Moving to remote – the experience of an Office Team
13.04.2020 | 3 min read
For the majority of the people at 10Clouds, remote work is the norm. But for our Office and Admin Team, it was a complete change to our daily lives. I thought I might talk you through some of our experience of this, in the hope that it might offer some insight and support to similar teams in different businesses.
Life Before – Like millions of people across the globe, we would start the day with a coffee and a bit of quiet time before our colleagues arrived, during which we could plan our tasks for the day ahead. These might include setting up workshops that were due to happen in our office, or planning the practical elements of onboarding a new employee who would be starting with us. If one of our colleagues was planning a business trip abroad, we helped to sort out the logistics; if the dishwasher broke, we called in a plumber; we sorted the deliveries, organized the daily arrival of the Sandwich Man and much more.
Then everything changed… And even though we were no strangers to remote work, the need to re-organize a very office-based team required a lot of effort and all hands on deck. We turned this into a project which we split into stages and step-by-step we analyzed which processes we could conduct remotely straight away, which required some modification, and which had to be set up from scratch. By the end of the day we had a process map.
It was clear that we would have to close the office, and that everything currently conducted in-house would have to be done remotely. With the help of our IT partner, we prepared some spare PCs and other hardware to store in our homes, because we knew that it was unlikely that we would be able to retrieve them from the warehouse at a later stage. We stopped all office deliveries and cancelled our cleaning services. We informed all of our suppliers that we’d now gone into full remote mode.
The biggest challenge was organizing our post, because we were told that the only way in which we could continue receiving it was to set up a PO-Box, which was far away and expensive. We came up with a creative solution instead – we bought our own post box and hung it up outside the office with clear instructions that it belongs to 10Clouds.
It was obvious to us that we found ourselves in a very unusual situation. We put together an ‘Office Manual for Remote Work’ in which we noted down, in a few key points, how we will be working going forward. We were keen to stress that what we did day to day in the office has been subject to some changes, but that the team continued to offer a full service to the business. We implemented a schedule according to which we could offer support from 8am-8pm.
This whole situation shows that it’s our minds which create blockers, and breaking them down enables us to achieve the impossible. The world moves forward and new technologies enable us to do our jobs without the need to come into the office – although we do miss it and we particularly miss seeing our colleagues in person.
Interested in reading more about a remote work setup? You might find the articles below useful:
