Problems and Solutions of Working Through Quarantine

In the current trying times there are different approaches from various companies on how to tackle working from home. In this press release we will describe our experience in the matter along with examples of other companies.

Private and state companies

When we talk about companies and organizations, we focus mostly on office workspaces. In accordance with the local rules, offices are allowed to have people working as long as distance and disinfection restrictions are obeyed. This gives advantage to workspaces with vast square footage that can afford some separation between their workers.

Many offices went a different way by putting their employees on long-distance work. Communication between the employees is usually carried by third-party software like Telegram, Zoom and similar IM and video conferencing programs. Some companies even went as far as closing their premises for an unforeseeable future and donating their furniture to employees for more comfortable conditions for working from home.

This approach has proven that many of the meetings in offices without any substantial losses could be calls or e-mails, which might be a reason to reevaluate our approaches to business and working from offices when everything will be over. Some businesses could even go as far as to keep home working on a permanent basis.

However, the disadvantages to this are also numerous and tend to compound depending on the size of the company. When the global quarantine was first announced, large companies had to severely reevaluate how they do things daily. To allow their employees to work from home, they had to provide them with working computers along with access to the company’s network and software. IT specialists and security operations had to work overtime to solve all these problems. With hundreds of such users, it was a distinct bottleneck that required immediate attention. Because, when over five hundred of users suddenly are after your help, it makes you want to crawl into a tight space and cry. We have an acquaintance in a banking IT team who had to work for the first couple of months of the quarantine nearly around the clock to provide everyone in the branch with a necessary level of support.

The network access problem was compounded by the fact that some of these entities have an inner network inaccessible from the outside world. This was particularly true for state organizations that allow their workers to operate only on a selected set of machines dedicated to a particular task. Some of the organizations had to either limit the amount of users per machine per room, or to raid their warehouses for hardware that could be repurposed for working from home.

As to SeoBrothers, we had decided to split the difference: some people are working from home, some people come into offices. The choice is personal and depends on convenience, transportation and other factors.

New approach to retail

From our point of view, the most interesting outcome of the quarantine was a steady rise of delivery and online store services. Whilst online purchases may be an everyday reality for some of us, many retail services were forced to explore these opportunities to not go out of business, franchise stores included. For the first couple of weeks of the quarantine, for example, one of the biggest retail franchises in Latvia was so overwhelmed with delivery requests that you had to wait in the queue for full five days before your order was delivered. To somewhat counteract this volume of demand they had to rapidly expand their park of machines and move some of their employees to delivery.

The same was also true for smaller shops and businesses that had to hastily look for online commerce solutions. As the restrictions tightened, the shops had to shift their focus somewhere else – to the Internet. The height of the quarantine saw a steady rise of local delivery companies that entered into contract with shops and restaurants to provide the population with a service on demand. As the working hours of public places were tightened by the government, they were into a hibernation of sorts by still keeping places open only to people that placed orders online and came to collect the order from the point of origin.

Summary

“Survival of the fittest” is described in the Darwinian evolutionary theory as a mechanism of natural selection based on adaptation for existing conditions. What likely will come out of all this when things will finally get back to relative normal, is a new equilibrium. Many places and offices will go to business as usual, but some useful and modern practices will and should stay. Not having a fully-supported online business platform likely hurt a lot of businesses without them even realising it, and this quarantine might just be the wake up call for them to rectify that particular situation.

About SeoBrothers

SeoBrothers is an international company that operates in SEO-based projects in multiple languages and project teams. Its websites have hundreds of thousands of unique visitors every month. If you want to learn more about the company, you can visit its social media at our Facebook, Twitter and Telegram. Read also our news about projects in Serbia https://seobrotherslv.com/news/the-launch-of-serbian-mightytips/