K15t vs. Coronavirus #FlattenTheCurve
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K15t vs. Coronavirus #FlattenTheCurve
This past week it has become obvious to everyone that Coronavirus is no longer something that's just talked about on TV or confined to China or South Korea. It has hit the western world too.
Unlike many other problems of our time, Coronavirus can't be solved by a team or an individual. It can only be solved if everyone does their part and follows specific rules. This means distancing ourselves from others as much as possible in order to slow infection rates and prevent an overload on our health systems.
This will only work if we all comply with these rules and take the situation seriously.
So we are taking this seriously.
In this post I want to share how K15t is dealing with the situation and how we are trying to make the best out of it. Make sure to scroll down to the pictures from the K15t team who are now working from home.
The Emergency Plan
One of our values at K15t is Care and Commit. This also means that our first priority has and always will be the safety and health of our team and our community, which is why we rolled-out the first version of our emergency plan on March 1st.
At the time, it wasn't clear to us how serious the situation would become in the following two weeks, so I must admit that our team had a lot of fun practicing the recommended hand-washing routine while singing "Happy Birthday" twice in our all-hands meeting (pun intended). Less amusing was the fact that we had to ask a colleague who had been in Italy the weekend before to work from home 100%.
Later that week, we put precautions in place for customer meetings, home office, and visitors in the office, which also meant that candidates wouldn't be greeted with a handshake.
Not even two weeks after we sent our first colleague to work from home full-time, we decided to do the same with the whole company. This way, we are hoping to contribute our (small) part to slow down infection rates.
I guess you could say, K15t is now a remote company.
Business as Usual
Lucky for us, this means business as usual for almost all of our teams. We're no stranger to remote work and thankfully, our tools help us stay connected and keep our business running without delay:
- Atlassian Confluence and Jira for collaboration and project management.
- Zoom to help us stay connected and be able to interface in meetings.
- Slack to keep the conversation going – and it's great to see that our channels are as lively as ever!
- Zendesk and Jira Service Management to keep us connected to our customers so we can continue to support them wherever they are in the world.
We're also doing what we can to keep our teams working with every sense of normalcy. We haven't canceled stand-ups or check-ins, and even our company all-hands meeting will just have a few more remote faces on the screen.
Long story short, K15t is still running and we are here if you need us.
Communication is Key
K15t will continue to monitor the situation and keep our team and stakeholders updated. We've dedicated a portion of our Confluence intranet to sharing information and guidance now that our team is distributed which includes some rules for preventing the spread of the virus, frequently asked questions, and links and contact information should anyone need to reach out to additional authorities.
Adjusting to the Home Office Life
For most of our team, home office isn't the norm, so we're all in a bit of an adjustment period. But we've already started sharing what this new reality looks like, starting with some photos of our home office setups:
Some even went back to their roots:
And we'll continue to learn and find new ways to communicate, connect, and socialize as we go, all while remaining socially distant.
tl;dr
This virus is serious and growing exponentially and we can all take action to help mitigate this pandemic. K15t recognizes that it has the privilege of moving its operations remotely which may not be the case for other businesses out there. But there are still a number of things you can do today to keep your teams and communities safe.
We've found these resources to be very helpful in guiding our actions and hopefully you'll find them useful in your plans as well:
Thanks for reading and we wish all of our customers, partners, and our community health and safety as they navigate this pandemic.
We're all in this together, so let's pull together and make the best out of the whole situation.
