A full year of WFH

Last Friday marked a full year of WFH for Kaz Software. On March 19, 2020 we turned from a zero work from home company to a 100% one.

The WFH move

We were one of the first few companies to move to WFH because of the pandemic. There were a lot of unknowns, both about operations and about the business. There were very valid concerns of performance, our ability to work from home without any experience in managing software projects from home. We mitigated the risks by careful planning, our blog post from that day outlines some of the strategies we took: Adapting to COVID reality and posts from the time we started thinking about the challenges and how to manage the risks are also very interesting to read: 10 Tips for effective work from home, Remote work - what can go wrong? The title itself shows what was going on in our head :)

First two months of WFH

To our great relief we found that the transition from 0% WFH to 100% WFH was almost completely frictionless. Our risk mitigation strategies proved to be very effective. We had almost no hiccups and was hit the ground running from the first day. That is not say that we didn’t have any problem at all, over the first few weeks we started coming across some wrinkles that we ironed out with our planning. We wrote about our experience in the two month mark: WFH - our experience so far We soon learnt that the work environment setup at home needed to be right for better WFH and we resolved that constantly providing tech and facilities support from the office to individual developers at their home. This included supplying them with the chairs, monitors, etc. resolving technical issues on their home computers, if needed supplying them with their work computers and monitors, etc. We also realized that the office cannot be fully closed as access was required on emergency situations - so we had staff (properly isolated) living at or near the office building so that any resource can come over to the office when needed.

One year down

Now we are on our full year of WFH. And we can say with certainty that the WFH model has worked very well for us. We have absolutely no delays or work lapses that was directly because of WFH. We believe we have improved our overall performance by saving time on travel. We do however feel that for a collaborative work of software development a purely WFH model is not right, there is huge value in face to face interactions in software. Our current state is a mixed mode of WFH and work at office. We have made it optional for resources to work at the office if they are vaccinated or if they have taken enough precaution and ensure that they follow the health guidelines. This mixed model of WFH and work at office is proving to be quite successful. As the situation improves with wider vaccination we will see how much of this model we can retain permanently - so I’ll be back with another post about what we are doing!

Bye for now, stay safe!