Our lessons from the Covid 19 crisis: Deepa Deo and Mansi Shah, ThoughtWorks

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, ThoughtWorks put together a detailed overview of IT best practices in a Remote Work Playbook that should help people and companies across the world navigate their transition to remote work, write Deepa Deo and Mansi Shah, Managing Directors’ Chief of Staff and COVID-19 Response Team Leads for ThoughtWorks in India

By Deepa Deo and Mansi Shah, Managing Directors’ Chief of Staff and COVID-19 Response Team Leads for ThoughtWorks in India

ThoughtWorks encourages a collaborative working style that a lot of our distributed teams benefit from. Several existing practices and tools lent themselves quite easily to the current remote working environment. Our teams that had already been ‘remote working’ for a while were already comfortable with secure remote pairing tools, whiteboarding, video conferencing and chats for daily work. Also, it’s been a few years since we’ve moved our systems to the cloud with no requirement for physical servers or data centers. Infact, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, ThoughtWorks put together a detailed overview of IT best practices in a Remote Work Playbook that should help people and companies across the world navigate their transition to remote work.

Key challenges

Implementing a company-wide WFH policy, while challenging, did benefit from some of our existing remote-collaborative practices. Infrastructural support like VPN access, a range of secure software and hardware were made available to our employees. However, matching client /project requirements for home-office setups did take time and effort. The main reasons were ensuring adequate attention to data security and accounting for limited availability of hardware in the market.

This particular situation also helped us recognize how a lot of working professionals do not have a full fledged WFH setup in terms of physical space, hardware, internet bandwidth etc. We met the challenge with a customized and timely policy that enabled employees to buy equipment they need and reimburse that cost from the company.

Additionally, our mental wellness team has been running mental health and wellness webinars and hosts an information board for tips on WFH (with kids and dependents at home). Our employee communities are offering online yoga and exercise classes, tech meetups and more. Also, the ThoughtWorks Assistance Program has been on call for free and on-demand counseling for employees and their families.

Key lessons learnt
One of the most important learnings during this crisis has been getting our communication style and cadence right, from the get go. ThoughtWorks has an open and transparent culture, hence the required shift was not tough. However, we did have to actively reinforce authentic information about COVID-19 alongside validated external sources. We needed to ensure that consistent conversations and touch points were established at all levels of interaction – global, regional, leadership, office and team levels. Additionally, we also had to take stock of the diverse needs that employees might have as parents, or living by themselves, as caregivers and be sensitive to their work styles and personal responsibilities.

Collaboration tools used
Some of the tech and tools that we use include Zoom for remote meetings, workshops, webinars, team or office wide meetups and information or announcements from leadership teams. Zoom Pairing works for remote pair programming, a key agile technique that ThoughtWorks uses across all projects.Trello comes in handy for distributed lightweight retrospectives and for general collaboration on ideas, and whiteboarding. Zoom Whiteboards, Google Drawings, Jamboards are also used for the latter. All of ThoughtWorks makes use of the GSuite set of products that enables seamless collaboration through tools like Google Docs, Slides, etc.

Understanding employees in a better way
Organizations have been evolving their recruitment strategies to suit the incoming digital natives or new generation workforce. This group is characterized by their tech savviness, flexible work schedules, locations-of-work and their participation in the gig economy. Organizations also have to appeal to a workforce that plays several roles on the personal front – single parents, caregivers, working couples and more. Add to this, recruitment efforts seeking candidates beyond the metros in tier 2 and tier 3 cities. Appealing to this combination of talent involves rewriting a lot of the old corporate rules and policies to ensure inclusion. Remote working is one of the most relevant approaches to connecting with and tapping this incredibly diverse workforce.