The end of confinement for France and the team at Tranquil IT

What a pleasure it is to hear the voices of your colleagues without the distortion of a headset or a microphone and especially without the terrible crackling noise caused by a 4G link saturated by the neighbours: Netflix, Deezer, Youtube, Fortnite and other joyful things!

As you may have noticed, Tranquil IT officially began de stage on Monday, May 11th, 2020. Take advantage of this article to discover how we managed during this transitional period.

With this method, we are able to respect social distancing measures in our office. This way we are not required to wear a mask all the time. Even though Cindy chose the softest and most comfortable ones, if you are someone that wears glasses they still fog up easily.

But we didn’t stop there! Hand sanitizer and disinfecting towels are available throughout the office and our cleaning team (especially Annick) visit us everyday now! As you can see, everything has been carefully planned out to ensure optimal health, safety and security.

This way, we maintain the social “closeness” which is so dear to us, while at the same time maintaining our social distancing protocals.  At the office, everyone can continue to communicate with real emotion, without having to guess them behind a mask.

How are we working with clients, those at the office and those working from home?

Before the confinement, Vincent M. had replaced all of our telephone headsets. His chose the Plantronics SAVI 8200 model,a top of the range and quality choice. The new headsets are connected to Aastra phones, which are connected to our Asterisk telephone exchange. These connections remain our main lifeline with our customers. The headsets are also connected to each of our PC’s via USB. So switching from a Mumble conversation with colleagues at home to a conversation with a customer on the other side of the world is done with a simple click of a button. We don’t have a time difference button yet. However, this childlike simplicity is really reassuring these days.

The company is overflowing with projects, and the projections are even beyond the most optimistic scenarios envisaged before the COVID-19 crisis. Let us continue to remain strong and let us go through this life ordeal together with hope.

Measures that were taken before the confinement :

Cindy had previewed us that, potentially, the confinement would impact our company. With the exception of a few changes to be made, we were prepared that it was probably envitable.

So, before the announcement of the confinement we had set up our telephones with SIT in 3CX. We had also generated VPN keys for all staff so that everyone could connect their PCs to the network. By Monday morning, everyone was almost ready. The technical team spent the next two days making optimizations that made our team more comfortable. There were no constraints that would prevent us from working from home.

Confinement from the technical side :

We had few calls during the first week of the confinement. They were essentially requests for access to guacamole, a web gateway, to access the communities’ server. We had already set up these gateways for many years for all our managed clients. Despite this, the number of people who needed to connect was higher. Therefore we had to size these servers accordingly.

In the second week, the few managed calls made way for people with WAPT support contracts. At the end of the lockdown, most of the calls were regarding WAPT projects. Finally, everything was running smoothly. Our customers were satisfied with our solution and could work in total autonomy, without any problems.

Internally, everything went as well as it could have. We had created two pleasant and intuitive communication channels: Rocket Chat for chat messages and Mumble to talk over the phone. We enjoyed the advantage of an Open Space without the inconveniences. As soon as someone needs help, we ask them in writing if they are available on Mumble and then join them in a call “room”. To make it work well we’ve made the names of the chat rooms as explicit as possible.

And then comes the end of confinement :

The company decided to bring us back full time because our business obligations were starting to return. And so they did: We’ve been getting more calls from our managed clients for various issues/evolutions. There was an increase in calls of about 130% compared to the week before the deconfinement. Concerning our organization, a schedule has been defined by our HR. Half the team is present in our office for two-three consecutive days, while the other half remains working from home, and then we rotate this between employees.

To be honest, working from home during the confinement went well on my end. However, I think that, morally, those two months of confinement would have been more complicated if we had worked on a full-time basis. We really felt the loss of activity in terms of incoming calls and the postponement of our services in the months of March / April / May.

Sometimes we pretend to be “lonely” or find our colleagues “boring” (which is normal in a work context, tensions always exist), etc. However, no matter what we might say, we are social animals. So this period of “non-sociality” has been painful for most of us. So it was with great pleasure that I learned, during a “tele-meeting” ( an over the phone conference meeting, and yes, in new situations, a new word is needed) about the plan to reopen Tranquil IT. The goal was to get us back to the office, in person, while respecting the government guidelines for the end of confinement.

Organizing for the end of confinement at Tranquil IT :

To prepare ourselves we set up an organisation that allows us to alternate between working from home and working at the office. An employee is present on site about 50% of the time, the rest of the time is spent working from home. It is therefore with real pleasure (and following a lot of patience) that I went back to work this Wednesday (May 13, 2020)! What a pleasure to renew the social link by being able to see people, discuss, no longer be alone, having a coffee together, smiling, etc..

But also (and this will probably reassure my boss), to feel a complete re-motivation at work. Indeed, we don’t work in the same way in teleworking, especially in the long term, as was the case during these eight weeks. And it has to be said that, in the end, I no longer had any motivation to work from home. In fact, I didn’t really want to do much of anything at all… So yes, coming back to the workplace was “life-saving” for me (and others internally). Especially since, without wanting to evangelize the company, the atmosphere at Tranquil IT is rather excellent. Many people are more like friends than colleagues. By the way, when do we have an aperitif?

This is the perfect conclusion to this “working from home” section! You can always find our articles on the tools we have put in place or on how we feel about working from home, if you missed them!