With almost 300 employees working from home, WorkWave joins the world-wide pursuit of flattening the curve. WorkWave has been operating as a fully remote company for the last five weeks.
Our biggest priority right now is the health and safety of our employees and our customers. To help ensure that priority stays a priority, our action plan to combat COVID-19 has been led by facts, not fear. Constant and transparent communication allows us to proactively share facts to all employees. Email or video updates are shared weekly by our CEO, Dave Giannetto, informing employees of our progress, goals, and recognizing the amazing work being done across the organization. Our HR team has been sharing regular updates as well, focusing on policies, procedures, benefits details, and FAQ’s.
We are fortunate that WorkWave’s culture runs through our employee’s blood. Throughout all of our communications, we have reminded employees to keep our culture in mind, but it wasn’t long before our team members picked up right back where they left off. We’ve seen teams conduct virtual happy hours, implement daily morning touch bases, and have virtual scavenger hunts. In the upcoming weeks, we will also be launching our first remote Spirit Week, including cool contests and themed days to add some more fun and team spirit into our routines.
Fully working from home is a transition in itself, and combined with the inherent stress that comes along with navigating a pandemic, we know it is not an easy time. So, supporting employees through constant communication, company-wide best practices, and fun activities to help settle the turbulence was a no-brainer.
With communication and culture aligned, we have been able to further support our employees through this transition by focusing on one of the most important aspects of our culture: continuous learning. Even while remote, our mission and philosophy of professional development stand true; our job (as an HR team) is to make our employees’ jobs just a little bit easier. We do that through sharing resources that foster continual development, learning, and growth.
The era of COVID-19 has forced employees across all levels to flex new muscles in the workplace. With that shift in mind, we created and shared collaboration guides to all employees to help exercise and improve these new skills. These guides consist of three parts: an acknowledgment that a challenge exists, education through best practices, and actionable solutions that can be implemented right away.
For WorkWave’s managers, we shared a guide to help lead their newly remote team members. Managing isn’t easy, and managing remote teams can be even more difficult. We wanted to support our managers so they, in turn, can best support their team members. It’s important for our leaders to keep in mind concepts like creating opportunities for connections, establishing frequent individual check-ins (both job-related and personal well-being) with their employees, and empowering team members through trust.
For all employees, most of our digital communication is done through Slack. Slack is a language that not everyone is fluent in, so we created a guide filled with do’s and don’ts to ensure the most effective use of our digital communication tool. Since now we are relying heavily on digital communication, we reminded employees to be mindful of tone and nuance so they can convey their message with purpose and empathy.
We also shared a remote-work relationship rule book that includes how to build and maintain work-relationships even when we aren’t in the office together. Right now, we need to practice social distancing, but we don’t have to distance our socializing. Utilizing our people skills and building relationships is what makes us strong, successful employees. Most notably, we wanted employees to remember the golden-rule of remote-work relationship building: at the end of a chat or email, there’s still a person on the other side of the computer screen.
To take virtual learning to the next level, we will be creating short video segments where we introduce pertinent topics such as emotional intelligence, motivation, and mindfulness. Employees can feel connected through seeing a familiar face and learn how to actually apply these concepts that will generate results. These efforts are done to remind all employees that WorkWave’s threshold of learning is endless and that our remote work status is just another opportunity to learn and grow.
During this time, our number one focus will continue to be the health and safety of our employees and customers. We will lean on one another to continue to live our company values and mission together because, even if we are working from home, we’re still WorkWave. The growth of our employees is invaluable and an investment that propels all employees to reach their full potential. We are WorkWave proud.
