With this blog post we’d like to thank all our customers and team members for their flexibility in going full-on remote. We’d also like to stay positive and outline a few things that might help you in facing the challenges that lie ahead.
By now the novel corona virus has spread across the globe. Businesses are required to transition to operating remotely and/or depending on their vertical / industry, find new ways of surviving. Being a relatively young, 10-year-old professional service and operations company, we have been able to collaborate remotely across borders and places more or less from the day of incorporating.
Over the years we have learned, adapted and continuously improved the way we work and how we consulted and supported our clients. We have been blessed to be early partners of strong ecosystems such as Amazon Web Services and Atlassian, not only supporting our growth and improvement, but also that of our customers.
We have seen our operations business scale. We implemented and continuously improved our technical and organizational measures and standard operating procedures to ensure smooth, scalable and high-performance operations for our customers. This also resulted in disaster recovery plans and business continuity management being implemented over time. Implementing a full-blown pandemic plan early on has been new terrain for us as well.
With this blog post I’d not only like to thank all our customers and team members for their flexibility in going full-on remote - especially in those settings where on-site meetings make a substantial part of the business - but also outline a few things that might help you face the challenges that lie ahead.
Reading this, you are probably aware of the large variety of tools for mastering remote work such as Zoom, Slack, GSuite, Funretro, Trello, Jira, Confluence and Co.
You might also have learned about patterns and best practices for acing the cultural aspects of remote work such as dedicating a part of your home specifically for work (no, not your bed), reset your cultural norms / reassess your rules of engagement and allow for personal exchange by having virtual coffee corners, lunches or random pairing of colleagues.
Don’t take the social part lightly! The emotional burden (especially for people living alone) is exceptional, especially with an increasing amount of countries under lockdown and practicing some form “social distancing.” By the way, can we make that word disappear from our global vocabulary and please talk about “physical distancing” instead? Allowing personal exchange with peers at work will not solve this, but it sure helps to stay mentally healthy.
Have you ever tried using the same tools you use to collaborate professionally in your private life? During the last few weeks my daughter had play-dates via FaceTime, while we did Yoga with Friends in Norway and had our first ever distributed “board game” night with Quizzes, Sketchful and Exploding Kittens via Zoom - and I am really looking forward to a joint cooking session on Friday evening. Our beloved Berlin / Brandenburg Atlassian User Group (Atlassian Community Event as it is called nowadays) switched our scheduled breakfast to virtual: Virtual Breakfast
I am also amazed to see new initiatives popping up daily to help us cope with the current situation in all areas of life and business. We at kreuzwerker are committed to doing our part: ensure continuous and reliable service delivery and operations. And some some food for thought, we have teamed up with Scandio and K15t, and launched No cabin fever today where we provide a daily 15-20 minute talk to inspire and enlighten you.
If you need any support in streamlining / adjusting your processes to optimal remote work, consider outsourcing your Atlassian application stack to free up internal operations resources for other mission critical tools, or if you just need a hand with your Atlassian application administration, we are here for you. Except for in-person trainings - we have switched to remote here as well - we offer the full range of our consulting services and solutions.
We’d also like to contribute and provide you with an Atlassian Managed Hosting Stack consisting of Jira and Confluence for up to 10 users for free for the next 3 months to help you collaborate effortlessly. Just request your instance here.
If you have spare time, why not learn something new? Either in private or professional: I am pretty sure our customers such as babbel have seen quite an influx of users these days. And if you just want to spend time on something nice: listen to the Berliner Philharmoniker in the Digital Concert hall for free, do a virtual tour of The Met in New York.
Stay Home, Stay Healthy, Stay Safe!
Here are several links I’d like to share with you
- Atlassian has launched it’s Remote Hub, containing a remote work 101 and helpful links and tips
- Practices and tools for acing remote Agile
- Software vendors providing their products for free at the moment
- Atlassian’s Teamistry Podcast
- Atlassian All-In commitment on cloud free plans
- Broaden your IT security knowledge
- Trello for free for educators
- Work from home with kids around
- Great courses for all ages: Khan Academy
- Helpful tips for structuring your home-office day
- Online whiteboards provided by Miro
Image Source: Unsplash