One year of working from home: the breakthrough of hybrid working

Today is the National Work from Home Day. It is exactly one year ago that we started working from home in large numbers. This so-called hybrid working (working partly from home and partly at the office) is here to stay, that has become clear to us over the past year. Working from home turned out to be ideal for us, because we already had the ideal platform. Yet we also ran into a number of problems. At Plek, for example, we had to think of new ways to on-board new employees. And maintaining (spontaneous) contact between colleagues proved to be a challenge as well. In this article we share our solutions.

X-boarding

Last year, we welcomed ten new employees online. While one lived near the office and another started from India, we made sure they quickly felt at home. Colleagues were updated online about their work and they were added to important groups and informed about important documents and ongoing projects in Plek. But we also let the existing colleagues get used to the new normal by re-boarding, so that everyone could continue their work digitally. Because of our rapid growth, colleagues sometimes had to assist with other tasks. By means of cross-boarding, we were able to provide everyone with all the necessary knowledge. We therefore believe that onboarding does not stop at day one but is an ongoing process.

Connection

We miss the connection, now that we no longer meet physically every day. And not only the connection with our colleagues, but also with our customers and external parties. At Plek we have made our implementation sessions completely digital. With different collaboration tools such as Miro we managed to set up new worksessions, and helped a large number of customers with the launch of their new communicationplatform. A number of healthcare organisations for example. By bundling their communications flows they managed to deal with new challenges during corona. One organisation - “Extra handen voor de Zorg", was able to recruit new (temporary) staff via their own Plek.. By providing their platform for free, thousands of former healthcare workers ended up getting back to work during the height of the corona crisis.

Working across borders

Informal contact has largely disappeared due to the fact that we don’t get to see colleagues from other departments in the corridors or at the coffeemachine. Therefore we need to think of new ways to stay in touch with each other. So you need to think of new ways to stay in touch with each other. It starts with the right mindset, by encouraging communication through informal channels. Within Plek, we have a 'Client Success' group where compliments from clients are shared, but also a group where office humour continues. The most important thing is that everyone must dare to share what they have to say, and the management itself must set a good example. Not everything has to be about work, it is also good to plan a meeting just to catch up.

Corona has not only changed the way we work, how we use Plek has also changed a lot. This is clearly shown in the usage figures below and how they differ from the time before Corona.

• The number of users of Plek has doubled since March 2020
• Since the outbreak of corona, Plek is used 3x more by our users
• The number of visits to the Plek app has increased by 300
• To keep Plek running the server capacity has been doubled

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