Remote work in the times of a pandemic

We all have been caught in an unexpected situation. No one had even imagined in their wildest dream that one day the entire world would be sitting inside their homes, devoid of human connection, and scared for their lives. The situation is grim and right now it’s hard to imagine how we are going to get out of it. Governments are on their toes trying to raise awareness among people how to take precautions.

As a measure, all over the world, schools, colleges, offices, and religious gatherings all over the world are shut down in order to isolate people from coming in physical contact with each other. However, a lot of businesses are still running through remote working options.

We are one among them.

Our entire organization has been working from home since March. However, it wasn’t easy for us even though we had flexible WFH guidelines since the past 10 years of our inception. We faced our share of challenges because this crisis was as unimaginable for us as it was for the rest of the world. On a regular day, it was manageable when some of our people were working from home. But now it was all of us sitting at different locations for an unprecedented amount of time.

I’m sure, you too would have faced the same challenges of working remotely — how to ensure that remote work doesn’t affect team communication or committed deliverables? Or, would working from home imply always being “available”? Or, how to have team members draw a line between work and family time? Or, how to keep the team motivated while being socially isolated? Or, how to ensure that team concerns were resolved quickly?

At Quovantis, our leadership team was proactive in imagining probable situations that could slow us down. Accordingly, they decided to follow the below practices for this entire social distancing period.

If you’re in a similar situation, feel free to borrow them for your organization. Here are a few steps we took to deal with this new way of working —

Simulate office like environment

For us, it was absolutely imperative that lockdown shouldn’t start creating social isolation leading to mental health issues. Neither it should take away the collaborative spirit which is weaved into the very fabric of Quovantis.

So, when we decided to start working remotely, we were torn between having all the team members work in their own cadence or atleast, try a tiny bit to create a virtual scrum team like environment. By the way, we sit in agile pods of 7–12 people in our office.

So, even though we were skeptical that someone might construe this as a trust issue, but for us, managing social isolation and creating office like environment was more important. Thus we decided to have at least two joint Hangout sessions everyday where team members could holler at each other whenever they had a question; just as they would do back in office.

We wanted to add the social element of being closer to our teammates and what’s better than being connected to each other through video? Moreover, we wanted to run it as an experiment and see how everyone responded to it.

Hold on to the positive vibes

The only thing people are going to miss after a few days (and it’s going to hit everyone very soon) is human connection. They are going to miss the office vibe, the social connection, the camaraderie, the fun and the ease of getting work done. They are going to miss all the coffee/smoke breaks, all the food they hogged on together, all the fun Fridays and more than that the adrenaline rush of accomplishing things together.

Remote work is challenging in that sense. Teams share the same level of responsibilities but when it comes to having fun while working, distance makes it difficult. So, find a way to play games, indulge in philosophical conversations. Lighten up the mood, whenever you can.

In our co-working sessions, we’ve made it a practice to be honest with each other and share whenever we feel a little blue. We then come together and talk about movies, books and good things happening around the world to brighten up the mood.

Maintain transparency and ask people to share their ideas

None of us know what’s the right thing to do at this time. We all are running experiments to deal with the situation in the best way possible. Therefore, it’s important to stay transparent in every decision. Explain the why behind every policy. Go out of your way to help people understand how this helps the entire organization run effectively.

In our case, for example, our work from home policies were already in place. But, we took everyone along and asked people if they had better ideas to improve the collaborative processes while working remotely.

So, if you’re in the same boat, show your people that you’re not hard bent on doing what you think is right. Instead, ask them to share their ideas, if any.

Today is Day 32 of working remotely. And none of us know how many days lie ahead. There is despair in the air and we are terribly missing being in the office, together.

However, we’re ready to deal with this situation, one day at a time. Most of our team members have shared that our experiments have increased the pace of collaboration. And a lot of people feel that their productivity has gone up.

How about you? What measures have you taken to deal with this?

I wrote this blog for our Medium Publication- Unboxing Product Management. The publication is a weekly column by people of Quovantis to share their learning.