COVID-19 transforms our lives, our work. At Progressive, we adopted a new working method on March 16. Technology has always interwoven our livers – our agility, fast response times and quality work regardless of one’s location have long been facilitated by our digital systems. Our self-developed software, corporate governance and resource management system (Progressor) and production support disposition tool (OEL) have been cloud based from the beginning. In addition to these, we’ve worked with Teams, Slack, Adobe Cloud, Sketch and Frame.io for a long time. Nevertheless, the change, that we will work from home going forward, seemed huge last week. Our system engineers had one day to move our office file servers to BIX, and we had more or less the same time frame to set up a new working and meeting method.
It actually surprised me how quickly and seamlessly the physical part of all this went down. It’s been 10 days since then, and we’ve already had tender presentations, campaign launches, creative brainstorming sessions, a series of preparatory in-depth management interviews and even an on-schedule Progressor patch.
Apart from the physical changes, these 10 days taught us a lot about the team, our operation, communication, and their related challenges. In this post, I will share with you my experience with these things.
1.Leverage the opportunities that lie within tools
Teams/Slack/Adobe Cloud/Sketch/Frame.io have really cool functions that you may have never or hardly ever used. If you dig into these a little, you’ll find that they have a lot of useful functions that boost productivity which are useful even in times of peace. These include the shared drawing table, the joint note-taking possibility or the accumulated cursors on the shared screen, which lets you point to things during meetings. If you haven’t used the simultaneous editing possibility of Office files, you’ll surely use them now.
