23 September 2020
Sifting from a traditional working schedule to a complete work from home scenario during the lockdown was a challenge for our non – Engineering departments.
Accounting, Risk, Customer Support and especially Sales and Business Development departments of a company that needs to serve its clientele of retailers who remain prosperous and use OKTO’s devices to serve our End users with the Value Added Services we are providing, were the departments that needed to adapt in this new reality and change the way they work.
However, we’ve learned our lessons and we have been working on a 50% work from home schedule ever since, with no surprises and with our hiring needs growing as time goes by.
Apart from our health that is being threatened during this period of time, another potential threat we had to face as a company in a massive transformation period and a period of growth, had reportedly been the bonding of our team and the sense of belonging in this new virtual reality.
Rules for a COVID – Free environment were shared with all of our employees, allowing them to become aware of the serious situation, while we have been trying to make sure that anyone who is traveling abroad is tested and remains quarantined before returning at the office. Even when one of our employees was positively diagnosed, we managed to arrange to get massively tested at our company premises, while getting the results during the same day always putting our employees’ health first.
We may work hard but we make sure we play harder! Our online games that intend to share hobbies, unknown and unexpected parts of our personality, or even hilarious facts from our employees’ past have been crucial in keeping our company pulse upbeat while we get to know our new employees even better.
We made sure that any of our internal processes remained unaffected while making sure to successfully onboard our new Software Engineers performing online interviews and structuring their New Employee orientation remotely.
Business, as usual, is our motto so we never lost our pace and we continued doing what we have been doing before. All Hands meetings were taking place on a quarterly basis in our company, so we continued doing them remotely. The participation remains 100% in such meetings and our interaction, although digital this time, remained unaffected.
Working in a team of people that constantly grows in numbers as well as in the learning of new industries, new ways of work in such challenging times can always be different but not difficult!
