How a “Virtual Office” has Held Us Together While Social Distancing
The emergence of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, has raised questions about how companies can be good citizens during an outbreak. It is now clear that the first step is to heed calls from public health authorities for “social distancing.”. Simply staying home has proven to be the most effective method of slowing the spread of the virus. That is why we at Happy Monday, like many other companies, have quickly transitioned from working in our bustling office, that is the good kind of crowded, to working 100% remotely. This abrupt change has been challenging, but we developed a simple hack that has helped us maintain our momentum. We want to share it so that other companies can feel more ‘at home’ while making the responsible decision to work from home.
Challenges of Going Remote
As a primarily in-person company, Happy Monday has benefited from fast, clear communication, and a culture of nearly constant collaboration. These strengths are deeply ingrained in how we work together in the office, and we feared they would be threatened by a sudden move to remote work. As a lean, bootstrapped startup, we had to figure out a solution that would allow us to work with our same speed, clarity, and culture, or risk falling short of our goals and our survival. We needed a way to ensure that the collaboration we relied on to launch Happy Monday would continue, even as our team dispersed indefinitely.
Unfortunately, scheduled video meetings don’t offer the speed of communication that we enjoy when the entire team is within shouting distance. Instant messaging does allow for quick communication, but at the expense of clarity of both ideas and intent. So much gets lost when in-person collaboration is replaced by the standard communication applications. Working from home would inevitably result in our established culture being put on pause.
…or so we thought.
The Hack
Thanks to some quick thinking from our Product Manager, Tom, we pieced together a solution that transports our agility and our culture into a remote environment: We created a virtual office.
Using Zoom’s video conferencing product and a digital floor plan of the Happy Monday office, we made “rooms,” consisting of always-on video calls, for our team to congregate in or jump into for meetings. Each room corresponds to a room in our real office in Phoenix, and it can be accessed by clicking that room on the office map. Each one can accommodate anything from a single individual holding open office hours (for others to pop into as needed), all the way up to our 10-person all-hands meetings. (Like the rooms in our physical office, each virtual room is named after one of our favorite robots, like Wall-E and MegaMan.) This arrangement eliminates the need to schedule and create individual rooms for meetings, allowing our team to collaborate fluidly, as if we were still in the office. Team members can “move” throughout the office in order to attend the same impromptu huddles and water-cooler chats that make up a normal day at the office. Since the rooms are always open, we can navigate the virtual floor plan the way we would move within the real workspace.
Don’t Knock It ‘till You Try It
The transition to the virtual office has been similar to putting on VR goggles for the first time: you don’t believe that a technology can replicate a real-world experience adequately, until you experience it for yourself. This simple solution has remarkably softened the blow of suddenly going remote.
If your team or company has been slowed down by social distancing, we encourage you to give our virtual office hack a try. We put a demo of our virtual office on our website, and we’ll send you complete instructions for setting up your own virtual office. We hope that it allows your team to maintain its pace and its culture while acting responsibly during this pandemic.
At our core, Happy Monday wants to be able to do the right thing and help as much as we can. We believe the solution is flexible enough to work within any company in the way that works best for your team and your individual strengths.
[this report was written collaboratively in the Iron Giant meeting room, inside the Happy Monday virtual office]
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Happy Monday Inc. is a Phoenix-based start-up that develops software to improve people’s lives by helping them find jobs they love. Founded in 2018, the purpose-driven team of 10 has introduced a platform that connects users with jobs based on their personal priorities and their ideal work culture.
