Level27 in corona crisis

No cosy hustle and bustle as usual. No gatherings at the coffee machine. Only peace and quiet, or so it seems.

But... is this really true?

Of course not, it is all hands on deck and nothing but busyness. From home. Because we believe it is important that we do everything we can to keep working.

Important for ourselves, because by keeping usefully occupied you don’t constantly focus on the ominous news reports.

Important for all our customer entrepreneurs, because in these times online presence is more than ever an absolute necessity. It may not always be visible what we do, after all for many of you it is behind the scenes work. Yes, we do ‘something with IT’ or ‘something with computers’. In times like this we ensure the continuity of your online services. We make sure you can email to keep in touch with your customers. We keep your website online, so that you can announce how you are organising yourself in this crisis.

The show must go on!

Indeed, with us there is no technical unemployment. On the contrary, there is actually more pressure than usual. More pressure because there is more traffic, the websites are under heavier load. Or to put it in human language, there are more people online.

Logical, because everyone is working from home and is completely dependent on the online world. VPN connections used to be a 'nice to have' to occasionally check your work from home. Today they are vital. Restaurants that organise takeaway are completely dependent on website and mail to receive orders.

How we organise ourselves

Of course we follow the government guidelines and work from home. Maybe I can inspire you by telling you how we approached this.

Communicate!

The biggest challenge speaks for itself. You don’t really see each other anymore, so we have to communicate extra. For this we mainly use our well known tool ‘Slack’. Check here this mega old article from 2016 about why we are fans of Slack.

Now we couldn’t do without Slack. Everyone is present there, we can chat, call and hold video conferences, all in one environment.

Internally we immediately made the agreement to communicate ‘excessively’. Especially when you don’t see each other constantly, it is important to do this. So better one project update too many or one extra little question. It can only help!

Organise!

From the start we set a few clear rules. We are not on holiday! It is important that we know what everyone is doing. That’s why we have a ‘daily scrum meeting’ with the whole team every day at 11:30. In this we deal with the following topics:

Quick check in: how is everyone feeling?
Problems: everyone can raise problems they are struggling with. During this call we don’t discuss them in detail, but we look for someone who can help you with your problem. After the call several private calls are then set up to work out the problems.
Other action points: anything special to share? A fun item? Or just a concluding reflection about the things of life.

Informal

We are all human and the world is in crisis. So we need humour and distraction. We try to provide that, however difficult it may be. The chat channels such as #random are being used a lot with all sorts of nonsense and videos. Soon there will be a virtual drink, where we will vote for the #failoftheweek and the #successoftheweek. Not at the office, but everyone at home with their own drink.

This is how we keep the spirits up!

Not everything is negative!

We like to look at life positively. Through this situation we learn to organise ourselves better, make clearer agreements and can keep improving our approach. We already notice that work is being done more effectively. Meetings are more efficient and people can especially do ‘deep work’ better in a quiet environment.