Notes from the (Work from) Home Front

Episode 1: Day 3: March 19, 2020

Two days ago my company started working from home and so far it seems to have gone smoothly. Over the past few years, we’ve been making decisions about our own technology infrastructure to enable operation from pretty much anywhere there is an Internet connection. I won’t be brazen enough to think we had forecast some global pandemic or other disasters, it simply was to make it easier for our employees to get their job done regardless of location.

This line of thought led us to provide a laptop to almost everyone. As well as put our email, CRM/Sales tools, customer support services, and most recently our phone system with SaaS (Software as a Service) providers. The only exception still is our accounting system, and it’s not out of fear of it being in the cloud, it’s that the cloud versions don’t yet offer the full suite of features that we need. Notice I said yet, I’m sure it’ll continue to improve and expand and we’ll one day make that move.

Needless to say, the decision to send everyone to work from home was, in a technological sense, easy. In the days leading up to this, we reviewed our processes and made sure there weren’t any “paper hand offs” in our workflows. We made some adjustments to status settings in the electronic workflows to make it a little easier to glance at a screen and have an overall view of things. Some of which probably could have been considered in the past, but when we see each other every day, it’s easy to just go ask for a status or update.

We also scheduled a daily all-hands call to check-in, to see how everyone’s doing, and to clear any issues that are happening.

At the end of day two, signs are showing of potential issues. Not with our tech or processes, it’s the fever, cabin fever. Those of us on the technical side are used to spending a week at home to attend our manufacturer partners live virtual classrooms for the variety of certifications we have to achieve or maintain. Additionally, most of us are not really extroverts anyway and regularly dream of getting some extended focus time.  I expect weeks 2 and on will start affecting my services team.

For those that are extroverted or thrive on human contact - some early cracks are showing up in their armor. For others, it’s having young children at home that aren’t used to leaving mommy or daddy alone for extended periods. Heck, my 12-year-old has achieved a level of boredom such that she’s doing the take-home assignments the teacher gave them, without any reminding (which she would call nagging) that she needs to do it. Perhaps there is a teeny tiny silver lining to this thing. Managing the kiddos that crave (demand!) attention and trying to maintain a working mindset and flow is a challenge that requires the patience of a saint.

Jeff Garell, VP Services

So at the start of Day 3, we will spend some time on the mental health of our folks. Talk about how to get a break from the home office if they need it. It’ll probably be in the form of reminding them that the office isn’t a plague-infested Petri dish and they can always go there to work for a few hours or a day. We just need to coordinate that “respite” with their co-workers so we can still maintain safe distances and all of that other advice we’ve all recently heard a thousand times.