Hello everyone from quarantine! I have long wanted to write a post about life and work in Spain, but for a completely different reason. However, the current situation dictates other rules. Therefore, today about the experience of transferring offices to remote work, before it became forced. And also about life, work and communication with clients in force majeure and the military on the streets.
What happened and what did we do?
Only the lazy did not write about the spread of the virus on Habré, so we will omit this topic. In fact, now quarantine is introduced everywhere, new countries are added every day. Today, all our European offices have been fully transferred to remote work, the rest are in the process of being transferred.
Also, we, the Zadarma cloud telephony service, provided special discounts to customers in the regions affected by the virus.
How did we transfer offices to remote work?
Since we provide distributed cloud services, our offices are also distributed around the world and we try to move everything possible to the cloud. This simplifies the transition to remote work. But I want to point out right away that this has its downsides. For example, physical meetings, however, are sometimes more convenient than virtual ones.
More specifically:
Computers: for the sake of mobility, we switched to laptops for almost all employees a long time ago. Of course, you will have to work at home without your favorite monitor, but we hope that we will survive this.
Net: since there are many offices, we do not have the concept of “office local network”. Those who work with sensitive data have their own VPN connection (for example, in case of illness / business trip). So no special settings needed to be made.
Telephony: Of course, Zadarma is a cloud telephony operator, and there is no problem providing your employees with communication. But the question is: how to receive calls?
For a couple of calls per day, our app for ios/android will do. I myself switched to it and abandoned my favorite desktop ciscophone. For those who call more and more often, our office has a stock of professional headsets, which we took with us.
This is actually very important. I strongly discourage using cheap headsets for work at home. They can be heard and the echo, and the cries of the child in the next room.
In general: either an ios / android application, or a good headset, or a desktop ip phone. But he's not that mobile.
Why do I pay so much attention to this - about half of our employees in all international offices are a technical support service that helps customers, including on calls. The support service handles more than 600 calls per day. On average, this is from 2000 minutes (there are much more chats and tickets). All this in 5 languages 24/7.
In fact, moving or quarantine does not affect the performance of the infrastructure or support operators in any way, thanks to the flexibility of the clouds.
And thanks to all of the above, the transition to remote work for us is not much different from driving home in the evening. To make things easier for you, we have compiled a short checklist:
It is better to use laptops at work. In extreme cases, of course, stationary units can also be moved, but is it worth saying how much more difficult it is?
It is better to store the entire workflow in the cloud. Use a VPN for security.
To communicate with each other, always have contact in messengers (better is the main and backup messenger, sometimes they fall), it is better to arrange the tasks in advance, for example, through Jira (this will help in the office as well).
Communication with customers. Non-verbal communication channels are always needed. Chat, mail, phone. Contact management is better in cloud CRM. Telephony should be, firstly, with a margin (there will be more calls without personal contact), and, secondly, in the cloud, otherwise it cannot be obtained from home either. It is for those who urgently need to transfer telephony to the cloud, or reduce the cost of it, we tried to help, more on that below.
Clients need help too.
When a country is quarantined, you can “touch” it. After all, this is not just a drop in the index on some distant stock exchange. This is when you write to the law firm with which we work (in Spain there is the concept of “hestor”), and they answer that everyone is busy for a week, they fire employees of restaurants and shops ...
Realizing that we “got off with a slight fright” and many of our clients are now much worse, we took several steps towards:
- We extended free local numbers for a month to all our customers in Italy, Spain, France (where everything is already quarantined).
- They offered a 50% discount on telephony tariff packages for an office in the EU and the USA / Canada for 2 months (we really hope the quarantine will not last longer).
- For those who still have to transfer the office online, provided for 6 months to phone numbers in 30 countries around the world (selected those with the highest number of new cases at the time of the offer).
We are monitoring the situation and will continue to help other countries. We have already prepared discounts on rooms and special tariff packages for clients from South America. The situation there now resembles the Russian one.
And of course, in general, we monitor the situation on the market and work on expanding the functionality of conferences. Including, we are already testing video conferencing.
Chronology of events in Spain.
One of our offices is located in Valencia, Spain. Actually, I work in it. In this chapter, I will describe the chronology of events as I saw it.
9 March. In Europe, this is a working day and the day of my last visit to the office before quarantine. On the morning of this day, there was still hope that Spain would “slip through”, or everything would happen much later. The number of cases has increased, but not by much.
On the evening of the eighth in Spain there were 674 cases of the disease and the increase for the day was 149 cases. The increase for the seventh number is 124. It doesn't look like an exhibitor.
The virus is still being fought locally in Madrid and the Basque Country, where it is most prevalent. We were much more frightened by the beginning of the celebration of the local holiday Fallas (Fallas). This is the main holiday in Valencia, which attracts millions of tourists from all over the world. Only Italians in 2019 were about 230 thousand. Very beautiful giant statues are built for the holiday, which are burned on March 19th.
The last week of the holiday is usually a weekend in the city, everything is closed, all the streets are packed with people, as you understand, this is “ideal” for any virus.
10 March. For the previous day (the 9th), 557 new cases were already detected.
In the morning, an announcement was made in our company that all European offices are allowed and recommended to switch to remote work. I was one of the first to use it.
Schools are closed in Madrid. In Valencia, the fallas are canceled (more precisely, they are transferred to the summer). The city is in shock as the construction of giant statues is in full swing. In the central square, a mask is put on the statue (it is in the photo above). We are preparing discounts for European customers.
12 March. Our European offices are practically empty. There are still 2 developers in Valencia who live nearby and go to the office on foot (that is, contacts are minimal).
In Spain, there are already 3146 cases, an exponential growth is visible. A very urgent request to all those remaining to switch to work from home.
I'm canceling an important business trip. It’s not so much the risk of getting sick that scares me, but to get quarantined on the other side of Europe without a family. There are still relatively few cases in Valencia (up to 100), but colleagues share the unpleasant news - after the closure of schools in Madrid, many locals went on "vacations" to their summer cottages by the sea (around Valencia and Alicante).
Later I learn that in Italy such movement was one of the reasons for the rapid spread of the virus throughout the country. The shops are already very crowded, in the mornings we buy groceries with a margin.
13 March. Truly Black Friday. Jump sick almost 2 times to 5232.
In Valencia, following other cities, restaurants are closed.
At 14.30:XNUMX p.m., the prime minister announces that a state of emergency will be declared, after which the crowd sweeps away what were once supermarkets. We are glad that we bought the products earlier.
14 March. The Prime Minister speaks, explains that you can go out only one at a time and only in a few cases (food, pharmacies, hospitals, to work, to gas stations, to people who themselves cannot live without help, walking dogs). I was relatively lucky, we live outside the city and you can walk around the house. Including you can’t go “to the dacha”, but we know that part of Madrid is already there. Cars with loudspeakers drive around the city and ask everyone to go home and not go out.
15 March. The city was empty, but the parks had not yet been closed. Several acquaintances talk about cases of fines if they went in twos. Friends climbed onto the roof to meet the sunset (there are also people on the neighboring roofs).
16 March. The first “working” day of quarantine. Let me remind you that on Friday there were still two people who wanted to work in the office (theoretically, they can do it, but practically it’s better not to, no one canceled the office on the 10th floor of the business center and common elevators and other places), while one of them is the only one who uses a laptop. So at 8.00:XNUMX, our developer V., like the captain of a sinking ship, is the last to leave the office with an iMac under his arm. You can’t ask someone to help, you can only carry it yourself (fortunately, it’s not far away and there were no police / military along the way). Speaking of the military, they also begin to be on duty in the city. The playground parks are all completely closed. We are looking for options for home delivery of products (not everyone has a desire to go to stores). The weather has deteriorated a lot, so I don’t really want to go outside, those who want to start inventing new types of business, I see the first ads on the net from those who want to rent a dog for a month.
The metro and other transport continues to operate, but the bike rentals are all closed. Intercity traffic is closed.
March 17 . The weather is still bad, but this does not stop people from wanting to go out, joke, and somehow keep themselves busy. There were jokes about dogs that were walked by the whole entrance, I heard that later this loophole was closed by starting to demand a dog’s medical card (I can’t check, I don’t have a dog). France welcome to the club, also full quarantine, speech by the president. The EU countries are finally closing their borders, by the way, Morocco has fenced off from Spain for a long time, and air and ferry traffic is closed (and the border with the Spanish city of Melilla in Africa). Israel and some US states also partially join.
20 March. We work from home, at home with children there is less time left for work, therefore there is very little time to monitor quarantine and the virus.
Today they are already declaring that taxes from local "individual entrepreneurs" and the like will not be collected for 2 months. I think no one doubts that the quarantine will last longer than 2 weeks.
As with schools, I can not describe. Firstly, my children are still small for school, and secondly, this week there are holidays in Valencia (in connection with the same Fallas holiday, the holiday was canceled and the holidays remained).
It can only be seen that in the Valencian community, the largest increase in patients in the city of Alicante. A week ago there were almost 0 cases, now there are 372 (with 627 in Valencia). But just around Alicante there are most resort towns and villages, those same summer residents from Madrid reached the hospitals. Looking at this, if quarantine is introduced in your country only in some cities and does not restrict movement between cities, wait in a week for greetings from your neighbors (first of all, where they usually rest). In our autonomy, 3 new temporary hospitals with 1100 beds are being built (today we have 1.105 cases, but everyone knows what an exhibitor is and sees Italy and knows how to count).
Neighbors in Catalonia are already complaining that they are putting the sick in hotels and there will be no places in a week, but instead of building hospitals, they complain about the central government, quarantine does not change people.
I have not been to stores since the quarantine, I managed to order groceries at home from the local Auchan (here they are called Alcampo). Not everything was there, but in principle we bought more than the norm that week. Friends say that in principle there are products, but not in all stores. So we sit quietly and work. Who is a sociophobe, they are probably even more pleasant.
Letters from everyone in a row “important information about COVID19, we continue to work, but now we have begun to wash the floors more often, everything is for you” have long been tired. It reminds me of the introduction of the GDPR in Europe, when everyone needed to be notified, but I don’t know why I should write now for no reason.
Do not get sick, work efficiently and do not forget that food stocks should not affect excess weight.
If you are interested in the details or continuation, welcome to the comments.
PS All photos are taken from the site of the local newspaper Levante.
Source: habr.com