Over the last three months, the way in which many of us work has changed dramatically as we remain confined to our homes, working from home offices or kitchen tables, relying on technology to keep businesses running and to keep communication streams with our colleagues and across the business, open.
Following on from Aldo’s blog in March where he spoke about our approach to moving to a fully remote-working world, I wanted to provide an update on how we’ve found the last few months and how we see things going forward as the world starts to come out of lockdown.
Going into this lockdown, we were already well geared to make the transition to full remote-working as many of our staff had been working this way for some time. However, with the whole company having worked this way for a number of weeks now, it’s only sensible to evaluate how we’d been working in the past and what aspects of this new normal we could incorporate into the post-COVID world of work.
Across The Floow, the ease and efficiency with which we moved to a fully remote world has been seen as a success but of course, we have faced some challenges across the way. Very recently, we gave our staff the opportunity to let us know how they have found working from home and what changes they would like to see going forward, to ensure that when we are back in the office, they can continue to work in a way which is beneficial to them and which keeps us all safe.
One of the major findings of the survey was that there is a real desire for a flexible, optional approach to our working practices in order to enable more remote-working across the company. For many of our staff, remote-working provides them with the opportunity to gain the focus and concentration their work requires, that can be difficult to find or maintain in an office environment. One member of staff commented; “I like working remotely… It’s quieter so I can concentrate better than I can in the office…”
However, the office is beneficial for certain activities including project planning sessions, training and development, client meetings, staff inductions and of course, socialising with colleagues. Many people who responded to the survey commented that having the opportunity to go into the office really does add value to these activities as it allows them to remove outside distractions, gather together a large number of people at once and get to know their colleagues and team mates as well as develop rewarding social relationships.
Here’s what one member of our team said on this subject; “Collaborative thinking, team building and workshops are definitely more suited to being face-to-face. Having the ability to sit down together with a whiteboard and draw up and discuss ideas is much easier in an office environment compared to doing so virtually.”
It’s been interesting to understand the thoughts of our team, not just looking at the positives and the challenges of the last few weeks, but also to see how they would like to work in the future. At The Floow, we’ve always prided ourselves on our positive culture and open environment where everyone is encouraged to express their opinion and challenge the status quo.
For now, our focus is on ensuring the safety of our team and like many other businesses, we are looking at a number of measures which we could implement to ensure that our staff are safe and feel comfortable to enter the office again. Throughout this discovery period, it will be important to remain focused on the thoughts of our team and ensure that we incorporate our findings from this time in lockdown into our working patterns going forward.
The last few months have been interesting and challenging in many ways, but we are especially proud of how the team handled the transition and that we have managed to continue to deliver the quality service to our clients which we pride ourselves on.
Whatever the future holds for The Floow’s team and the way we work, we’ll continue to tackle challenges with resilience and a collaborative approach, whilst celebrating the successes and great work which we continue to deliver, day after day.
Share this article
