In these times, the importance of adaptation to change becomes more relevant as it’s not the strongest, not the smartest who survive, but those who can best adapt to change. For this reason, in these especially challenging times, flexibility to current and future changes becomes more important than ever.

 

The current situation has made it necessary to adopt new work methods, such as remote work. Due to the shift in the way we work, it is imperative to find new ways of facilitating this change.

 

Working from home

 

In our company, the employees and their wellbeing always come first. So due to the situation all of us started working from home. The efficiency of the employees remained the same, but in order to achieve that, the employees were quite up to date, in reporting hours and reporting absences. The transfer wasn’t that difficult, cos we already had the option of working from home earlier. Of course, some jobs simply cannot be moved online, but as recent the world pandemic has shown, a lot of jobs can be performed from home without any productivity losses. The most difficult part is the communication, physical presence and time management.

 

Although remote work has been popular for a while. For employees, benefits of remote work include organizing their own time to achieve better work-life balance.

 

The first two weeks of working from home were difficult and stressful, because we changed everything to be in a digital form. All the paperwork and administration work were moved digitally and the most challenging part was to digitize that part.

 

Company tried to help the employees to ease their stress, and make their home office effective, relaxing, technically facilitated, and give them the opportunity to bring home their office equipment, monitors, chairs, coolers etc. 

 

Virtual Team building events organized during summer to help the employees to better organize work from home, balance the life/work activities, and make SMART plans for their future.

 

Digital transformation

 

As a company we work according to an agile methodology. Being Agile is the use of an adaptive life cycle, which doesn’t fix, design and plan the product upfront, but let it evolve throughout the project based on feedback loops. It allows the product to emerge from unclear requirements and environments, and therefore, is very flexible about changes.

 

 

We grew a lot in the second part of the year, so we needed some software to help us get organized and not to miss anything that was in need of the employees. So we were introduced to the company People HR, and digitized our HR procedures, vacancies, holidays, reports, evaluations, employees documents, ATS, etc.

 

For time tracking we are using Planio which is super helpful for us to plan and track projects, Trello for organizing work tasks (administration), what to do by the following week or month etc., incorporated google docs for synchronization of our document preparation, google forms for internal pools, Miro for creative brainstorming and Box and internal DMS for our documents storage. These are some of the tools that help us with working from home.

 

Colleagues communicate with each other several times a day and they have several meetings. Communication in a traditional, face to face way, is surely disrupted by remote work. Employees don’t have a chance to walk over their colleagues desk and start the conversation whenever they want. And the latest we got a channel (Discord) that is easy to use and thanks to the  voice channels, you can drink coffee with a colleague much easier.

 

Internship program

 

Our internship program is a tradition in the company. We did not allow this situation to prevent it, we even extended it this year and organized for the first time second (winter internship). Offering a well – structured internship program with real experience and working opportunities can increase a brand awareness and recognition among job seekers significantly, so we decided to introduce an internship program in our company which is totally remotely.

 

In this part, we also like to say big thanks to our mentors who selflessly supported and communicated with them all the time and thanks to them and the whole company, 3 participants from the internship were employed.

 

Afterwork party

 

We started missing our casual after work parties so we organized a fun Friday, which is the relaxed atmosphere of unwinding from a day of hard work over a drink with some Kahoot and other games. The last thing any of us want is more stress. However, we would probably welcome a chance to relax and get together for an evening which should be fun.