Work-19/ The Work From Home Project (The Occupiers)

Lida.Charitonidis

Published in

Leadership & Emotional Intelligence Lab

8 min readMay 30, 2020

This project was created by the Occupiers, 4 senior university students who listen to the names of:

Nikos Kontomitros (Νίκος Κοντομήτρος)

Hliana Pantazi (Ηλιανα πανταζη)

Anastasia Papathanasiou (Anastasia Papathanasiou)

Lida Charitonidi (Lida.Charitonidis)

We would like to thank our teacher Dimitra Iordanoglou for giving us this opportunity through the Leadership & EQ Lab of @AdandPrLab, Panteion University.

Introduction

Two months ago, Coronavirus came into our lives and brought with it
many changes. Changes that refer to a science-fiction scenario. And
yet, everything was different. Our personal relationships. The
interactions with our friends and the people we wanted to have next
to us. Labor relations. The way we worked. As a result, our daily lives
have changed. The office gave way to the computer, which, during all
this time, remained active in our living room or bedroom.
So, in the course Leadership and Emotional Intelligence and the
workshop #AdandPRLab of Panteion University, we decided to
address all those who stayed home but continued to work normally
from their personal space. The aim of our work was to investigate
“Psychological Well — Being”, as this, can be formed in difficult times,
such as the period after the outbreak of Covid-19, which we are
experiencing this month.
How did the workers initially react to the sudden change in their daily
lives? How soon did they manage to adapt to the new living
conditions? How ready and safe do they feel for their return to
normalcy? What further changes do they expect in their workplace?
How confident do they feel about their jobs and their stay in them?”
are questions that will first be explored and then answered through
this work. Utilizing both quantitative and qualitative research methods
(for even more accurate findings), this work has gathered all the
necessary data and with the help of experts, it comes to help those
who need it: those who are already experiencing the first days of
return. in the office and those who, for a variety of reasons, continue
to work at a slow pace.

Our Name & Hashtag
Keeping in mind that the beginning is half of everything and the title is
the first summary of a text, we came up with the name Work — 19. It
is a pun, which combines the phrase “Work From Home” as the first
synthetic and the most famous virus of the 20th century, COVID — 19
as it is written in its scientific name. To make it even more understandable, the caption “The Stay Home Edition” appears below
the title, making the subject of the job search clear. At the same time,
in order to achieve greater interaction with the public, but also to help
readers to more easily search for the material we offer them, we
created the official hashtag of our campaign, which is none other than
# work19gr. This hashtag will accompany the posts on the social
networking pages we have created and will contribute to the
widespread dissemination of our work.

Choice Of Skills

Before we begin our research and brainstorming to find the subject of our project, our professor assigned us to choose some skills/ capabilities, which we want to develop through our assignment.

Our main goal was to develop some specific skills that we will need in our future personal or professional career. While in this lab, we analyze the meaning of “captain-leader”, our choices would be depending on characteristics that belong to a captain.

First of all, a key element in a leader’s personality is empathy, that is, emotional identification with another person’s mental state, and understanding his or her behavior and motivations. Of course, this can only be achieved through contact with other people. In our case, through the interviews we will conduct, we will be called to “enter” the place of others and to identify.

Then, we considered it possible to improve the “teamwork” feature, as we will be involved in teamwork, in which we need to communicate almost daily and work together to strive for the best.

Finally, we considered the “determination” for a leader a special qualification, as it is the characteristic that keeps you awake and from there it will mainly be judged if you are worthy of “leading”. That is, whether you decide quickly, without hesitation from the risks, and be prepared for any difficulties. Of course, although some of the above features take time and effort to develop, our goal was not to improve them, but to a significant extent, provided that we continue to evolve and strive for the best.

Questionnaire.

Before we move on, we had to find our audience. So we started with quantitative research. The aim of the research was to create a questionnaire to better reach our audience. So we decided to ask 50 people aged 30+, that is, people who are at the core of teleworking and maybe they found it difficult, having learned to work mainly from their office. Already from the first samples, we saw that we had not fallen out in our predictions. The individuals had experienced stress and difficulty in being productive. We created the following infographic:

Taking a quick look at the above art, one understands that the need to create a platform, which will be used to better inform these people about the use of teleworking tools and articles to inform them about their work and psychology, it was necessary.

Article

After a thorough discussion, we all agreed that apart from the questionnaire we wanted to conduct qualitative research. We decided to have an interview with a psychologist so that we could have an expert’s opinion on the issue of social distancing and its implications.

We came in contact with psychologist Vasiliki Tziola and after we informed her about our project and about our goal she accepted to help us. One day before the interview we sent her an email with the questions that we had made so she could be more prepared. Due to ethical reasons, we couldn’t record the interview but the member of the team that went to her office took notes (only one of us could go because of the circumstances). The conversation that we had with her was focused on how the employees experienced the period that they were working from home and how we could help them going back to their office easier. Furthermore, after the interview, we wrote an article according to everything that she told us and with some advice for the employees.

Social Media

Instagram

Then, while we had completed a significant part of our project, we considered it important to create social media accounts to spread our content. Some of the most popular social media, which does not have a specific age limit, and everyone enjoys it, are Instagram and Facebook. We created an Instagram account, which we named __work19, like the name of the project, with which we want the people we work with and those who watch us know us. = Our work. Then, we chose a central profile photo, thinking, of course, of the well-known saying “a picture = a thousand words”.

This is a representative photo, which covers the main goal we have as a team, that is, to help those who work from home in the middle of the coronation. Next, we had to formulate the “description” we would use in our account, which had to reflect our purpose. So we wrote the following: “Welcome to Work 19’s Instagram! We are a team that wants to help you who work from home, as long as there is still the mockery in our lives. We hope you enjoy our content!”. The account remains private, as we have not yet officially released the content.

Facebook

As we know that the people in our target group are mostly familiar with Facebook, creating our account will give us more resilience and recognition. www.facebook.com/Work-19-108627177518394

As with Instagram, the choice of photo refers to the message we want to convey to employees. Within our page we intend to post useful articles, interviews that we will conduct with coaches, small tips, and announcements about current events!

The Work-19 Site.

So, we were led to create our site: work19project.wixsite.com/work19project

Creating the site was a purely functional option. Our goal was to create a platform that would connect all the elements of our research and present them to our audience. Based on the questionnaire and the interview with the psychologist, we divided the platform into three sections:

🔸Stress control tips

🔸Articles by psychologists for the awareness and improvement of psychology and

🔸Online Courses for learning online tools.

Therefore, by offering all the above services, the individuals will be ready to face the new conditions, having received the appropriate work supplies. In the long run, the platform will be updated with new material and developments to offer maximum results to its readers/users.

Spreading our content

After discussing with each other our professor Dimitra Iordanoglou, the next step for the completion of the project was the dissemination of our material.

Social Media

Instagram

We first began with our Instagram page

(www.instagram.com/___work19/)