote first organizations aren't the companies that found better tools to communicate. It is they who developed more effective operating systems under the communication layer. 

What operational efficiency actually means in a remote context 

It is a term that is thrown around quite lightly and it is important to understand what it means to a distributed team.

Operational efficiency is the capacity to make a manoeuvre predictable, to coordinate as little as possible, without needing people to be in the same place or the same time zone to make it happen, in a remote-first company. It signifies that tasks are not lost in translation. Decisions are not made when everyone is not on the Internet at the same time. 

Information is not in one person's head and doesn't stay in one person's inbox. And the business has adequate visibility of what's going on so it can catch issues before they escalate.

That definition helps to explain why it's essential to have the right platform. A company that is remote-first, uses disjointed tools, informal communication, and manual processes, is functioning on trust and on people. This yields results for ten persons. It begins to split at the age of 50. It will fail at the age of 100.

The infrastructure needs to do the jobs that proximity did. To be effective, that infrastructure must be connected and visible and must be built around the way distributed teams work. 

The coordination tax on remote teams 

Each unconnected tool in a remote team's toolbox contributes an extra tax, or cost, of "coordination" needed to maintain information flow between systems not built to communicate.

A Customer conversation occurs in EMAIL. The results must be transferred to the CRM. The result of that conversation should be a task in the project management tool. This order/Bill should be entered into the billing system. 

Each step involves a human in the transfer of information from one source to another. This overhead is a nuisance in an office! This overhead is exacerbated in a remote team with people across Time Zones and working asynchronously, and is multiplied by real delays and real errors.

One member of the billing team in one time zone waits for another member of the sales team in another time zone for new CRM data.A member of the billing team in one time zone waits for a member of the sales team in another time zone for new data in the CRM. 

If the support agent cannot access the customer's purchasing history due to a lack of visibility in his/her system, the customer experience will be compromised, and the agent will have to ask all sorts of unnecessary questions. These are not technical misfortunes. 

They're architecture failures: that's the predictable outcome when a team's operations are based on tools that don't talk to each other.

Companies that are remote-first that have found a way around this report the same thing: the coordination tax nearly vanishes when tools natively share data. If the CRM is all looking at the same underlying customer record, then the information need not travel between the systems, such as between the CRM and support platform. It's not in need of someplace to be. 

What the Zoho ecosystem enables for distributed teams 

While Zoho One was built with no specific focus on remote first organizations, its architecture aims to solve a coordination issue that is relevant for distributed teams

If the business uses the Zoho suite of applications including Zoho CRM, Zoho Projects, Zoho Desk, Zoho Books, Zoho People and any other application, then all of these applications access a common data store. 

The customer record in CRM is the same one that Desk uses to create a ticket, Books refers to when creating an invoice, or Projects references when creating a delivery engagement. No data is copied from one system to another. No one waits for a sync. The information is already linked in as the platform has been designed to be.

This native connectivity is a game-changer for remote teams, eliminating one of the most frequent coordination bottlenecks. A salesman in London can serve a customer in Nairobi without briefing him/her, because the support agent can view the entire commercial history of the customer. 

A project manager in Manila will be able to tell if an invoice has been paid and then he can decide if he will continue or not with the next step of the project. An operations lead can create a report across sales, support and billing data without performing a data export and a manual merge.

The work is done at the right time, in the right place, with the right information, and at the right person's fingers. That's how a remote-first company works.This is how an operational efficient remote-first company operates. 

Automation as the backbone of async work 

Most teams that are remote-first are necessarily asynchronous, and that is only viable when things get done automatically without the need to be online for a person to do them.

The repetitive coordination efforts that otherwise require constant human efforts are taken care of by Zoho's automation features across the suite. A Task is automatically created in Projects when a deal moves to the Proposal stage in CRM. A draft invoice is generated in Books when a project is completed. If an invoice is 30 days overdue, a payment reminder will be automatically sent and a task assigned to the accounts team. If a customer with a high value opens a support ticket, an alert is automatically sent to the account manager in CRM.

None of these automations have to have a person on the internet at the time that they are triggered. They execute the rules that the team set up, on a consistent basis, no matter the time zone. The team starts the day with work that progresses rather than with a nightly pile of coordination work.

This is the real life example of "asynchronous efficiency". Not that everyone has to communicate with each other, they do, but it's not to move information around, it's to make decisions and form judgments. 

Visibility as a management tool 

One of the most frequent pitfalls in managing a distributed company is that they cannot see what is happening.

What comes next is the urge to increase the number of meetings, from daily standup calls to weekly syncs to status emails just so managers have some idea of what's happening on their teams. It makes it feel like you're not supervised when, in fact, you are.

Operational visibility should be embedded in the platform itself instead. A manager can open one Zoho Analytics Dashboard and view the deal velocity, project status, health of the support queue and the billing performance, without having to reach out to anyone for an update and gain the oversight he needs, without the overhead of a meeting.

This changes the way things are managed from being monitored to managed on an exception basis. Instead of holding regular check-ins to see what's going on, the manager looks at the dashboard, notes any unusual activity and takes care of those items that need to be taken care of. Team is independent in action. The manager keeps informed. The business moves at a quicker pace.

Thought needs to be given to what decisions each role needs to make and what data it will refer to in making the decision if they are to get this visibility configured correctly. This is where the experience of Zoho Consulting Solutions teams comes into play. The platform can do it. Putting those capabilities into practice with the day-to-day flow of the business demands someone who understands both sides of the equation. 

The lessons remote-first companies have learned 

The pattern worth saying is what’s shared by the most efficient remote-first organizations.

They made the investment in their operational infrastructure early, in time before the coordination issues became too great, rather than trying to patch up a system that had been already broken by the growth of the team. It wasn't about how cool the applications were in a demo, but how the applications worked together. 

From the beginning, they incorporated automation into their processes rather than adding it as an add-on. And they made it a job criterion, not a luxury item.

The remaining companies who are still trying to figure out how to make their operations more efficient remotely are often still trying to solve the tool sprawl problem, to coordinate work across platforms that were never intended to share information and are doing so with low-scalable meetings and manual work that adds up.

The lesson from the Zoho eco-system is not that Zoho is the only way. It's that, interconnected and automated operations are the ones that make remote work sustainable at scale. Any architecture that provides those three things can do. If the architecture that is supposed to provide them fails to do so, then it will fail, typically at the most inopportune moment. 

Building for how remote teams actually work 

The businesses that are doing remote operations right aren't the ones that have the most tools, or the most meetings. It is they who have thought about how to run their operational systems in a way that is distributed, and not simply an office environment in the remote setting.

It will take honesty regarding the sources of co-ordination overhead, the lack of visibility and what routine tasks are occupying human attention that can be automated. It demands selecting platforms that make connection the default and not the project. And it takes investment in implementing those platforms around the business, not the vendors' demo model.

Working remotely doesn't have to be more difficult. Unbelievably, poorly designed remote operations are more difficult. The difference lies in the infrastructure that's under the hood.