Our Back to the Office best practices

After more than 3 months of lockdown, IWD is gradually reopening its offices in line with the directives given by governments around the world.

The crisis has been not only a business challenge, but also a human challenge. We believe that it is not enough to have a great product if we don't have at the same time happy and motivated employees to work with it. We have always placed the development of our employees at the heart of our success!

During the lockdown, we checked-in on the evolution of our employees' "mood" thanks to a weekly survey, which allowed us to catch potential pain points. In the comments section of the mood-survey, we would regularly read "can’t wait to come back to the office", "looking forward to seeing my colleagues", "not easy to stay at home". We tried our best to make this period as smooth as possible for our IWD family with different initiatives (sports, e-yoga, coffee room etc.) to keep the team spirit alive. We share our Work From Home best practices here. 

We were aware that returning gradually to the office meant not necessarily regaining the usual atmosphere: morning coffee break, cheerful exchanges in the corridors, happy lunch break, etc.

Here we are!

We are June 29th and the time has come to reopen the Paris office on a voluntary basis.
Some brave people took up the challenge while others preferred to continue working remotely.

Why? We were asked ourselves the same question. Is it because good weather is finally upon us and people would rather stay at their country house and work from there? The difficulty of going back to a "normal" organization? The anxiety of coming back to the office?
We dug a little deeper to understand. The result was indeed the anxiety of having a 'before' and 'after' office, mixed in with the difficulty of imagining the office life with the new sanitary regulations. 

Employee’s health and safety is crucial!

It is the role and responsibility of the employer to guarantee and abide by the new hygiene rules and ensure the safety of everyone (wearing a mask,hydroalcoholic gel, social distancing etc.).
However, it is neither an exciting task nor an easy task to find the right balance between strict measures while keeping conviviality within the office. In fact, according to the French national rules, each employee must keep a 4 square-metre physical distance from others. 

Wearing a mask is mandatory if physical distancing is not possible. So here we are ordering masks and placing signs indicating that only one person at a time should enter or exit the meeting room.

What about communicating the new sanitary rules to employees?

What better way to help employees and higher management visualize the new office space and reassure that safety measures are taken? With Display 3D, of course. This project was the result of an unexpected, and first of its kind collaboration between the management, HR and product teams! In a nutshell, we hijacked our own product!

We twisted the basic functionality of our product to help IWD employees get a better picture of what the new office organization would be. We are so excited to be back at the office soon!

We are very proud and have proved that there is nothing more powerful than combining our IWD values to get us through the crisis: focus, agile, different!

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