How to Work and Manage a Team Remotely
What we learned working from home during the pandemic
Welcome to those who have come to this post. For starters, I am going to tell you a little about the place where I’m working. We are an Uruguayan company based in Uruguay and Colombia that’s dedicated to software development (mobile and web) and user-centered design. Currently, we have more than 90 employees from different countries.
In this post I want to share with you how my team known as People Care (aka HR), faced the pandemic. Also, how we’ve supported other UruITers (that’s what we call our colleagues) in adapting to the changes that it has brought about, both the logistical ones and cultural ones. As a team, we’ve been working hand in hand with all of our employees who are in both countries. I myself am in Uruguay, although only physically really, because there’s a level of warmth that makes us feel so close to Colombia that only physical distance separates us.
Getting ready for the storm
As a software company, we were prepared and already had the necessary conditions for working remotely during the pandemic, which was an advantage. For some UruITers, remote work was not a novelty either. “Work From Home” has been part of our company policy for years, so we already had remote work best practices. In the People Care team, we found ourselves with the challenge of digitizing every one of our processes to the max. We had to start rethinking strategies and new ways of working that would keep us all highly connected, since our people are the ones who deliver the quality behind everything we do.
After five months of having changed our way of working, it seems like now is a good opportunity to share with you how we have been addressing this transition, despite all of the uncertainty and not knowing when it will end. In this post, I’ll cover the problems we faced, our approach for tackling them, and some challenges that we as a leadership team have overcome in order to keep the focus on the business, our people, and results. We invite you to learn about our improvement process, our transformation and lessons learned in this blog post.