To ensure business continuity, OIP has formed the COVID-19 work group even before the outbreak, making a smooth transition to remote working. We can all vouch for how great of a job they all did! Two members of this group, Vanja and Snezana, shared their thoughts with all of you:
Engaging People and Making Sure They Feel Connected to the Company and Coworkers (by Vanja Milojevic, Head of Talent and Development)
With the worldwide pandemic, we have all found ourselves in a situation we have never been in before. Not knowing what will happen and having to continue living your life as normal as possible is hard for everyone. That is why our company has worked hard in order to organize everyone to work from home.
Although, staying home at this situation does bring some relief, being detached from your office environment, from your coworkers, from your supervisors, might feel stressful, insecure and unnatural. That is why we have invested a lot of effort in order to make everyone feel comfortable, reduce panic, making each and every individual know that we are there and that they have all of our support.
Our HR team has invested great efforts in order to keep everyone informed, by sharing information gathered from official announcements. We are sharing useful tips about how to protect ourselves from getting sick, how to keep communicating with coworkers, how to stay focused while working from home, and how to assure everyone that, even if physically separated, we are all one big team working together.
We went even further, by making IT and HR available at any point to everyone and by creating a hotline where our employees can ask for any information they might need.Staying connected is how we stay strong!
A Personal View – Working from Home (by Snezana Obradovic, Director – Finance and Compliance)
Our company never provided working from home to employees, including management. We, of course, had offsite access, but that was limited to a small group of people, and mostly due to long hours we put in to make things run smoothly. We managed to onboard more than 300 people to work from home in a matter of days, and that has been both amazing and nerve-wrecking and deserves a completely different blog post.
I am well aware that I am the privileged one in the pandemic situation. I live within walking distance from work and have a corner office, not shared with anyone. My exposure is minimal, something they are trying to achieve with quarantine and self-isolation measures for everyone else. Still, I started working from home after everything got set up. Mostly because seeing empty floors, workstations without people and not hearing people working creates a scary feeling as you know people should be there. It felt strange – my quiet time is at my home, not at work, so I switched.
Everything is running smoothly, my connection, productivity, we have so many tools to collaborate remotely, and nothing really stopped. But I do miss actually seeing and hearing people, video calls and chats are not it. I miss sharing the floor with the group I need to collaborate with and enjoying all the benefits of the open door policy. I can’t wait to be back in the office with things being back to normal. Until that time, I hope everyone will stay healthy.
Remember – stay alert, not anxious, we can do this!