We managed to transfer offices to udalenka, and you?

Hello from quarantine! I have long wanted to write a post about life and work in Spain, but on a completely different occasion. However, the current situation dictates other rules. Therefore, today about the experience of transferring offices to remote work, before it became compelled. And also about life, work and communication with clients in the conditions of force majeure and the military on the streets.


What happened and what did we do?

Only the lazy did not write about the spread of the virus on the hub; therefore, we omit this topic. In fact, now quarantine is introduced everywhere, new countries are added every day. Today, all of our European offices are fully transferred to remote work, the rest are in the process of translation.

We, the Zadarma cloud telephony service, also offered special discounts to customers in the regions affected by the virus.

How did we transfer offices to remote work?

Since we provide distributed cloud services, our offices are also distributed around the world and we try to transfer everything that is possible to the cloud. This simplifies the transition to remote work. But immediately I want to note that this has its drawbacks. For example, physical assemblies, however, are sometimes more convenient than virtual ones.

More specifically:

Computers: for the sake of mobility, we switched to laptops for almost all employees for quite some time. Of course, you will have to work at home without your favorite monitor, but we hope that we will survive it.

Network: since there are a lot of offices, we don’t have the concept of “office local area network”. Those who work with sensitive data have their own VPN connection (for example, in case of illness / business trip). So there were no special settings to make.

Telephony: Of course, Zadarma is a cloud telephony operator, and there is no problem providing your employees with communications. But the question is: how to receive calls?

For a couple of calls per day, our ios / android application is suitable. I myself switched to it and abandoned my favorite desktop ciscophone. For those who call more and more often in our office there is a stock of professional headsets, which they took with them.

This is, in fact, very important. I strongly discourage the use of cheap headsets for working at home. They can be heard and the echo, and the cries of the child in the next room.

In general: either an ios / android application, or a good headset, or a desktop ip-phone. But it’s not that mobile.

Why do I pay so much attention to this – about half of our employees in all international offices – is a technical support service that helps customers, including on calls. Support service processes more than 600 calls per day. On average, this is from 2000 minutes (there are much more chats and tickets). All this in 5 languages ​​24/7.

In fact, relocation or quarantine does not affect the performance of the infrastructure or support operators, thanks to the flexibility of the clouds.

And thanks to all of the above, the transition to remote work for us is not very different from a trip home in the evening. To simplify the task for you, we have compiled a short checklist:

In work, it is better to use laptops. In an extreme case, of course, stationary blocks can also be transferred, but is it worth saying how much more complicated it is?
All workflow is best stored in the cloud. For security, use a VPN.
To communicate with each other, always have contact in the messengers (it is better to use the primary and backup messengers, sometimes they fall), it is better to arrange the tasks setting in advance, for example via Jira (this will help in the office).
Communication with customers. Nonverbal channels of communication are always needed. Chat, mail, phone. Contact management is better in cloud CRM. Telephony should be, firstly, with a margin (there will be more calls without personal contact), and, secondly, in the cloud, otherwise it also cannot be taken out of the house. For those who urgently need to transfer telephony to the cloud, or to reduce the cost of it, we tried to help, more on that below.

Customers need help too

When a country is quarantined, it can be touched. After all, this is not just a drop in the index on some distant exchange. This is when you write to the law company with which we work (in Spain there is the concept of “hetor”), and they answer that everyone is busy for a week, they dismiss employees of restaurants and shops …

Understanding that we “got off with a slight fright” and many of our clients are now much worse, we took several steps to meet:

  1. Local numbers were extended for free for a month to all our customers in Italy, Spain, France (where everything is already quarantined).
  2. They offered a 50% discount on telephony tariff packages for an office in the EU and the USA / Canada for 2 months (we really hope the quarantine will not last longer).
  3. For those who still have to transfer the office to online, provided 50% discount for 6 months to telephone numbers in 30 countries of the world (selected those where at the time of the offer there were the largest number of new cases).

We are monitoring the situation and will continue to help other countries. Already prepared discounts on rooms and special tariff packages for customers from South America. The situation there now resembles the Russian one.
And of course, in general, we monitor the situation on the market and work on expanding the functionality of conferences. Including, we are already testing video conferencing.

Timeline of events in Spain.

One of our offices is located in the city of Valencia, Spain. Actually, I work in it. In this chapter, I will describe the chronology of events as I saw it.

9th of March. In Europe, this is the working day and the day I last visited the office before quarantine. On the morning of this day there was still hope that Spain would “slip through”, or that everything would happen much later. The number of cases, although growing, is not so significant.

On the evening of the eighth in Spain there were 674 cases of the disease and an increase in the day amounted to 149 cases. The gain for the seventh is 124. It does not look like an exponent.

The virus is still being tried locally in Madrid and the Basque Country, where it is most prevalent. We were much more frightened by the beginning of the celebration of the local Fallas festival. This is the main holiday in Valencia, which collects millions of tourists from around the world. Only Italians in 2019 were about 230 thousand. Very beautiful giant statues are being built for the holiday, which are burned on March 19.

The last week of the holiday is usually a weekend in the city, everything is closed, all the streets are crammed with people, as you know, this is “ideal” for any virus.

10th of March. For the previous day (9th day), 557 new cases were identified.

In the morning, an announcement was made in our company that all European offices are allowed and recommended to switch to remote work. I was one of the first to take advantage of this.

Schools are closing in Madrid. In Valencia, Fayyas is canceled (more precisely, transferred to the summer). The city is in shock, since the construction of giant statues is in full swing. In the central square, a mask is put on the statue (it is in the photo above). We prepare discounts for European customers.

March 12th. Our European offices are almost empty. In Valencia, there are still 2 developers who live nearby and walk to the office on foot (that is, contacts are minimal).

There are already 3146 cases in Spain, an exponential increase is visible. A very urgent request to all those left to go to work from home.
Canceling an important business trip. What scares you is not so much the risk of getting sick as quarantine on the other side of Europe without a family. There are still relatively few cases in Valencia (up to 100), but colleagues share unpleasant news – after the closure of schools in Madrid, many locals went on a “vacation” to their summer houses by the sea (around Valencia and Alicante).

Later I learn that in Italy such a movement was one of the reasons for the rapid spread of the virus throughout the country. The stores are already very crowded, in the morning we buy products with a margin.

March 13. Really black friday. Jump sick almost 2 times to 5232.
In Valencia, following other cities, restaurants are closing.

At 2:30 p.m., the Prime Minister announces that a state of emergency will be imposed, after which the crowd sweeps away what used to be supermarkets. We are glad that we have bought products earlier.

March 14th. The prime minister speaks, explains that you can go out into the street only one at a time and only in a few cases (food, pharmacies, hospitals, work, gas stations, people who can’t do without help, walk the dogs). I am relatively lucky, we live outside the city and you can walk around the house. Including you can not go “to the cottage”, but we know that part of Madrid is already there. Cars with loudspeakers drive around the city and ask everyone to go home and not go out.

March 15th. The city was empty, but the parks had not yet been closed. Several acquaintances speak of cases of fines if they went in two. Friends climbed onto the roof to meet the sunset (people are also found on neighboring roofs).

March 16th. The first “working” quarantine day. Let me remind you that on Friday there were two more people who wanted to work in the office (theoretically they can do this, but they don’t need much better, nobody canceled the office on the 10th floor of the business center and general elevators and other places), while one of them is the only one who didn’t uses a laptop. So at 8.00 our developer V., like the captain of a sinking ship, was the last to leave the office with the iMac-oh armpit. You cannot ask someone to help, you can only carry it yourself (the benefit is not far away and there were no police / military along the way). Speaking of the military, they are also on duty in the city. Parks are already completely closed. We are looking for options for delivering products to your home (not everyone has a desire to go to stores). The weather has badly deteriorated, because I don’t really want to go outside, those who want to start inventing new types of business, I see on the network the first announcements from those who want to rent a dog for a month.

Metro and other transport continues to work, but bike rental is all closed. Long-distance traffic closes.

March 17 . The weather is still bad, but this does not stop people from wanting to go outside, make a joke, somehow occupy themselves. They made jokes about the dogs that the whole porch walked on, I heard that later this loophole was closed and they started demanding the dog’s medical card (I can’t check, I don’t have a dog). France welcome to the club, also full quarantine, speech by the president. EU countries finally close their borders, by the way Morocco has fenced off from Spain for a long time, and air and ferry services are closed (and the border with the Spanish city in Africa, Melilla). Israel and some US states also partially join.

20th of March. We work from home, at home with children there is less time left for work, therefore there is very little time to monitor quarantine and virus.
Today they are already declaring that taxes from local “individual entrepreneurs” and the like will not be charged for 2 months. I think no one doubts that the quarantine will be longer than 2 weeks.
As with schools, I can not describe. Firstly, my children are still small for school, and secondly, this week in Valencia there are holidays (due to the Fallas holiday, the holiday was canceled and the holidays remained).
It is only visible that in the Valencian community the growth of patients is most of all in the city of Alicante. A week ago there were almost 0 cases, now 372 (with 627 in Valencia). But just around Alicante there are most resort towns and villages, those summer residents from Madrid reached hospitals … Looking at this, if your country will be quarantined only in some cities and will not restrict movement between cities, wait next week for greetings from neighbors (in first of all, where they usually relax). In our autonomy, 3 new temporary hospitals with 1100 beds are being built (for today we have 1.105 cases, but everyone knows what an exhibitor is and they see Italy and can count).
The neighbors in Catalonia already complain that they will put patients in hotels and after a week there will be no places, but instead of building hospitals they complain about the central government, quarantine does not change people.
I have not been in stores since the quarantine, I managed to order food from the local Auchan (here they are called Alcampo). Not everything was, but in principle we bought more than the norm that week. Friends say that in principle there are products, but not in all stores. So we sit quietly and work. Who is a sociophobe, they are probably even more pleasant.
Letters from everyone in a row “We continue to work on important information about COVID19, but now we have begun to clean floors more often, everything is for you” have long been tired. Reminds the introduction of GDPR in Europe, when everyone needed to be notified, but why now I do not know why to write without a reason.

Do not be sick, work efficiently and do not forget that food stocks should not affect excess weight.

If you are interested in details or continued, welcome to comment.

P.S. All photos taken from the local Levante website.

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