Confinement and remote working: one year on
How did OpenClassrooms adapt?
March 17, 2020 marked the start of the first confinement, due to the health situation we are all experiencing. This date also initiated a drastic change in our work habits: the vast majority of us had to get used to working from home overnight. Now, a year later, the situation is not resolved and teleworking is still widely recommended when possible.
How did we adapt at OpenClassrooms? How did we manage this forced teleworking? The purpose of this article is to give you some answers.
Rules for teleworking have been relaxed
Working from home was imposed by the government in March 2020. From May it became only “strongly recommended”. Some companies expressly asked their employees to return to the offices, even when their job did not require it.
OpenClassrooms has chosen the exact opposite by reworking its remote rules: working outside the offices has become the default mode; it is now necessary to request authorization to go to the premises.
Come if you want to. No obligation.
Remote working is almost part of OpenClassrooms DNA: when our cofounders Pierre and Mathieu started building their project, they were very young and they worked together remotely. Mathieu says it himself: “we never thought of working remotely as an issue”.
That’s why this flexibility in teleworking is not surprising. It also echoes the changes to OpenClassrooms’ premises: in April 2020 the company left its offices in Cité Paradis to move … nowhere.
The premises located at Quai de la Charente were indeed not yet finalized. It wasn’t until five months later, in September, that the new offices were definitively opened. This meant that, even between the two lockdowns, we had no choice but to work from home.
Despite OpenClassrooms’ best efforts to provide us with very nice offices, we are not forced to come in.
It is very strange to note that, at the time of this writing, I still have not seen these offices in real life!
That said, we still have the option of going there from time to time, if we wish to, the only condition being to limit the frequency of our visits according to the evolution of the epidemic: safety above all!
OpenClassrooms has chosen to trust its employees by offering us this freedom of choice. It is much appreciated and it allows us to handle the situation in a much more serene way.
Working from home should be comfortable
Working remotely can mean sitting in a dining room chair all day or slouching on the couch. Not all of us are fortunate enough to have our own home office, or even simply a second screen.
For our comfort, OpenClassrooms offers to send us various office supplies. We just have a form to fill out, and it’s sent!
In addition, each employee can volunteer to present a masterclass on a subject of their choice, including well-being:
By ensuring the daily comfort of its employees, OpenClassrooms allows us to work in good conditions despite this difficult situation.
Our onboarding process has evolved
One of the big challenges during this period of remote work is how to welcome new hires. How can it be done? What can we do so that they do not feel lost?
In the OpenClassrooms tech team, we started by reviewing the welcome wiki. It describes as precisely as possible the most important information to know when joining us. If some is obsolete (and there is always obsolete information!), our new colleague is invited to correct it so that the next one won’t face the same issues.
Small 30-minute meetings with each member of the team are also organized. These meetings are not organized with the whole team at once, but instead are one-to-one discovery sessions. It may sound long and tedious, but the human aspect that emerges is much more important than you might think, especially when you are alone behind your screen.
It’s also worth noting that an experienced team member is dedicated to the onboarding of a newcomer. He or she is there to answer all of the questions and to do pair programming.
Do these measures really work? Adèle, who joined us not long ago, offers us her feedback on this subject.
The confinement has forced us to review the way we welcome new people to our team. As paradoxical as it may sound, I even feel that we are better at this exercise today, remotely, than we were face-to-face before!
Employees still lose some points of reference
That said, remote working has its flaws, mainly about human relations and small events that cannot be done online. For example, I particularly miss the pledge of “if you arrive late three times, you bring chouquettes” (but on the other hand, I lost weight!).
When it comes to having lunch with colleagues, welcoming newcomers to the local Italian restaurant, going to after-work drinks, or even seminars, good alternatives are difficult to find and usually come down to formal or informal thematic Google Meets.
In my team, we used to play Smash Bros. games on Fridays. Others occasionally organized boardgame evenings. It is possible to do online equivalents, but we must admit that it is not the same.
Working hours are also much more difficult to follow, at least as far as I’m concerned. They were fixed and clear when I was in the office, but now I’m working remotely it is quite common that I cut back on my breaks. Ten minutes here, thirty there … and without necessarily realizing it. I’ve even caught myself taking out my work computer on a Sunday.
OpenClassrooms obviously does not request us to do that; it is up to us to discipline ourselves. It is clear that I am particularly bad at this exercise, and I doubt I am the only one with this issue. It’s something to be aware of.
In short, negative points related to teleworking that we face at OpenClassrooms are simply due to teleworking. Our company tries to mitigate them as much as possible, with varying degrees of success; it can’t perform miracles (although a big up to our VPN which sometimes has trouble keeping up with the load!).
This strange health situation imposes on us a very different corporate life from the one we are used to.
Moral support matters as much as anything else
That’s why, during this difficult time, the most useful help is probably moral support. Unfortunately, it’s also the easiest to forget.
At OpenClassrooms, one of our values is “care”: taking care of others and caring about their well-being. And certainly everything has been done to respect it!
It started with a Slack message from Pierre Dubuc, co-founder of the company, who simply wanted to hear from us personally:
But that’s not all! Some time later, each employee was surprised to receive a package full of sweets: chocolates, nougats, jams. Something to bring us comfort.
All of this was done during the first lock down, and it should be noted that we were gifted something similar at the end of the year, during the second one.
It also worth saying we have free access to Qare. This platform allows us to make an appointment with health professionals in a few clicks, including psychologists if the situation is difficult for us. Consultations are done remotely, which is very practical during this period. This service is fully supported by OpenClassrooms.
OpenClassrooms has won the 100% remote bet
These are only some of the measures put in place by the company to help us to better work remotely. I could also have mentioned preferential rates for FoodChéri, a Gymlib subscription adapted to 100% online, a small support for our UberEats orders, free access to co-working spaces for those who really cannot work from home, and many others.
Each of these gestures from OpenClassrooms is not much, but added together they create an ecosystem in which it is pleasant to work, even from home.
To be honest, it is true that we have been fortunate in our industry. The impact of the health situation has been far from less negative than for other professions. There is no doubt that this context being not so unfavorable for us has enabled the company to help its employees as it wished.
So, how did OpenClassrooms adapt? The answer is quite straightforward: by caring for its employees and ensuring their well-being.
