How does the Co-libry team deals with teleworking during COVID-19

7 April 2020 | 3min read

In this article we wanted to share how our team handles teleworking. The reason the team works from home is because a meeting at work isn’t essential and forbidden with the COVID-19. Some daily habits and tools are very helpful to maintain a high level of productivity.

Important tools and habits we use:

• Daily team huddles
• Weekly team meetings
• Working in fixed blocks
• Todo lists
• Google Hangouts and Skype
• Slack
• Dropbox

Daily team huddles

Every morning at 9PM our whole team has a quick 15 minutes team huddle. Through Google Hangouts or Skype everyone tells how he feels, what he or she is going to do during the day and if there are any problems a team member is struggling with.

Having those team huddles really helps to keep team spirit high and not getting disconnected from everyone.

It takes a little dedication for everyone to get there every morning on time and the 15 minutes could be used for other tasks instead. Within our team, team huddles have a higher priority. 

Weekly team meetings

Every Friday morning we have a 2 hour online meeting instead of the team huddle. This is where we discuss and talk about what happened the whole week in terms of development, marketing and sales. During the meeting we make a todo list for the next week and make sure everyone has enough work.

Friday is the best day to wrap things up and fix certain issues & our weekly team meeting makes sure no one is left behind. During the weekend it’s possible to forget some problems, issues you were facing. 

Working in fixed blocks

Working in weekly fixed blocks, if you have a job that allows you to, is way better for our productivity. Instead of trying to multitask, we try to do one task at a time and actually get it done. A method that works for us is putting the blocks in your calendar with Google Calendar.

A disadvantage of working in fixed blocks that it can get mixed up because certain tasks are more important to do first.

This is just an example of one of our team members to give you an idea:

Todo lists

We make a daily todo list. It only takes 5 minutes but helps us to stay organized while prioritizing tasks that are important. 

Some tools we use are Google Tasks, Todoist, pen & paper and Notepad.

Hangouts and Skype

The two tools we use as a team to have our online meetings are Hangouts and Skype. Why two? Because we often have problems with one of the tools via a bad connection or to many people using the tool at the same time. So switching if one is not working is usually the best solution for us.

When the connection is really bad, we turn of our cameras and only use microphones.

Slack

This is great software that we’ve been using for over a year now. If you don’t know what Slack is, it is a tool to chat with a team member, share links and images. Slack works quicker for us than calling or texting.

Dropbox

Dropbox is the place where we store all our files, in a structured way. Everybody in the team has access to the files of others so it is very easy to share something or work on the same document.

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