The Covid-19 virus has disrupted and rearranged the workplace with breathtaking speed. In the span of a week, organizations across every sector have sent millions of employees home to work remotely.
Just because offices are closing does not change business as usual. Work still has to get done, and products have to be developed.
Emphasoft’s home office organization
Even before the Coronavirus forced the issue, our company was already starting to work remotely. Many employees work in separate locations, and even time zones. It’s optimal to cover different time zones our clients may be in so as to answer all incoming requests in a timely manner.
But in the second half of March, Emphasoft completely switched to a home office environment. We helped employees into a smooth transition by talking about remote work during the quarantine with our team, providing open access to software, and discussing new forms of communication.
Our main communication tool is Riot. In this real-time messenger we discuss tasks, projects, and other topics. We also use Jira to create tasks and requests between specialists from different departments: developers, project managers, sales managers, and marketers.
Management and reports
We use SCRUM and Sprint Planning with our remote teams. Every day our workers agree with their managers on a set of working tasks and hours in Zoom or a chat and stick to it. We try to use video conferencing for meetings as much as possible. While not perfect, video conferencing adds a significant amount of body language which is important to help teams feel more connected.
At the end of every working day, members of our team write a short report. Having reports in a remote team is great for cutting down on administrative tasks and controlling the progress.
Each week, teams talk about what they released that week and what they are working on for the next week.
This makes it easy to keep everyone in the loop on projects and also holds everyone accountable.
Motivation and learning
The Emphasoft’s team stays in regular touch. Our HR team carefully monitors employees' questions and quickly answers them. They regularly feed the information and updates for our staff via an internal blog and corporate newsletter. HR motivates our team and invites them to use the quarantine conditions for developing new ideas and studying new professionals skills.
Mission and goals
Routines stay the same on for remote work and our teams are continuing to be productive. Emphasoft’s main purpose is developing bespoke software solutions for companies from all over the world. We strive every day to solve our customers' problems and help make their jobs just a little bit easier.
No matter who your team is or where you work, you can work well
By now, Emphasoft and many other companies with the ability to work remotely have done just that – moved their employees into a work from home situation.
We believe that even once the virus fades away, this trend will continue. Most teams are quickly becoming accustomed to this set up
This is a paradigm shift that could potentially reduce migration movements in the medium / long term future. Many people will no longer need to move to a different country just so they can get a job. Now, the internet lets us manage our teams and work from anywhere.
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