What silver linings are you finding through this time of change?
As many challenges as we're all facing I would love to hear some wins! While I've been working from home the past few months I've seen the faces of coworkers I wouldn't have otherwise seen unless onsite at headquarters. The new trend around our company is for all on the meeting to turn their cameras on, and even though many of us are remote we would not have opened our cameras prior to March.
Answers
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Most of the benefits have been personal. I am cooking more. I get to spend more time with my wife. Every evening at 6:30 we mark the end of the work day by going online and exercising with our son who lives in Las Angeles and a friend. This has been a good rhythm. I have enjoyed the break from travel, was away too much last year.
On the work side, I think our small company (20 people) have come to understand each other better and learn how to give each other emotional support.
Productivity has held up, increased for some slipped for others, with the older people generally being best at staying focussed. Over time though, I think we need to meet in person to continue to drive innovation. We have a number of design research projects underway into things like career paths and talent exchanges, and into how to connect skills to business value generation. I think we would be further ahead on these if we were meeting in person.
We were about to start planning for a new office in early March. We now believe our needs are different. Fewer individual workspaces, more large team collaboration rooms. I doubt we will ever have more than 20% of people working out of the office in the future. I plan to do so though, once it is practical. Hopefully in September.
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We always had lots of people working from home even in my broader team, but some were in the office. With COVID19 our management team paid much more attention to the emotional part of managing the teams, resulting in lots of great side effects: Besides just switching on the camera we talked about how people live (and I still remember somebody living really far away in the mountains in a beautiful house - smiling that he doesn't need lockdown as his next neighbour always lives miles away), people sharing how they work in their offices etc - so, we know much more from each other as ever before. I hope we all keep this momentum going of connecting even more as we always did.
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We've also experienced some of the things mentioned. Additionally, some of the "always" remote employees have expressed that they feel everyone is on a level playing field in this new environment. There are no hallway chats or decisions being made at the water cooler; everyone is able and willing to communicate via the same methods to get things done. Employees at offices other than HQ have reported similar feelings. An interesting perspective we had not thought would be an initial outcome!
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