It’s no secret that the last few weeks have been a time of questions and concerns and not knowing what exactly to expect in the coming weeks. COVID-19 has put the world at stand still and social distancing has seen organisations across the globe implement a ‘work from home’ policy. Kooba is lucky to be in an industry where working remotely doesn’t affect our progress and productivity on projects and to ensure the health of our team the decision was made to begin working from home for the foreseeable future. And actually, it’s working quite well for us!
As long as we have our computers, work can be done anywhere
As a digital agency all of our work is done from our desktops and laptops. We have all of our essential programmes (Sketch, PHPstorm, Invision, etc.) to design and develop downloaded onto these making them an essential part of our process. Once the decision was made for everybody to work remotely we loaded these up and sent everyone on their way, desktops in tow! We may be in different physical settings, but we have the same tools in front of us so we won’t miss a beat!
We love google hangouts
It’s obvious that working remotely means meeting styles had to shift. Although the norm is catch ups in our meeting room or at our long table, doing meetings through Google Hangouts isn’t new to us. This is actually a tool we use daily to communicate with our Kooba Berlin office to chat through projects and tasks. Every meeting that would have taken place in the office has now been shifted online and we’re very comfortable with doing project Kick Offs, UX presentations, CMS training sessions and Friday Workshops in a virtual environment.
We plan & log all of our time
Two of the major time tools we use on a daily basis are Harvest and Forecast. Harvest gives our team the ability to continuously track their time while Forecast helps us to allocate and organise time on projects months in advance. Forecast gives the team a preview of what they’ll be working on while also ensuring that the right amount of time is dedicated to each step of our projects. When it comes to working remotely our team is able to log on and see what they have scheduled for the day and make any necessary scheduling changes to ensure work is done on time - this ensures responsibility and ownership of projects . We then track our time in Harvest so we’re always held accountable for what has or hasn’t been done. I think we can all agree that working remotely takes trust and accountability for tasks and these tools help keep everybody on track and ensures projects continually progress.
We’re keeping up moral and remaining positive
One thing we don’t want to lose during this stint of remote work is our momentum as an agency. We’ve seen huge growth in Kooba and want to maintain an onward and upward outlook as we navigate through the present environment. Daily communication between the team is paramount to keep everyone connected and in-sync in terms of projects and tasks, but also to keep up with personal wellbeing of our team members. To bring a bit of fun and team bonding into the work from home environment we’ve also started a weekly Friday virtual quiz with an ongoing table of the winners. This gives the team an opportunity to decompress from the stress from the week and also have a bit of social time that isn’t work related.
We know that we will be back in the Kooba offices at some point, but for the time being we’re embracing working remotely and remaining focused on our objectives and goals.
