How JH is adapting to fully remote for a happy and healthy team
With the COVID-19 crisis now very much upon us, JH made the decision last week to step ahead of government guidelines.
This meant not only offering the ability to work from home, but have our team be able to choose when to complete their own hours, to work around the unfolding circumstances.
As an agency, we’ve been working partially remote for nearly ten years, offering our staff the ability to work from home each week. Some of our staff already work permanently from home as part of our existing policies, so we were well prepared with great advice for the rest of our team to help out.
To date, and going forward, we expect no difference in our servicing all our clients with zero impact on day-to-day operations and logistics. However, with the whole team now working remotely, the biggest challenge we faced for those not used to their home being their permanent location to work from was keeping morale high amidst such a difficult time.
We wanted to share some of the things we’re doing right now to keep up, not just work-based interactions, but also social and supportive networks, digitally – something we feel is equally important within a close-knit team!
Dedicated Slack Channel
The first thing we did was pretty simple; we set up a Slack channel to share the latest advice that others had found useful in adapting to fully remote-working life. This also serves as an open channel for people to ask questions and raise any concerns they may have around the effects the outbreak is having on our team’s daily lives, the business and anything else on their mind. The open channel kept communications easy for everybody to see, so no information has been siloed away.
“To date, and going forward, we expect no difference in our servicing all our clients with zero impact on day-to-day operations and logistics.”
Claire Johnson, Head of People at JH
Virtual Lunches
We use video conferences as a way to still enjoy our lunches together as a team and keep up the office chats and social life! Some have formed coffee groups; others have created the ability to play games or just talk about specific topics.
Home Workout Suggestions
With the disruption to people’s ordinary daily lives, we felt it was important to encourage health and well-being for anyone in self-isolation or for those that have had their normal exercise classes cancelled. So, we started a thread where the team can share recommendations for home workouts and have scheduled in some typical times for people
#Dogsofjh
Anybody who has visited our HQ will know that we love our pooches, with the regular dogs of JH often present in the office. There’s no denying that animals can provide some much-needed stress-relief in hard times, which is why now we’re all remote, we’re keeping up the love by sharing our pets via a digital channel! #dogsofJH has now been renamed to #animalsofJH, with our team sharing funny photos of all our pets at home.
Shared Playlists
As well as sharing our pets, we’re also sharing our playlists. The office playlist is usually a heated topic of debate at the JH office, so we’ve simply brought this online. Our team can share their playlists and continue to argue as they would usually whilst at home over music tastes! Bear in mind, not everybody is good at curating music, and some sorely missed this!
Virtual Movie Nights
With everyone feeling isolated and missing the lack of social gatherings, we teamed up and joined Netflix Party, so we could all still enjoy a movie and popcorn together.
We hope this blog has brightened your day slightly. Though it’s important not to forget the seriousness of the situation we’re all currently facing, we believe it’s equally imperative to look after your team’s mental well-being and keep a positive mindset.
Hopefully, you take away something from the suggestions above that puts a smile on your co-workers’ faces’ at this difficult time.