{"id":698,"date":"2020-03-22T12:39:30","date_gmt":"2020-03-22T11:39:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/juergenhthiel.de\/?p=698"},"modified":"2023-01-09T14:19:43","modified_gmt":"2023-01-09T14:19:43","slug":"an-entire-company-goes-home-office","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jhtconsulting.de\/en\/an-entire-company-goes-home-office\/","title":{"rendered":"An entire company in the home office"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This little nasty thing called Coronavirus has changed the world in a few weeks. I must admit that still in February I did not pay a lot of attention to the whole story and just filed it under \u201cjust another flu virus\u201d. Now as I am writing this, I am basically only allowed to leave my house to go to the supermarket or the pharmacy. And I should go there alone. For sure, I can also go out to reach my office to be able to work. But I am not doing this already for a week now. Why? Because we already had decided to send everybody out to work from home. But wait, everybody? Yes, everybody! I am the Head of Global Sales and Business Development at Paessler AG<\/a> headquartered in Nuremberg, and for at least 80% of my team this is nothing new. Most of them are distributed around the world working remotely, either from their home office or in coworking spaces. But we also have a lot of departments, where people usually do not work from home, like product development, technical support, IT, marketing, finance, HR and a few others. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A successful project starts with good preparation<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Our colleagues, especially in IT and HR, had already done a lot of work during the weeks before the office shutdown, in order to be prepared for moving everybody out of our nice headquarters in the northeast of Nuremberg. That is why we were able to decide on a Friday morning finally to do this step and had everybody working from home starting on the following Monday. There is a nice blog article about that on our website<\/a>. Seeing how other companies obviously still struggle to implement a working home office strategy for their employees, puts the great job done by our IT colleagues and other backoffice functions in an even brighter light. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Business as usual… almost<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

After one week of a complete company operating from home, I can say everything goes very smoothly. Face-to-face meetings are now being done online, including meetings with customers and partners, who partly also work from home already. For sure it is not the same seeing the other person just in a little square window on your screen rather than sitting in front or next to you. But meetings up to seven or eight participants are very efficient still. When it gets to larger crowds of twenty or more, it is a bit of a challenge and efficiency goes down. But are meetings with twenty people or more efficient at all? As all schools and childcare centers are also closed, parents working in their home office now are facing another challenge, at least those with small children. The little ones are just simply glad that mum or dad are at home all day and obviously the term \u201chome office\u201d is not yet in their vocabulary. I think everybody remembers the famous BBC News video. You can see a few similar scenes these days during online meetings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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