by
Janine Zwanzig
| Mar 27, 2020
Business as usual at Consultingwerk? Well, almost. No question - Consultingwerk is also following the #stayathome policy recommended or instructed by the WHO and most national authorities. We have already closed our offices in the Netherlands, Germany and Romania at the end of February and stopped all business trips even before we were forced to. Our international team with developers and consultants living and working from England, the Netherlands, Germany and Romania and many of our customers, already have a lot of routine with collaboration from home offices.
Our corporate infrastructure has already supported our distributed team for years. We have a lot of experience with systems like Office 365, Teams, GotoMeeting, Anydesk, Teamviewer, Bitbucket, Github and VPN access to our office, our cloud data center and our customers. We have been using all of these daily, since long before the Corona outbreak. In short, it’s not relevant when and where our employees are working in our customer projects or adding features to our development tools like the SmartComponent Library. A fact which also helps our employees to work flexibly and to reconcile work with changed requirements with children are also staying at home.
A huge portion of the work of our consultants is interaction with our clients, often onsite. In the past weeks we’ve moved all our meetings to GotoMeeting or Teams. We have the experience and discipline to use online meetings as an efficient alternative to meetings at the customer site. And in times of social distancing a video chat with our clients is often also a welcome substitute for personal interaction in an office.
In regular times, our team gets together for a couple of days each month in our headquarters in Cologne. Since the outbreak of Corona, we are offering virtual lunch breaks to our team which helps us grow even stronger as a team in these different times.
All these measures help us to assure our clients, that also in these times we are able to provide the same professional level of services our customers deserve. So, business as usual at Consultingwerk – almost.
