The epidemic has transformed our world view, our working methods and in addition to others tested the established team cohesion. Since most of the office work is done from home, colleagues do not meet every week, so teamwork, collaborations, joint decisions have all suffered from a debased. This was no different at INNObyte, but we tried different methods to help the situation.

In particular, we have increased the amount of communication to colleagues. The communication channels (sharing meals, coffee) that are the main channels of information flow within the office have been lost, and we have tried to make up for this with semi-formal communication. Every week, the Director of Communications provided a circular informing everyone about the state of the various projects, new projects, matters affecting the entire company or most of the company. We felt it was extremely important that they were made aware of matters concerning colleagues, so that we maintained confidence in the common goal.

In several groups (depending on the burden of the manager) informal cohesion on a weekly or fortnex basis has been introduced, where the manager informs the group of the current situation and, on the other hand, all colleagues also are given the opportunity to share private or professional information concerning him or her.

We also examined the individual effects of the epidemic with a questionnaire in the spring, which will be repeated in early 2021. According to the results of the questionnaire, colleagues took the obstacles of the changeover well and picked up the pace, but everyone was strongly impressed by the changeover. Colleagues stressed that the most important thing is the lack of shared meals and coffees, the function of which we wanted to replace as described above.

In addition, we have contributed to the success of several colleagues’ online home-schooling efforts with scrapped laptops. We have also prepared a questionnaire for our colleagues on the effects of online home education, the results of which had been published in a press release. During the online education we prioritised the area in spring and autumn, as there are nearly 100 children in the immediate vicinity of INNObyte and family-friendly operation has always been important to us.

Finally, there were several owner informations for which we used Teams video conferencing. Some of these were more informal, general occasions, and some with the explicit purpose of explaining an important change in the life of the company. Written questions could be asked during the conferences.

In 2021, we plan to continue to communicate frequently, continuing to focus on goals and successes achieved. We plan to re-record our questionnaires last spring. In addition, it has been suggested that online reception classes will be offered so that colleagues can stay in touch with management.