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How we transferred all internal communications in the company to online

As soon as the world familiar to us went into the home office mode, IT companies transferred their employees to remote work, faced not only with technical problems. How to maintain the morale of employees? What should be done so that our colleagues do not feel sad about the "remote"? Of course, we rushed to this grenade - the department of internal communications, collecting the will to life and optimism in a feeble cam. 

First steps


We started with a simple contest in social networks and offered to send a photo of our home office to check how colleagues are ready to participate in something. This was not the height of originality, but the competition went off with a bang: the employees gladly posted pictures of their workplace with children, dogs, cats and Ikea sharks. I joyfully reposted each photo on our Instagram, until at one in the morning I received an ominous message: "Are you tired of exploiting animals?" I grabbed my heart: what kind of animals? Where did we manage to operate them? WWF already followed me?

It was an answer to an innocent story with a doggie that a colleague put at the desktop. WWF seems to have lost a valuable activist in someone!



Next in line were virtual kitchens: we created several rooms and invited our colleagues to come in to talk there. Initially, kitchens were created for everyone, but almost immediately, colleagues from different cities began to ask them to create separate rooms. It was a little sad that Voronezh did not want to communicate with Moscow, and Moscow with St. Petersburg, but you could not command your heart. 

The main thing is that the idea worked - in the kitchens there are always people who want to escape from work and talk for life.

Director cooks pasta


There was no time to relax. A secret weapon was launched: video blogs of top managers from home. By the way, our directors regularly vlog, but the releases from the home office won the hearts of colleagues: with the number of employees in 2000, each video gained more than 3000 views. That is, they all looked. Perhaps even those who never in their life paid attention to mailings from internal communications and sent them immediately to spam. However, to pass by when your director is standing in an apron by the stove and tells how to cook pasta is simply impossible ...

Probably, everything is explained in an elementary way: usually vlogs of directors are removed in offices, against the background of panoramic windows, diplomas and kanban boards. But it turns out that the bosses are also people who just now sit at home with their wives, children and dogs, cook pasta and help the younger generation do their homework. Of course, for IT companies with their fairly democratic management system this is not news, but we are always pleased to see the “reverse side of the moon”, to learn something about the real life of those who are at the head of a large company.



Sports to the masses


The lack of physical activity in quarantine is felt much more acute than when you go every day from the subway to work, and then you run through a seven-story building of five buildings. 

In the second week of quarantine, we launched morning online training. A certified trainer, a close friend of our company, agreed to lead them. We decided to schedule the first lesson at 9:30 in order to see if this time was suitable for colleagues. I open the laptop - internal communications should set an example and ensure presence - and I see: 20, 30, 60 people got up early to do exercises with us! The author of the article, by the way, was blown away at the 15th minute and tried to catch her breath until the end of the workout. About the frail cam, as you know, was not a metaphor.

We received a huge amount of gratitude from colleagues. So we work for good reason!

Training has become regular - three times a week, and now yoga has been added - a colleague, a professional teacher, has joined. About 60 people also come to yoga, which starts at 9 in the morning and lasts an hour. 

Kids time


Thinking through online activities, we, of course, relied not only on our intuition. A survey of colleagues showed that hearts also require entertainment for children, which we have already written in detail about . In addition to weekly selections with games and all kinds of resources, we organized a children's master class in drawing, which was conducted by our colleague. Children and parents liked it: after the lesson, we received only thankful messages from colleagues. It is hard to be parents 24/7 in a locked room, and it is always pleasant when at least for an hour someone will take on the difficult burden of education.



Toastmaster is fun and contests are interesting


Working in a large company has some non-obvious advantages: there will always be proactive, active colleagues who are ready to help, as was the case with yoga and a children's master class. A little later, eco-activists joined us, who conducted a workshop on sorting waste at home, and experienced “remote workers” who organized life hacking sessions for working from home and virtual facilitation. 

Along the way, we organized several contests in social networks and the internal portal: we asked to talk about new habits that appeared during this time, offered an extra reason to smile - colleagues designed the Happy Maker application, in which artificial intelligence evaluates a smile from 1 to 100. However, Happy Maker made me sad rather than happy because it turned out to be problematic enough for a simple contest. Colleagues needed to leave their names and surnames so that we could find the “stallists”, but Alf and other aliens were on the list of winners. I had to search the entire universe of the company.



All contests went to colleagues: they actively participated in them, and we did not have time to compile lists of those to whom we will give prizes after quarantine ends. 

Online apartment


Our apartment owner definitely deserves a separate paragraph. The idea was the simplest - to bring people together and invite them to sing together songs "around the fire" with a guitar. The “open microphone” format was announced, but just in case we asked a few people to prepare a couple of songs in advance. 

At 7 pm on Friday, about 35 people gathered at the conference. It seems to be a bit for a big company, but the evening was so lamp and soulful that for two hours I smiled without stopping. Colleagues came with guitars, ukuleles, sang a cappella, showed seals, and someone even had children's backing vocals in the background. 

"When is the next apartment?" “Gathering live when quarantine ends?” - Such questions were asked to us later. Live laughter, good songs and cats help to find inner harmony much better than any article on the topic “100500 magical ways not to go crazy, working from home”.

Future plans 


So far, this is all that we managed to do in a few weeks from home, but certain conclusions can already be made: most of all, colleagues liked those online events and activities that involve lively, sincere participation of people - home vlogs, training, a children's master class, apartment building. Contests, challenges in social networks and webinars from colleagues, in our opinion, went well, but we received much less feedback and feedback. 

We still have a lot of interesting things in store. Now we are preparing an online quiz: the New Year corporate party has shown that colleagues love intellectual games, and we decided to please them with a quiz of our own production. It turned out that organizing and thinking through everything is not so simple, but we hope that our colleagues will appreciate our efforts. And we, meanwhile, will naively believe that quarantine will end faster than ideas.

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