Different Strategies Companies are taking up to manage their Workforce during the Corona Virus Outbreak
Different Strategies Companies are taking up to manage their Workforce during the Corona Virus Outbreak
As the number of COVID-19 cases keeps on rising, organizations are urging their staff to work remotely. While the efficiency of remote work was an ever debated topic, companies find themselves being forced to embrace remote work sooner than they would have expected.
Companies who were once resistant to the idea of allowing their employees to work from home are now forced into making it a priority.
As we surpass around the 3-week mark for most companies working remotely, we reached out to tech companies and personnel asking their different strategies they are taking up to manage their workforce during this outbreak.
1. Atlassian
Peter Bartolome from Atlassian commented:
As the situation around coronavirus COVID-19 continues to unfold and create uncertainty around the globe, we at Atlassian are committed to maintaining our high level of service, our compliance obligations, and the safety of your data. We have a strong business continuity plan in place so that you can continue your important work without interruption:
- Our Crisis Management Team meets daily to evaluate the situation and act accordingly.
- We are following guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and other authorities for information and decision-making support. We are also in close contact with our peers in each location in which we operate.
- We regularly test our backup and restore procedures and have stepped up the frequency as a result of COVID-19. Atlassian’s cloud infrastructure is highly redundant and in multiple AWS regions around the world.
- We have a team of SREs around the world who ensure our services are running, whether they are working from the office or remotely.
- Our teams continue to remain available to address all your commercial and support needs.
The health and safety of our employees is a top priority for us. We have asked all of our staff to work from home and have also stopped all non-essential business travel and in-person meetings. While this may be a shift in working style for many companies, at Atlassian, we’re no strangers to remote work. A significant number of our employees work remotely on a regular basis, and we count on our own products to collaborate, track progress and communicate with each other.
2. HireTester
Alex Khobotnya (CEO from HireTester) says:
My personal rules and approaches to managing my team are the following:
- Planned structured daily scrums. Daily virtual meetings with the team or one-on-one calls with the team players, who require any clarifications, help a lot to catch up with the current state of affairs, stay tuned, foresee and quickly react to possible difficulties that may arise.
- Apply several communication options for the better and quicker information exchange, like chats for less formal or more time-sensitive communication, video conferences for getting visual cues to some question as well as for avoiding the sense of isolation, etc.
- Measure outcome, not activity or hours worked. For some employees, it can be a bit difficult transition (from office to remote work I mean). They need to adjust to the new conditions and work out their individual work pace. Besides, it’s quite difficult to track and manage every aspect of the remote team’s work. Focusing on the outcome will provide a far better result in terms of productivity.
- Always remember about social interaction (even when going remote), encouragement and support. A group chats in a messenger the team uses (for us it’s Slack) for informal communication, and non-work-related info sharing, where it’s possible to shift your attention and feel the office buzz again, works as a perfect solution.
3. Studio 3T
Yvonne Karwig from 3T Software says:
We are lucky enough to be able to all work from home, supported by our company who have generously allowed us to bring home our peripheral devices such as mice and keyboards, and if needed, our displays so that we can work more comfortably.
We’re using Slack and Skype for video calls and chatting. We’re checking in on our team by recommending over group chats, that people take time to get up and walk around, and within the team, I work in, we’re having a casual coffee catch up as a short break to relax. It’s important to do this as this is a very different work environment now for most of our firm who previously did not work from home. Keeping in contact is important.
We are still as available as ever for our users and customers, and we communicate with them the same as before: with email, newsletters, or social media, so this has not changed.
4. Inventus law
Shantanu Surpure (US/UK/India Admitted Cross Border Venture Capital) shared his WFH strategy:
Don’t stop networking – whereas it used to be IRL, it has now moved to online/virtual. SaaStr was one example. YC moved their Demo Day to online and TiE has moved several live events to Webinars.
Stay on top of trends and build your network by moving the networking online during this time. In fact, it might set up a long term trend.
5. Zeroqode
Vlad Larin founder of Zeroqode says:
1) Everyone is encouraged to work remotely – close to 100% of all communication is managed via Slack, so the work continues as usual
2) We are learning how to run 100% of our interactions via Skype\Zoom – Interviews, Onboarding, Business Partnership Meetings, Status Meetings, etc. Even if we’re both in the same city\country – currently almost everything is done remotely
3) We have increased our efforts for creating and maintaining our internal Knowledge Base – adding more entries, process descriptions and daily routines to make it easier for people to be autonomous
4) Last, but not least – we’ve launched a special discount (%30-80) for people like us that are stuck at home and have some more time to do something creative to support them in their creativity.
6. Cloud Sight
Brad Folkens CEO of Cloudsight says:
We’ve been a “work remote” enabled company for a long time, and in fact, our company has team members all over the globe. We’ve also been monitoring the situations in other countries where our team members are located and have ensured extra flexibility in working hours. Surprisingly, we have actually been getting an increased amount of business inquiries during this time, whereas initially, we thought there might be a bit of a slowdown. In any case, because we’re already a very “remote work” company, the virus hasn’t affected us from an operational perspective.
7. Tenbound
David Dulany (Founder & CEO) of Tenbound says:
We had in our plans to move to a more digital and virtual model in 2020, and this crisis has massively accelerated that. We’ve been fully remote since the beginning, but many of our programs were still face to face. Now that live events are no longer an option, we are figuring out how to offer our audience the same value and experiences digitally. The crisis has forced us to move faster.
8. Habitica
Habtica commented:
At Habitica, we’ve always been a remote work team, so in some ways, our strategy is the same. We’re doing our best to stay on our usual routine (daily webcam meetings) as much as we can, but we’re also making sure team members have space to vent and talk during meetings now that we are all self-isolating. It’s been a good way to feel more social and also to share information.
We’re also all reminding each other to keep up self-care and attempt to avoid burnout more than usual. It’s a busy time, but we need to take care of ourselves to stay healthy and keep Habitica going.
Here is how CodeGrip is managing its Workforce during the Corona Virus Outbreak
At CodeGrip, we created a quick policy that can become a guiding principle for all.
Rather than asking everyone to not come to the office suddenly, we made a plan and shared it with everyone.
We use slack for communications throughout the day. We have a standup meeting with all the teams. It allowed us to discuss queries and solve problems that anyone had throughout the work. We made a strategy where we use Trello to assign tasks to everyone and have an end of day meeting to discuss the progress and any doubts.
We are still available for our users and everyone can communicate with us using email and socials.
Takeaways:
Let these examples inspire you to see how you can help people in your company to stay productive and create value. As a true leader, turn every disruption into an opportunity.
