We’re coming to the end of our first week of the entire company working from home and we’re pleased to report that in the main it went pretty well. In the weeks leading up to this the Management team had done some robust contingency planning with several team members chosen at random to work from home each day for a week to make sure that our systems were going to cope with having lots of people working from home at any one time.

How work is being affected

Well, thankfully our day to day work isn’t being dramatically affected at the moment. Our development teams are still able to work on all of our client projects with no interruption to service which is great news.

Our Business Development team are also ploughing ahead and the project team held their first ever kick-off workshop via Teams with a new client this week.

In addition to that our Board of Directors were still able to hold their monthly board meeting and were able to share live reports and presentations. Microsoft Teams is working really well for us and we really appreciate the work which Microsoft have put in to keep the platform stable during a time when they have seen a massive upsurge in usage.

Social activities and teamwork

At IJYI we’re really lucky to have a strong social scene. We have a Social Squad who organise a whole range of activities and charity fundraising events. The Social Squad haven’t been deterred by our current working conditions and are busy organising some fun online gaming sessions after work and possibly even a virtual “pub” quiz.

The Management Team are really conscious that they don’t want people to feel isolated in their work and so we are holding regular company-wide team “huddles”. Every day at 12pm everyone logs onto a Teams call, webcams on, so we all get to see some smiley faces. We have a chat to see how everyone’s day is going and share any tips on working from home or just give a tour of our work from home space or meet the dogs!

Every evening our CEO Chris Pont records a short video to give everyone an update on any new developments from Government announcements and how that will affect us. It’s working really well and is so much more engaging than getting an email update every day.

One of our Business Development Managers, David Napier is keeping a video diary on how he is finding working from home: