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peter279k
peter279k

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How we do work from home for COVID-19 in our department?

Introduction

At recent time, we will know about the COVID-19 virus outbreak effects our working in many countries.

My work is also effected. And we recently launch the "work-from-home" style in our department.

In this tutorial, I will introduce our "work-from-home" and how we launch this working style in our department.

What is work-from-home?

Well, I say "work-from-home" because it's not equal to remote work.

The remote work means a job has the remote style and working for a company originally.

What about "work-from-home"? A job is a normal work and we always go to the office every day.

Because of some reasons (e.g. the government policy, virus outbreak and etc.), we need to adjust working style to cooperate government policies.

Our "work-from-home" features

When we do "work-from-home" style to do works in our department, I found some features are as follows:

  • We have two teams in our department to do work-from-home style. These two teams we can call A and B teams.
  • A and B team members cannot appear in the office at same working day.
  • When A team members go to office today, B team members will work from home today.
  • When A team members work from home tomorrow, B team members will go to office tomorrow.
  • It has the working schedule and it arranges working date status for all team members.

Advantages

When we do work-from-home schedule for A team and B team in our department, it will have some following advantages:

  • It can be easy to follow our government policies. Recently our government suggests people should have 1.5 miles of social distance in indoor and should have 1 miles of distance in outdoor.

If it cannot meet these suggestions, people have to wear masks.

  • It will not be crowded in office and it can be helpful to decrease virus infection risky.

Disadvantages

  • It doesn't make senses about working from home schedule. A team members and B team members should estimate/remember working status on specific date.

It will waste of time to calculate/estimate the working status on specific time.

  • This working schedule is only proper for software engineers and it's not for hardware engineers as well.

These hardware engineers only work at another office because they cannot bring hardware devices to work at home directly for some reasons.

Summary

To resolve this problem about estimating working status time, I've developed two repositories recently.

One is called work-home-schedule and another one is called working-status-notification.

  • The work-home-schedule can help me to estimate next date of working status.
  • Our work-from-home schedule will be effected by country holiday and weekends so work-home-schedule provides calendar data loading. This feature will skip weekends and holiday during working date status estimation/calculation.
  • I'm lazy and I don't want to waste my time on checking working schedule. And I develop the working-status-notification to help me to resolve this.

This notification sender can be set on cron job and I can receive e-mail on specific time to know next day of working date status.

To summarize this, I have to say it doesn't have the best way about working-from-home policy.

I think the best way is: every member works from home every day until the COVID-19 is under control or over.

This way is hard to execute because it's up to department managers' decisions and some work features.

For example, some hardware engineers in our department cannot bring devices and work at home.

They have to work at department laboratory and cannot go to office at some days.

Every working-from-home policy cannot fulfill every members and it's not friendly for us.

To resolve this issue, the only way is: developing somethings to follow that policy easily :)!

What about your work styles? Feel free to write some comments to share them!

Top comments (1)

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jschleigher profile image
James Schleigher

Great post! During the pandemic, our team had to work from home and to communicate effectively, we used task management software. My team needs to update the tasks, and I will receive notifications about the progress. In the beginning, we need some adjustments, but now we continue to use it even after returning to work in the office. I like Trello and Quire.