Wine in Black IT - We are moving to Home Office

It is the year 2020 and spring is arriving. As many companies Wine in Black has to deal with the Corona lockdown. The management acted quickly and decided that all of our ~35 employees should work from home. We all had a home office day or two in the past and being an E-Commerce business we are not too dependent on our office and seeing us daily face to face. But this lockdown would last over several months and our ability to still work together as a productive team was put to a test. These are the stories of the Wine in Black IT team, which obstacles we faced and how we worked around them, so that in the end we came to a very positive outcome.

Kai - Backend Developer

Not being a very outgoing person I thought that working from home would be no problem for me, although I remembered struggling to stay concentrated when working in home office in the past. I realised this issue was very real and would be a bigger problem over time. So I tried to establish some routines which would help me to get started on a working day.

First of all I am starting my day as I would usually do when going to the office: Getting up on time, suiting up (not the sweatpants but the jeans), making the bed. I need to eat something in the morning, so instead of grabbing something from the freezer I am often going outside to the bakery. Having a short walk and some fresh air as I would usually get on my way to the office turned out to be very important for me to get awake.

So here I am — all awake and ready to get started. It turned out to be very helpful that I have a separate working room in my apartment where I can switch from private to working mode and back when going through the door. In the first weeks I pimped my equipment quite a bit with a new desk and lamps to make the place appealing. In the office I was working with two smaller monitors, at home I have a single 32” 4K monitor which I highly prefer because of the bigger space and sharper image. I always have my company MacBook with me, so I have everything I need to do my work.

The typical day starts with checking the Emails, Slack messages, monitoring systems and my appointments and to do’s for the day. Then we have a team standup in Google Meet. Everyone gives an update over the past and upcoming tasks and then the actual work is done. In the office you usually meet people in the kitchen or while walking through the corridors and they will give you some information about what is happening or if there are any IT related problems. Since this “channel” is missing people are reaching out through Slack and email for things that can be discussed in a minute. So I often would make a quick audio call in Slack to get these things solved pretty fast. What I am really missing is some kind of whiteboard to scribble down some complex information. The software solutions here are not the same as standing together in front of a white board and drawing with a pen. So sometimes the meetings are a bit longer because you have to explain things that could be easier drawn and also you have to make sure that everybody and also yourself is having all the necessary information.

Also ending the working day properly turned out to be very important. Basically my commute from the office back home is missing here which would always give me some time to free my mind. So having a short walk, doing grocery shopping or at least coming down with a book and some music can help out. I am happy when some friends or family are calling over the day to have some more social interaction but I am missing lunch with the team to have some off topic conversations with people who share the same interests. Overall I am happy with the home office situation and I will definitely do it more often in the future but a mix of both is surely the best solution for me.

Max - IT-Administrator

Coming from a full self-employment, working part time as an IT administrator at Wine in Black for a couple of years now, the current Covid situation did not make a big difference regarding my daily routines to be honest. I have found my daily home office routines years ago and I have learned to handle with the typical distraction traps and my personal, commonly time related lack of focus.

Usually I wake up around 7 a.m. I start my day having a shower and a balanced breakfast; a cup of ice-cold coffee and a cigarette (maybe one of my rather bad habits I try to break for years now but no one is perfect, hum?). After caffeine and nicotine flood my body, I move from my kitchen to my working room and start up my computer. By the way, one of the few advantages of the current situation is skipping the crowded train ride to the Wine in Black office at Friedrichstraße (which should not mean, that I do not love our office). At that time, my most productive time period of the day starts, which usually lasts till 12 a.m. / 1 p.m. (depending on my personal constitution) and only gets “interrupted” by a short standup meeting around 9 a.m. I quickly check my mails and my slack notifications (which definitely increased in times of Covid). Right afterwards I start to work on the most urgent topics or bigger tasks (which require more concentration and focus then the other ones), which I often have defined the day before. My girlfriend, who sometimes is at home at the same time and I have the agreement, that when I’ve closed the door to the home office, absolutely no distraction at all is allowed (even not when she wants to tell me, that our toaster is burning(!)). After the first part of the day it’s time for lunch (and perhaps another cup of coffee and a cigarette or two). Usually I do not have (and do not want) to leave the house, because I have all the ingredients for my lunch at home. After lunchtime and a short rest, I start working on some “easier” tasks. Mostly topics I know, how to fix quick and easy.

Beside my daily routine I have described above obviously there are things, which have changed in the current situation of Covid. First of all, I would like to mention, that we were lucky enough finishing the move of all our business-related data to the Google Cloud service (as if we knew what was going to happen). This probably saved us a lot of trouble. As already mentioned, the way of communication has also changed. Like you probably noticed yourself, communication happens much more via email or chat. Sometimes this causes misunderstandings and furthermore can be very time consuming. I still prefer the (old) phone or (modern) Google Hangout call.

What I really miss is the “hands on” service. Currently I have to work a lot via remote sessions but the tools like AnyDesk or TeamViewer were not configured proper before we’ve spontaneous decided to move to our home offices (definitely a learning). I also miss the personal contact to my colleagues a lot. Having lunch together, laughing and crying (more often laughing) makes work much more fun and livelier (but we are all sitting in the same boat).

To put it in a nutshell: Of course, it’s an extraordinary situation for all of us. We have to deal with a lot of new challenges, but it could have hit us harder and I’m very optimistic, that we can learn a lot for the future — technically and humanly.

Milan - Frontend Developer

I thought that working from home would be a breeze, although I knew that it was a bit hard for me to stay focused in the past, but with a little discipline it should be easily achievable.
I started off a bit lazy, getting up 30 minutes before I planned to start working. I thought: OK, in the beginning I can sleep a bit longer, I don’t have to commute. As we have a bit flexible working hours (we should start from 8 to 9:45), I was starting to lean more towards the latter.
In the first week I realised that it’s not going to work, as getting out of the bed and going almost directly to the (home)office chair isn’t good for your health, your back, as well as eating habits.

So I decided to start with a more “military” regime. Getting up at 6:45, doing stretches, burpees, push-ups to get the blood flow going and to wake up the body. Then making a healthy breakfast, or sometimes eating overnight oats I prepared the night before, usually plant based, which are rich in fiber and protein, and very tasty when you spice it up. And the moka pot coffee — not as good as an espresso, but it can still be tasty.

I felt much better, more prepared for work and focusing more easily.

As for the “home office” space, I had the same setup as in our office, with two monitors, which was great, as there were no compromises. The only thing I did was that I cleared the desk completely, removing literally everything that I do not need — leaving basically with the laptop, monitors, mouse and keyboard — very clean. This helped to remove distractions, and to ease the mind with no visual clutter.

During work, I set some reminders to get up after a while, because in the beginning I found myself sitting a lot, focused on my tasks, and without any people around, it’s easy to get lost in time and space :)

Video conferencing is working quite good, and we set up a “virtual kitchen” meeting room, which is a replacement for our office kitchen where we usually bump into each other, have a quick chat and update on our daily lives.

Also I started cooking more, and looking for some ideas online, so this was a good move which I overlooked before. I also found that more friends of mine started exploring and experimenting with their culinary skills, people that I never heard before exchanging recipes, which was fun.

After work I started going for longer walks around my area, sometimes pretty far so I ended up doing 10–12km. As social distancing was/is the thing, i spent half of my walks talking to or video chatting with family and friends. I was catching up with more people than I would usually.

Coming back to the office a couple of times was really refreshing and fun, to talk with the dear people we are lucky to have as colleagues and friends. We went to lunch together and that was something everyone missed. We are all looking forward to getting at least closer to normal, to sit together and exchange ideas as human interaction “in flesh” is not replaceable.

I would say that this situation pushed us to think and do some things that normally we didn’t put much effort or thought into. Challenges are real, and this will definitely give us new experiences to learn from, to become better, and to broaden our perspective.

Florian - CTO

„Hey Dad, do you have time for playing?“, „No, I’m sorry, I have to work“, „Why do you have to work? You are at home!“

Sometimes it’s not that easy to work from home especially if you have two kids and they can’t understand fully what is going right now. The last months were very stressful but we learned a lot as a family and as a team at Wine in Black.

My daily routine starts at 6:30am by dressing the children and making them a small breakfast. When the shutdown started the Kindergarten did close so we had to deal with the situation by finding time slots when my wife or I can take over taking care of the kids. Because they are very young (my daughter is 5 years old and my son 2 years old) they need a lot of care and support. It gets also tricky if your grandparents are not living in Berlin and are far away by just taking over. Luckily we have a very flexible working structure at Wine in Black, especially when the situation about Covid 19 started. Everyone understood the situation and the whole company supported each other by finding better matching time slots for meetings or agreed on postponing deadlines. That helped a lot.

I was able to start working very early or sometimes later so my wife and I could share the takeovers. Our meetings have been done by phone calls or video conferencing services. This worked out very well even if it’s sometimes a bit confusing if there is a delay or someone doesn’t have the most stable connection. Even when my son was crashing the conference we were able to communicate and find solutions for our problems that we discussed. Luckily the Kindergarten is open again and it’s much easier to structure your day now. Since a couple of weeks I’m also going to the office two times a week. I really enjoy seeing some of my colleagues, to talk with them about work but also how life is going. It is a very nice mix right now, working in the home office but also having the old routine by using public transportation and being in the office. This gives me some time to catch up my podcast queue. I think this could also be a very nice solution even if the „Corona times“ are over.

The best tip that I can share based on my personal experience: Keep communication high even when working from home. It doesn’t matter if everyone is working at the same time but it is very important that your team is up2date. Colleagues should be aware if you are dealing with some issues so they can support you. By the end every result is somehow a team effort and by telling them also some personal things you will receive support and understanding.

In the IT team we found a very nice solution to spend time together. In the past we went out together for lunch and enjoyed the time by having a nice meal or coffee. Nowadays we are having a gaming session once a week where we are playing games like Rocket League or CS:GO. We are combining things like: communicating about off-topics, having fun but also working as a team. I’m really proud of the IT team and the whole company for how we handled staying safe, working productively and how we grew as a team.