Birthday wishes via video conference, babies in the meeting and toilet paper as a trophy: After almost 2 months in the home office, we want to take stock. Here’s how things have been going at Perseus so far.
Something is coming. This became clear to us at Perseus in the middle of the second week of March. Corona numbers were still low in Berlin and also in large parts of Germany, but the wave was coming. And so we too began to cautiously consider a move to a home office.
We certainly had better conditions than many other companies. In our office there are almost without exception notebooks and we also work in the office with digital coworking and communication tools. So, from a purely technical point of view, it doesn’t really matter where we work and we were fine adjusting to the “new normal”. Nevertheless, we have a lively office culture with a lot of exchange of ideas, across the table or at the coffee maker. In addition, we have a weekly breakfast together and other group activities.
At the end of the week, we decided to have a home office day for everyone on the following Monday. As a trial run. Just in case. And just in case the test turned into the new normal, our weekly Friday afternoon after-work meeting (“Fribeer”) unceremoniously became a clean-up event. After all, when you go on a trip, you want to leave your flat tidy. On Friday evening, it was quite a scene when colleagues went home: Notebook and external keyboard in the bag, big monitor under the arm.
As it turned out, it was a good idea to take the monitor with us, as it was the last time until now that we were all together in the office. But that didn’t do any harm to the team spirit. On the contrary: in many ways we have become closer (only figuratively, of course). We now meet every morning for a virtual meeting with the whole company. Yes, some of us now look a bit more crumpled than before, but the mood is good and we have got to know each other better. Here and there, a partner walks through the picture and briefly greets the group, others have a baby sitting on their lap every now and then and look with interest at the many faces on the screen. We sang birthday songs together, on theme days we attended meetings as pirates, in Hawaiian shirts, as hackers or Easter bunnies. And our Whatsapp group filled up with funny photos of colleagues proudly holding up a pack of toilet paper they had got hold of, of the home office set-up, of new workout methods to ward off the Corona belly, or of the new router to improve the internet connection in the home office.
When we will all be back in the office together is still uncertain. So it’s all the more reassuring to know: it’s going ahead anyway.