Advice from one member on working round the virus

Clarsoft closed the office last week and are all working at home: this is fairly straightforward for us since we’re a software company – no physical goods. (Well, one: you can’t buy ClaroRead on a USB stick as of now, but that’s not material!) So we’re open as usual

So we have the challenges of people working at home, especially those with health issues: is the home office correctly set up? What about stress and isolation? But we have an easy time of it next to companies that rely on face-to-face or physical shipments. I feel for you guys, and I wish you all the best.

My team has been very good: suggestions that keep coming up are exercise and making sure you take breaks.

Other things:

• Lingit does a daily “hello!” on Teams where you pop in to say how you are doing, we should probably adopt that – I’d always avoided it before so part-timers are not treated differently, but maybe time to change that.

• Little things can be very helpful, of course: we have an Amazon business account – free to set up – and staff can go on there and request things like monitor stands, or new mice – whatever they need for their home office. The request comes through you to approve.

• Chat is big. We’ve also started to try using Yammer, which is Facebook for business and part of Office 365, but though a few of us are posting things I don’t think it will take off. Maybe just use a dedicated channel in Teams / Slack / Hangouts for chatting. Lead the way with some gentle animated gifs.

• I’m thinking about online games or play-by-email or other social things. We’re generally a “come to work, go home on time, your life is  your own” company, but work is still a big thing for people.