It’s now been 7 weeks since we took the decision to move our entire team to home working, and I just thought I’d share a few words on how we’ve all been dealing with this radical shake up to our working lives both professionally and personally.
Professionally, the change had to be immediate. We are lucky in that by virtue of what we do we are able to work remotely, but additional systems were required to do this full time. Our work scheduling system (Trello) & finance system (Xero) were already internet based and our IT systems were remote working enabled so that was a good start. We added to this Slack as a collaborative conversation tool to discuss client work & for internal video conference calls and Zoom for external conference calls. We received excellent training on these new tools from our web team and held our first team video conference call on 19th March. I was overwhelmed by the team’s positivity and commitment to this change in such a disruptive landscape.
As the weeks have gone on, we have added to our remote working skill-set using other video-conferencing tools such as Microsoft Teams and Jitsi, depending on our clients’ preferences and, having taken a good look at various webinar tools, we have adopted GoToWebinar as our webinar software of choice for our own and client webinars.
So the business tools have been relatively simple to adopt but probably more important has been things that have helped to keep the team dynamics going while working remotely. I think it is fair to say that everyone has found the last 7 weeks more physically and emotionally demanding than any of us could have expected. We are missing each other and when all you have is a screen image of your colleagues, it’s easy to miss the body language and other cues to tell you how another person is doing that day.
Having said that, we’ve all worked hard at maintaining relationships and team working. We’ve supported each other in adapting to shifting client demands and in continuing to develop our own business tools such as launching our new website and holding our first Mearns & Gill webinar.
As you would expect, it’s been a variety of things that has made this possible such as virtual kitchens & virtual pubs; using Slack for ‘group conversations’ on client projects; regular business updates and 1 to 1 meetings with each team member; maintaining our regular meetings schedule via conference calls rather than in person; Rob’s Tuesday quiz on Telegram; remembering we can still phone each other and some video calls just to say hi, how are you doing? Here are some quotes from the team on what has kept them going:
As we all know, the technology is there to allow some level of human interaction while remote working and everyone is adapting. Maybe it will change how we work in the future but I for one am looking forward to getting back into the office and thanking the team in person for how each of them have adapted and supported the business through this enforced period of working remotely.
