At the beginning of this year, we could not have imagined at what pace we would rethink and evaluate all aspects of the topics of workplace and community management. These topics have always been important components of our work for our team - but Corona has raised a few new questions and kept the focus on them.
Fortunately, here at Tallence we have also always placed great value on providing our colleagues with mobile and contemporary work equipment. In this respect, the fundamental changeover to remote working was no problem for our team. Sure, we had not yet testet the scenario with all employees at once and parallel to everyones partners and children. But: trial and error makes you smart - and as it turned out, everything worked perfectly (considering the circumstances).
Over the months with COVID-19 we got to know different needs of our team and tried to meet all their ideas and wishes. In accordance with the decisions of the German government, we reopened some of our offices in May. Colleagues who felt alone and unproductive at home were able to return to a more suitable working environment for them. However, this was only a small part of our team and a much larger part still works from home. We have taken this as an opportunity to revise our internal regulations for remote working in order to integrate work outside the office into our everyday life in the long term, taking into account data protection and workplace safety. Thinking forward to a time "after Corona", we also want to rethink our places of work and make the offices not only places of core work, but above all places of teamwork and coming-together.
A completely different - and for Tallence much more important - challenge was to change the way we maintain dynamic and rewarding exchange within and across teams - and to integrate our togetherness and team spirit into our new digital workday. Until March 2020 Tallence has distinguished itself through lively contact in our offices. Apart from working together, the Tallence spirit lived in joint breakfasts or after-work drinks, in cross-location project meetings lasting several days and in large all-company-meetings with subsequent celebrations with all 135 colleagues. We feel closer together and with the whole team.
COVID-19 has forced us to rethink and try out new things, so that not one of us forgets that we are all part of a great big team - and not lonely fighters at the living room table at home. But Tallence would not be Tallence if we didn't face this challenge with united forces and make the best of the circumstances.
We celebrate the team spirit that has developed over many kilometers. Slack and Microsoft Teams became exchange platforms for so much more than just finding you next lunch date: motivational songs were sent out, the latest news from the federal states were exchanged, breakfast groups and after-work meetings were created within the Circle and Units, and after only three weeks we even startet the video blog called the "Tallence Quarantine Weekly“. Here we were provided with Circle/Unit and location-spanning information and stories from the Tallence world as well as bizarreities of the world wide web.
We also rediscovered the snail mail and provided our team with the most important accessory of the year: Tallence-style face masks. More snail mail was delivered in June in aspiration of our first Corona-compliant all-company-meeting. Various updates from all areas were spiced up with a round of bingo via Slack and even a company-wide cocktail happy hour.
We have learned a lot from the last 8 months and look into the winter months ahead with confidence. As we write this article, infection rates are rising sharply again throughout Germany. At the beginning of last week, we sent our team back to their home desk or kitchen table as far as possible and are already working on new digital communication formats to be as close as possible despite the distance.
One thing we are even more certain of now than before Corona: we can do digital.
Not only in our work for our customers and partners, but also and especially for us as a team.
The Tallence team has just given us a big award to prove that we are on the right track with our work! Thanks to the positive feedback from our colleagues on the employer evaluation platform kununu, we now officially carry the certificate "New Work Employer 2020". Thank you!
#bestteam #flattenthecurve