Sharing strengths and struggles: navigating through remote work during Covid-19.

Last week, I had the pleasure of participating in the first roundtable discussion of the new series “Sharing Strengths and Struggles” by Transition Partners on the topic of remote work during COVID. We exchanged ideas about what worked well and what is being planned going forward.  

Here are my 3 key takeaways from the discussion and a summary of how Lingoda dealt with the remote working situation during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Key takeaways: 

1.Connect with other companies, leaders, and people to stay inspired and innovative.

It was amazing to see how many great things we all did to handle the crisis and its effect on our people. Exchange is key, never stop doing it.

2. Keeping the business running is one part, ensuring our employee’s well-being (both physically and mentally) is the other important part when a global crisis hits.

People are vital to every business. Without people, a business cannot grow. Putting infrastructures and routines in place, especially in crisis times, will help employees feel cared for and mentally supported.  This, too, will benefit the business in the longer term.

3. Social distance and physical closeness is very hard to overcome remotely.

The struggle is serious: overcoming “virtual fatigue”. People are social creatures. We want to hang out with our friends, families, and colleagues, having fun, eating, drinking, and laughing. Virtually, it just isn’t the same. Once you realise that you will never replace this physical closeness, you can look for temporary alternatives that will sweeten the moment, whether it is virtual games, pub quizzes, or chat-roulettes.

How Lingoda dealt with the remote working situation during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As an EdTech company, we are pioneers in believing in the potential of online: our entire business model is based on combining the effectiveness of the traditional in-class experience with the convenience of the digital environment. So when we had to move our business activities online, we were adequately prepared. Still, this did not mean that we did not also face challenges! We had to rethink processes and introduce change. 

Lingoda - a flexible company that adapted very well to the circumstances. 

Before COVID, some teams were already working fully remotely, so we were used to interacting with them virtually through Slack, Jira, G-suite etc. Certain events, such as the huddles (company-wide team meetings), where we share business growth and updates on what is happening across all departments, were already happening over Zoom.

Going into the first lockdown, we knew we had to focus on our employees’ well-being and enable them for a smooth cross-functional collaboration. We did so by leveraging the following 3 dimensions:

1. Motivate our employees by showing them we care.

We believe that by having motivated and productive employees, we can then go places and deliver on our mission to enable people to become fluent anytime, anywhere. The lockdown, and the insecurity, was having a negative impact on these two attributes.

It was important to show Lingodies that we are there for them, so we started a whole battery of initiatives: 

• Restructuring the office and introducing a new hygiene concept to keep it open as much as possible.
• Regular and open communication about the current status of COVID and how it affects Lingoda.
• Headspace subscriptions for a calmer mind, sponsored for 2 quarters.
• Financial aid x2 in the year (once in spring to help with the home-office set up, once in winter to help cover the extra cost for electricity, heating, etc.) 
• Branded masks. 
• Sending words of appreciation and encouragement every quarter via post.

2. Enabling our Lingodies by integrating new tools and processes.

The goal here was to enable cross-functional collaboration, streamline certain workflows, and integrate new Lingodies well into the team. 

• Asana - We went for the project management tool Asana and started to implement ticketing systems for our business services departments; BI, HR, and Finance, to make the interaction with these teams smooth and effective on all sides. Also, we used Asana to plan our key projects and provide reports weekly to see progress (even without results delivered). 
• Virtual onboarding series - In addition, we set up a virtual onboarding plan for new employees to follow, ensuring they know our mission, our vision, where we stand, and what their contribution will be to the overall company.
• Buddy system - To facilitate the integration of new Lingodies, we implemented a buddy system, which allows old and new Lingodies to mingle more easily.

3. Enabling our Lingodies by implementing new work and social routines.

When everyone works fully remotely, conversations tend to become very transactional, so making sure there is time and space for socialising is important. We did the following to drive up the exchange: 

• Daily team stand-ups.
• 15 min quizzes twice a week.
• Chat-roulette once a week.  
• Christmas party virtual event “Escape Game”.
• Virtual events within the team: Music quiz, 2 truth-1 lie, comedy club, yoga classes, to name a few. 

We don’t know when the pandemic situation will be over, so planning for the future is hard. Nonetheless, we have learned a lot and can say for sure that we will not be going back to the old style of working “everyone has to be in the office every day”. We are currently exploring other possibilities and will do “test phases” in 2021, as far as the pandemic situation allows.