How We Keep the Team Spirit High in 180 Home Offices
We moved completely to Home Office this March for the first time ever as a whole company to combat the spread of the coronavirus.
We’ve learned that online chatting and video calling can replace traditional office interactions and even help shape new connections in beneficial ways. Working in a digital healthcare business during these challenging times couldn’t be more rewarding for us as a company.
Besides the possibility of having conference calls in your fanciest shirt paired up with your favorite Spiderman pajama pants, mySugr offers a fun, safe, healthy, and efficient Home Office setup for all of us.
How do we do that?
Moving to the Home Office scenario in two days isn’t really an ideal solution for any company. Surely, mySugr is not made out of sugar and preparations that have been done beforehand made the transition far more smooth than any of us could have imagined.
Setting up Home Offices in 180 homes around the globe would not have been possible without the support of our office management team, our dedicated Agile Coaches, and every single individual of the mySugr community. All together, we made sure that all of us can work as normal as possible from home.
- Our office management team organized the delivery of 52 screens and 39 office chairs to 64 homes in and around Vienna.
- The mySugr leadership sends out weekly and bi-weekly health surveys to check in with everybody and gain learnings and insights into the current situation. This enables us to make decisions and drive improvements forward. Nobody is left behind and everybody is involved.
- We keep having our daily meetings such as stand-ups within our teams, one-on-ones with our Head via Google Hangouts to stay connected, and keep developing our skills.
- Focusing on the fun side of the whole Home Office situation, we set up special Slack channels like #show_your_home_office or #homeoffice_tips-tricks. Also, our #eating channel was suddenly filled with pictures of homemade goods. Sharing our findings and learnings throughout this new way of working and coping in our personal lives has become the new normality.
- We managed to implement new online tools in the first week of Home Office that allow us to digitize parts of our Homebase in the office like the Kanban board or our retrospectives.
- Keeping our bodies moving is a must. Now that we cannot use the stairs between different floors in our office or join our favorite sports courses, mySugr provides the employees with online movement classes.
Tips & tricks to stay connected
Our Agile Coaches offer tips and tricks on how to stay healthy and productive, how to overcome communication barriers and loneliness.
We are encouraged to use focus time slots in our calendar and turn off notifications. Calls are favored over written communication, healthy breaks are encouraged after every 1–2 hours.
We are having online group lunches and team-building events like we used to back in the office. Even virtual happy hours after work and karaoke nights are a huge success.
We stick together
We are a strong community striving towards sustainable living and we think sharing is caring. Having a common enemy to conquer really brings people of mySugr closer together on a very personal level.
Parents share their childcare daily routines that could also help others, the leadership team gladly shares their Home Offices and struggles, pet owners share the most adorable pictures of their cats removing post-its from the walls.
Calling your colleagues who traveled back home to stay with their families for example in England, India or Hungary to share your experience and offer your virtual shoulder to lean on is one truly rewarding feeling.
And it is exactly this feeling of community that makes it easier to get through these times. We stick through this — together.
