How businesses are refusing to let coronavirus get them down

Yes, many industries are going into survival mode. But the ones still going are keeping themselves busy remotely and doing their best to stay happy and productive. If there’s ever been a time to turn lemons into lemonade, it’s now. So, here are some ways organisations are currently banishing the corona blues.

Getting the basics right

The antisocial nature of remote work can drive some people crazy. So at General Assembly, they’ve set up a virtual coffee break room, where employees can drop in to video chat with whoever happens to be there at the time. This “virtualising” of standard company culture stretches beyond the casual cuppa. Businesses are organising virtual quiz and game nights and even virtual happy hours. When Kris Nelson, the COO of LA ad agency Srax realised remote work was the new normal, he fired up Google Hangouts, poured himself a Jameson and unwound with his team.

Staying sane

Sometimes a Friday drink and a morning coffee aren’t enough. Pandemic + house arrest can whip up quite the perfect mental health storm. So media company Havas is offering mindfulness training to anyone in need with its Creative Consciousness programming over Instagram. They’re offering meditation and kundalini yoga over Instagram live, as they walk with the current surge in the online health and wellness industry.

The rise of virtual conferences

Just because a pandemic is cancelling events doesn’t mean people don’t want to network and learn. Virtual conference start-up Run The World has just secured backing from angel investor Andreessen Horowitz and is planning on changing the conference game and capitalising on the current lack of in-person events. The virtual aspect allows for a potentially more effective conference experience. Advantages over the norm include being able to interact with speakers directly and the option to be paired with like-minded attendees. Click here to see how their technology works. It can streamline the conference networking experience. No surprise that some big conference players are also going virtual.

Family fun

Back into the ingenious land of advertising, Krow employees are using video conferencing tools to happily blur the lines between business and family time. Their bedtime story get-togethers involve agency parents and kids getting into their pyjamas and sharing their favourite tales for half an hour.

As well as creative responses to remote work, any app that’s become more useful overnight thanks to the surge in remote work can now celebrate. Collaboration tools like Miro (popular with designers) and the lunch date app Donut have come into their own.

What we’ve been up to

Anyone who knows OryxAlign knows that we’re big on culture and teamwork, and we weren’t going to let remote working and keeping our employees safe ruin that.

Our collaboration tool of choice is Microsoft Teams, which we’ve been using to run our weekly sales meetings, monthly company-wide updates and even a remote pub quiz. We may be a team working apart, but being able to see one another physically and continue constructive meetings as normally as possible goes a long way to keeping a happy and productive workforce.

Everything above is a testament to the old maxim: constraints breed creativity. Considering we’ve only been at this for a few weeks, it’s pretty good going! So when the dust settles on all this mess, it’s safe to say that while we’ll be shaken, the progress and creativity gained during this period could well be bigger than the pandemic itself.

Contact our team at OryxAlign to learn more about productivity and collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams.