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How large IT companies transferred their staff to remote work

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A month ago, only a few companies began to carefully and gradually transfer employees to remote work from home. After the president’s speech on March 25, almost all of his staff had to be sent home to everyone else, including large companies employing thousands of people. This is a difficult logistic task, because many employees needed a VPN, communication tools, and some needed working computers and other tools. We contacted large IT companies and asked how they dealt with it.

Who was transferred to work from home


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Since March 16, the entire VKontakte team switched to a remote mode of operation. A small number of specialists who support the infrastructure of VKontakte and must be at workplaces get a taxi for free.

Mail.ru Group


Most of our employees switched to udalenka from Tuesday and will return to the office no earlier than April 10. To help colleagues not get distracted by everyday routine, we gave everyone individual promotional codes at Delivery Club.

Only those whose work tasks cannot be solved remotely come to the office now. At the same time, the dining room, restaurant, gym, beauty salon, coffee shops, dry cleaning, fresh bar, as well as the offices of the masseur and psychologist are closed. Employees who need to go to work are brought and driven by CityMobile for free. At the same time, security measures are strengthened in the office - a thermal imager checks all incoming messages, sanitizers are installed on each floor. Everywhere there are individual skin antiseptics for hands, we constantly replenish first-aid kits with antiviral drugs, antibacterial gels and masks, and elevator touchscreens and all door handles are regularly treated with a disinfectant solution.

Dodo Pizza


We have four offices (two in Moscow, in Syktyvkar and in Nizhny Novgorod). Now we have completely closed one office in Moscow and an office in Nizhny Novgorod. Only the employees of the product development team, photo lab and bookkeeping come to other offices to receive documents. In total, in offices no more than 15 people a day.

Tinkoff


From a letter from Oliver Hughes on March 23:

“We transferred more than 75% of all people sitting in our offices throughout Russia to their homes. This process continues and, if necessary, we can quickly transfer even more than 20%. There will be much less than 5% of employees who are required to have a physical presence in the office (for example, technical support, collection, security). For them, we will fully ensure safe working conditions in accordance with all hygiene requirements. Today I’ll go to the cloud myself and work from home. Now - what to do next? ”

Now about 95% are at a distance: [employees] from headquarters, Moscow offices and shopping centers, 12 Tinkoff development centers in the regions.

Rambler


Most of the Rambler Group team currently works remotely, in the office are only about 2% of employees. These are colleagues from media assets whose work due to technical features is not possible from home: employees responsible for the news, video department, as well as colleagues from Okko studio. At the same time, the group took all necessary measures to counteract the spread of coronavirus for those who need to be present at the workplace.

Megaphone


Megaphone was one of the first to start transferring employees to a remote location, however, transferring all 100% is impossible due to the specifics of the process. All our efforts are aimed at maintaining high quality communications, especially in the current conditions of increasing network load. Now most of the employees work from home.

Beeline


Beeline has been implementing a remote work project since 2016. In the company it is called BeeFREE. Prior to the introduction of measures related to counteracting the spread of coronavirus, 65% of employees of administrative offices from different departments used this opportunity: finance, marketing, HR, IT and others. Different functions in different departments can be performed outside the office - and it will be a delusion to believe that only business support can be such. In connection with coronavirus infection, we are conducting a reverse analysis: who exactly should work in the office? And first we can say: almost most functions can be performed from home, if IT systems have such an opportunity. There are employees who, due to the specifics of their functions, cannot go to a remote site. Our company has a number of technical positions that ensure the smooth operation of the network,they are located at our facilities and cannot work from home. We understand that providing stable communication and quality service is especially important and critical for our customers.

Also, employees of our stores cannot work remotely. Now for such employees it is provided to equip shops and administrative offices with ionizers, antiseptics and thermometers.

How to solve technical issues


Megaphone


At the time of the transfer to the remote site, the technical support of the company and the internal communications service were in constant dialogue with the employees, they worked in an increased load mode, which made the transition as quick as possible. The internal technical support service was able to transfer part of the requests to the voice assistant service, as well as to the chat bot.

Tinkoff


The difficulties were connected only with what needed to be done very quickly, but we dealt with them. For a long time, every employee has Slack, Zoom, and most of them already had remote access.

Dodo Pizza


In the current situation, we began to transfer employees to a remote site three weeks ago. To ensure a comfortable and productive work at home, we gave the opportunity to pick up tables and chairs from the office. Corporate taxis and car sharing were connected to all employees if it was necessary to pick up the monitor from the office or come to test cash register equipment.

The hardest part is to make up for the lack of communication. We are looking for different options.

  • We have random dinners. Each week, the Slack bot connects two people who need to drink coffee or lunch together. This may be a colleague from your office or from another country.
  • We have already held one common lunch for everyone. In the office, many have lunch together at the same time and this has already become their little tradition.
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Mail.ru Group


We are a technology company, and it was easier for us to transfer work to a remote mode: Mail.ru Group has many strong communication products, including two social networks, we used to solve many problems in instant messengers, mail and video. Now we just transferred all communications online, including meetings with partners.

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Our team is based in different cities, and before self-isolation, we often held meetings online, so we do not experience any technical difficulties on the remote. VK has many of its tools for remote work: chats, video calls, communities, video broadcasts and other services. We use them on a daily basis, and not just during the remote work of the entire company.

In order for employees to have access to all necessary working services, we gave the whole team VPN tokens for remote access. In addition, you could pick up your monitor from the office for convenient operation. We also tried to make life easier for our team, and for the period of removal we gave employees discount on food delivery from Delivery Club.

And we also have an internal VK Isolation community where we, together with colleagues, do yoga online, cook according to recipes, share online concerts and do a lot more together. We adapt to new realities and try not to get bored.

Rambler


The Rambler Group, many of whose assets have long been operating on a flexible schedule, was technically and operationally ready for remote work. A full transition to the remote format of work took us about two days. We set up Teams for everyone, bought Zoom licenses. During the first week, we conducted several webinars on a remote site, during which employees of different departments of the Rambler Group talked about how to keep calm in the new reality for both specialists and managers. We issued equipment for work from home to the financial unit, accounting department and the HR department.

VPN has long been used by editorial staff and technical experts - we replaced the routers and increased the load to 2.5 thousand connections. And the primary goal was to provide standard access to over 1.2 thousand employees. We sent out a letter with detailed instructions, but received about 600 responses asking for assistance in connecting. This significantly exceeds the standard number of requests to the technical support service (about 80 tickets per working day) and is due to the fact that many employees constantly worked from the office, and in a few cases working from home did not use corporate services.

The second task (it is also the most labor-intensive) is the direct issuance of accesses (personified or group). For several days in a row, we worked out hundreds of tickets for their provision.

We are faced with the fact that some employees cannot clearly articulate their need for access to a specific resource and request much more rights than they need, and in an emergency situation you may not notice such inconsistencies. We also found that some of the group VPNs do not have owners who can coordinate the inclusion of the user or adjust the content of the group, which slowed down the process of providing access.

We did not have to introduce additional security measures, because the remote work process at Rambler Group has been around for a long time and we allow our employees to work from home computers. However, we are well aware that connecting users from personal devices carries additional risks, to minimize which we published a reminder on the corporate portal on the second day with measures to work safely from home. To prevent phishing attacks, the cybersecurity department has already carried out two additional waves of cybercrime.

Megaphone


MegaFon’s work in HomeOffice mode involves solutions for remote virtual desktops (VDI, the service is available to almost all company employees even from their home computers) and other technological solutions (VPN) that allow remote access to company resources to employees, contractors and partners. It was decided to gradually transfer to HomeOffice by region, which allowed the load to increase smoothly. Since the load on key services (VDI, VPN, AD, Exchange, SfB) increased by 2–5 times, all these solutions required significant previously unplanned re-equipment (taking into account the need to preserve the geo-reserve). This was realized within two days. To monitor and distribute the load, dashboards were quickly updated, which made it possible to make informed management decisions.

We continue to use the Exchange mail service locally deployed by Skype4Biz as communication tools. There was a need to quickly provide part of employees with pre-configured laptops before they go to remote mode.

Beeline


An important part of the transition to remote work was the creation of the necessary IT infrastructure and its support. Our employees use VDI for remote access to corporate resources, Skype for Business and Zoom for video conferencing, Jira, Trello and corporate tools for planning and monitoring tasks.

You need to be prepared for the fact that without working IT tools, remote work is not effective. We organized high-quality support for IT tools, we work with user feedback online and train employees to work with new IT tools

Onboarding new employees and instructions for old


Rambler


On the day the new employee is registered, the recruiter arrives at the office to meet and give him the welcome pack and necessary equipment, talk about the current situation and help with additional accesses. Then we release the new employee home, and then transfer it to the immediate supervisor, who introduces the new employee to the team and connects to daily meetings.

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We have prepared additional materials for beginners and managers who hire them. They also added additional meetings with adapters and managers to the onboarding process, and, of course, changed the adaptation process for remote interaction.

But the informal part of adaptation is also important. For example, flood chats. This is the same virtual office kitchen where you can joke, gossip, fool around - feel like living people, not chat avatars. Recently, our colleague had a birthday, and he "put down" in the chat pictures of pizza and juice, promising real food after the end of self-isolation. Such moments help us relax and feel like a team.

Beeline


The process of working at BeeFREE in Beeline is organized according to certain rules. It is necessary to sign an additional agreement to the employment contract, which regulates the main aspects of remote work from a legal point of view. Each week, you need to draw up and coordinate a schedule of remote work with the head in advance, as well as create a to-do list for every day. It is also necessary to inform colleagues about when you work remotely. A remote employee must be in touch during the working day. To conduct working meetings and meetings, you can use the capabilities of audio and video conferencing - while being late for such "virtual" meetings is also not worth it. In order to ensure information security of the process, an individual virtual workplace is organized for each employee.

Recommendations to others


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Don't panic! With a cold head, check the management processes, put yourself in the shoes of the new ones, understand what is missing, conduct surveys of the company to be aware of the "average temperature in the hospital" and, depending on the results, organize what the employees lack.

Do not lose touch with your employees: encourage, do not forget to praise, in this unstable time, communication between people is especially important. Pay attention to the needs and desires of colleagues. Maintain team spirit - albeit through video broadcasts, and not during personal meetings. 

It may also be worth discussing with the team work in new realities. Especially if you and your colleagues did not have to work remotely before. When you start and end the working day, how you will distribute tasks, report on the work done, how often you need phone calls, or even how to build communication in a working chat. 

Rambler


It is difficult to give general recommendations, since each business has its own specifics. Mostly, we advise everyone to abandon desktop computers in favor of laptops - so an employee can work remotely from anywhere, if necessary. It is also important to translate all paper work into electronic form - implement electronic document management: it can significantly increase the speed of business processes in the company.

Immediately use a centralized access control solution, otherwise you may have a zoo of access to the corporate network via inconsistent channels. It is also important to provide employees with collaboration tools. At the same time, be sure to remind them of the rules for working with confidential information when using online collaboration platforms.

Be sure to tell us about measures to work safely from home, as your employees and their personal devices are most vulnerable outside the office. You can take advantage of ready-made recommendations from vendors and large companies. Pay attention to technical means of protection - begin to implement (or at least look) towards NAC (Network Access Control). Be sure to use 2FA methods for remote access to the network.

And, of course, at such times, motivation is crucial for employees to feel support and security. From the first day of the remote work, we worked on this: direct connections with the CEO, business leaders and teams. Individual sessions for employees who do not own management tools in the current environment, or for new / young managers. In live broadcasts, we talk about how to cope with increased psychological stress: work in the environment of children, everyday life, regulation of nutrition and physical activity. We don’t forget about how we all worked together in the office: on the corporate portal we continue to hold challenges (we collected photos of employees' home offices, pluses of remote work, etc.), we develop sticker packs for Telegram and we carry out many other activities ,which help us strengthen team spirit!

Beeline


Beeline is ready to share experiences and share best practices. Below are some links to information about the BeeFREE remote work project:

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