Covid-19: Our Continuity Plan

We decided to mobilise our team to work from home last week. This was done to support the measures announced by the Irish Government to limit the spread of the COVID-19 virus. We had been developing a business continuity plan and we were able to activate it quite quickly. Our team are now 100% up and running across the globe.

Thankfully, unlike many companies, we are a cloud enabled company. All our tools, systems, and data are hosted in the cloud and our team can access and manage our systems and tools anytime and anywhere.

This week we have been in constant contact with our customers and, where possible, we will all try to continue to collaborate to keep the ball rolling.

Some of our team are remote working veterans and have been supporting the newbies to adjust and adapt to our new working environments. This is difficult, but this week I’ve been amazed at how quickly the team have embraced the changes and how they are looking after one another.

Over the coming weeks we will all have to manage family and work, which, up until last week for many, didn’t happen all in the same place. We have several guiding principles at Arekibo, and one of them is Family First. Never has a principle meant so much. It’s important that we can be with our families during times like these. Hopefully one of the lasting benefits of this will be a greater appreciation of family, friends, and community, not to mention a greater global focus on looking after our environment.

Some interesting findings this week include:

1. Microsoft Teams is our MVP product this week and has been busy helping us to communicate.
2. The team have created various activities to keep us collaborating and these include the Movie and Book library and the Step Challenge.
3. The Friday Learning Series, where our remote working veterans and other Arekibians will share their best practices of working from home.
4. Weekly all hand video call to check in, say hello, show each other our coffee cups and just shoot the breeze for 30 mins.
5. Comedy has helped and it’s amazing how many of the team are using it to cheer each other up.
6. Structure – we have quickly found our cadence and are getting on with it.

Taking into account that we will all be doing more conference calls, I'm reminded of a great quote from Nelson Mandela - “Appearances matter — and remember to smile.”

Please feel free to contact us if we you need any additional support. We wish you and your family the best over the coming weeks. Stay safe!

Onwards 🚀

Martin