Tag: home office

My biggest decision as a business owner (yet)

This week, a very fortunate event will take at our company: We all come together to have a summer party in person. This will be the first time in nearly 3 and a half years that we all spend time in the same room. It will be the conclusion of a decision that I call the “biggest one” that I had to come to. This is the very shortened story of that decision.

The end of an era

Our company was founded and set up as a place for direct interaction and short communication distances. We favored office workplaces and open space room plans and often visited customers at their location.

In March 2020, this setup appeared to be the exact opposite of what is advised. I remember the week from the 9th to the 13th March, when every day and every hour, things got worse and more restricted due to the Sars-Cov2 pandemic. On Friday, the 13th of March 2020, I was in a phone call with an employee that lasted 30 minutes. When we began to speak, one federal state had closed the schools. When we stopped, every school was closed in the whole country.

During the weekend, I tried to approach the situation with plans and lists. A list of endangered projects, a list of endangered customers, a list of endangered employees, a list of critical tasks, a plan to stay ahead of circumstances. I came up with a scheme to assess the risk and derive actions, but spent the whole sunday to talk with my employees just to gather some of the information necessary to base any decision on more than fear and hope. I am very grateful that my employees all picked up the phone and went through my questions with me. It helped me to realize that no matter how fitting the lists, how clever the plan, I won’t be able to process the information with the required speed.

Some employees offered to go on holiday to take moving parts out of the equation, but it was still overwhelming. If you know the feeling in a roller coaster when a certain “feel-good” speed limit is exceeded and real fear takes hold of your heart and head, you can imagine how these days felt for me.

The beginning of a different era

And then, on Monday morning, I knew exactly what to do. The situation necessitates that we change everything at the company at once. We need to go “virtual”, to retreat into home offices that didn’t exist yet.

Monday, 16th of March was the last day that several people were in our office simultaneously for a long time.

Everything the company was used to do didn’t work anymore. We had to buy new hardware, new furniture, new chairs and everything else that was needed in the home offices. We had to examine every business process and partition it into “on site” and “remote” work steps. We had to introduce new means of communication in the company and with our customers. We had to continue with our project work while transforming everything in our professional and our private lifes. We had to keep up our spirits while experiencing isolation and uncertainty.

And just like that, we replaced the “pre-covid” company with the “during-covid” company. Nobody could say that it would work. Nobody knew how long it would be required to work. Nobody could anticipate how much it would cost us.

The decision

The only thing I was certain of was that if we need to change, we would do it wholeheartedly. I was sure that even if the pandemic suddenly disappears, I don’t want to look back at that time and think of it as a makeshift solution.

My decision was to embrace the uncertainty and let go of any remnant of a masterplan that I might have left. I “jumped into the fog”.

For me, it felt as if I placed a wager on the existence of the whole company: “I bet we can do what we did for twenty years, but totally different and in a time of crisis. And we can start right now and keep going for an indeterminate period of time”.

The outcome

Since then, a long time has passed. The fog has cleared and we have survived. And not only that. The “gamble” has paid off:

We resumed our project work within two days and steadily improved our situation day by day and week by week. Our revenue went up, our productivity went up, our profits went up. New customers called us, new projects were started. Today, we are in a much better place than before.

But that’s not all: We have established new means of collaboration and communication, regardless of workplace. Every employee has a full-fledged home office with as many monitors as are physically possible, fitting furniture, a good webcam, good audio equipment, a powerful notebook or desktop computer and all the accessories that make the difference between “a workplace” and “my own workplace”. So we are fully equipped for any future isolation event that hopefully never comes.

Making the decision, trusting my employees and providing them with the equipment to master the challenge yielded the best outcome I could have hoped for. The whole experience humbled me: I lost any control over the situation early on and it didn’t really matter. What mattered was to keep innovating, investing and improving. And that is a group effort, not the vision of a single mind.

The future

So, here we are, at the natural end of the story. If this was a movie, the credits would begin to roll when we raise our glasses to celebrate our success. To me, it seems that lots of companies operate like this. “The temporarily embarrassing loss of control of upper management is past, now return to the office and commence the old rituals. And don’t forget to bring in that notebook that we borrowed you for your kitchen table home office.”

I’ve seen the potential of this transformation way too clearly to go back. There is nothing gained by reverting to the old ways. We will continue as a “hybrid” company with an attractive office and equally attractive home offices. We will continue to find ways to collaborate with each other and our customers that we didn’t think of before. We will continue to spend time, effort and money to improve our work reality. It might cost 15k euros to equip one workplace in the office and 15k euros more to do it again at home, but that money is the best investment I can think of. The return on investment is amazing.

I witnessed it firsthand.

Key ingredients for the home office

Since March 2020, we transformed from an “on-site” company to a remote company, not particularly because we wanted to, but because the corona pandemic forced us to. Our office is not suitable to ensure transmission safety, so I decided that work from home is the lesser problem. When I say “transform” and “decided”, please bear in mind that these are retrospect notions. The decision was made at Monday, March 16th 2020 and the transformation happened in the next two days.

But there is a real difference between being operable and fully equipped for the situation. We were operable in the remote situation within 48 hours. But we still work on improving our equipment to match the situation that seems to linger a lot longer than initially anticipated. This blog post tries to summarize what we’ve learned since March 2020 in regards to equipping home office workplaces past the makeshift phase.

The fundamentals

The most fundamental ingredients of any office workplace are the table and the chair. If any of those lack in necessary ergonomic features, your comfort will never be the same as in the office (provided that your equipment there is adequate). And this constant discomfort will permeat everything you do.

The chair was easier to detect because it shows up in the video calls, it is part of the “zoom room”. Still, it took some time to order new chairs or transport existing office chairs to the home offices. If you experience back pain or mechanically induced headaches, review your chair thoroughly.

The table was more tricky, because it is typically invisible during video calls. My approach was to retrieve a photo of every home office space and talk about the possible improvements. During these talks, we came up with two solution categories that I want to present.

The notebook workplace

We all had work notebooks as secondary computers before the pandemic. So it was not a problem to start with working from home on that notebook, we’ve done it before. But if all you do is to work directly at a notebook, you might have the best chair and table, your body posture will be suboptimal. We equipped the notebook-based workplaces with the following extras:

  • An external keyboard
  • An external computer mouse
  • One (or better: two) additional monitors
  • A matching docking station, at least to connect to the monitors
  • A notebook riser stand

The last item, the notebook riser stand, was the game changer when it came to multi-monitoring (two or three monitors). It elevates your notebook to the same height as the other displays and might even change its angle. This transforms your notebook from being the CPU unit with cumbersome monitor to a secondary monitor with a CPU. The riser stand doesn’t cost much (if you don’t go overboard with its design) and provides you with more table space and improved displays.

The existing computer workplace

Because we are software developers, we mostly have a very decent computer already fully equipped at home. The only problem: The computer is for private tasks and should stay that way. We want to separate our work environment from our leisure environment as much as possible. But several developers wanted to use their usual “battlestation” for home office work, too.

In this case, we bought a lavish SSD as an additional boot drive for the home PC. This separates the work operating system from the leisure drive as much as the notebook approach. And the existing hardware can be used for both timeslots, much to the comfort of the developer.

The video conference equipment

But regardless of your approach (notebook or existing computer), there are still some things missing that improve the quality of work of yourself and your colleagues tremendously:

  • A good headset, preferably with top-notch comfort and active noise cancelling (ANC)
  • An at least decent webcam

Most notebooks provide a mediocre webcam and some low quality microphone. Do yourself (and your communication partners) a favor and invest in a good microphone. Oftentimes, it is coupled with good headphones. The difference between a good audio setup and an echo-prone makeshift solution is the deciding factor when essentially all communication with your colleagues go through this channel.

The webcam is not as essential as the audio equipment, because it “only” affects your communication partners, but it adds a nice touch to your other equipment. You don’t have to go overboard on it, a model for one hundred euros is already an improvement.

The bottleneck

One thing that can really invalidate most of the other improvements is a small internet connection. This is probably to hardest thing to fix in a timely manner, but give it some thoughts. If your internet connection is too slow for your daily work and communication pattern, it will be a constant annoyance. Just because it takes some time to improve doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

We will probably remain in this situation long enough to still reap the profit of our effort. And even if not (at least we can hope), nobody ever complained about an internet connection that is a bit oversized.

TL;DR

If you didn’t read the article, here are the major take-away points neatly summarized:

  • Ergonomic chair and table
  • Notebook with external keyboard, mouse and monitor
  • Notebook riser stand
  • SSD for dual boot systems
  • Good headset
  • External webcam
  • “Broadband” internet

If you miss an item from this list for your home office, give it a thought. And if you plan to only think about one item, think about your chair first.

What are your experiences with working from home? What accessory makes your work life better? Give us a hint by writing a comment below. Thank you!