With the outbreak of Covid-19, everyone is concerned about ensuring the health and safety of people around the globe. For BlastAsia and many other companies, this has led to redefining how we operate and communicate– reevaluate practices, better plan, streamline and coordinate our efforts while telecommuting to maintain the momentum we have achieved and to ensure our efforts remain on track once we are on the other side of this.
In companies, technology enables business continuity by keeping employees connected. For about three months now, this has helped us in BlastAsia to operate on full Work-from-Home mode to safeguard our employees, navigate the unpredictable, and keep our office 100% Covid-free.
How did we make it work? Here’s how:
1. Thorough employee assessment. Needless to say, human capital is the single most important input to production in professional services companies. We looked at all employees, identified who’s taking public transportation to the office, who has an internet connection at home. This way, we are fully aware of any possible impediments/risks/considerations of going full telecommuting.
2. Always-open virtual communications. We created different chat/video conference groups to have constant coordination among top management, among individual teams, among work that involves different teams. The first one is particularly important in doing #3.
3. Well-established communication lines. On top of the distribution email for everyone in the company, we are using an SMS blast service to send out short, urgent announcements that complement each email we send out. This way, we can reach everyone even if they don’t have internet access at any given point.
4. Remote production-side management. As software engineers, testers, and marketing & sales professionals, we have all requested for telecommuting at some point. So we have been practicing daily standup meetings (we’re an agile company after all) and end-of-day (EOD) reports and all we did was shift these meetings entirely online.
5. Active use of own product, QuickReach, to provide support services i.e. document requests, leaves, etc. We identified key HR, finance, and office admin activities that need to continue even if literally nobody is in the office. We prioritized critical processes like payroll processing, expense approval, employee requests (such as for certificate of employment), and a bunch of IT checklists.
BlastAsia remains committed to the important work that we are doing and continue to show our support to our clients while keeping our employees’ safety and health a priority. Despite the government’s move to ease up the lock down, work from home still persists through July 2020.
Innovation, particularly in these unprecedented times, has proven its relevance to revamp business as usual to hit company objectives; to thrive and emerge stronger from this critical period, we must strengthen our commitment to our mission of innovation.
For inquiries, connect with us. Send us an email through jfajardo@blastasia.com or BOOK A MEETING.