Like most teams across Singapore, M1’s staff members made the shift to working from home during the circuit breaker period. Whilst it was a significant adjustment for all of us, it has been an exercise that has proven the importance of digital tools, cloud technologies and creative collaboration while social distancing.
To support our teams in continuing to work towards our goals, we’ve encouraged them to use a variety of technologies, including online collaborative tools that help staff members stay nimble through cross-team ideation and problem-solving while working remotely, and have provided educational workshops on remote working methods and techniques, such as SCRUM, which encourages teams to “sprint” while working on different aspects of a project together and ensure achievements are seen in weeks rather than numerous months.
In addition, all our teams working from home were equipped with hardware that included the software suite available at the office. Though a critical piece of technology for everyone, few software suites are a perfect fit for every employee and situation – especially when working remotely as a complete organisation for the first time. To bridge the new gaps our teams were experiencing in working from home, they worked together to tackle how best to fill gaps and communicate with each other. Through this, they have found innovative and fun solutions and share them with the wider team.
For example, our Digital Apps & Platforms team, led by Nicole Cheah, has adopted a hybrid approach to enable her team’s mode of communication, track work progress and drive remote collaboration by using a blend of enterprise suite of software and social apps.
Still, teams are experiencing some challenges while working remotely. “I’ve received feedback that people felt as if they were trapped in a borderless time and space realm where they were unable to logout from work,” Nicole said. “The lack of division of ‘on work’ and ‘off work’ status because people were at home ultimately prolonged their working hours.”
To help her team balance their time more evenly and work sustainably, Nicole has encouraged everyone to work the usual office hours – which includes taking a lunch hour and respecting everyone’s time by not scheduling meetings outside of work hours as much as possible.
Beyond the challenge of balancing work and life when always at home, Nicole’s team also misses the social aspects of the office. “I do miss face-to-face interaction and informal conversations,” Lau Seng Keat, a team member from the Digital Applications and Portals team said. “I feel like in-person communication really helps to uplift the team spirit.”
To recreate the feeling of in-person interaction while social distancing and working remotely, Nicole and her team check-in with each other every morning to chat about work. They also have a dedicated channel for sharing non-work thoughts, articles, and memes, get together virtually on Fridays to wind-down the week, and have held birthday celebrations online.
This is just one example we can share and overall, Nicole and her team feel as if they are working well together and have been able to remain productive while working remotely over the circuit breaker period. “Our team is passionate about digitalization,” Nicole said. “We are adopting a growth mindset, and we believe in being the digital change agent to inspire our M1 teams to develop, grow and win as one team.”
We know there are still aspects we need to improve and therefore we won't be viewing these achievements as completed but merely providing insight for our next steps. Our new objective is that when we are able to all work in the office again many of the collaboration and productivity tools will continue to be used so that we realise a “win-win” outcome of personal interaction with some exciting new digital capabilities to support our team members and realise achievements on a more regular basis for the foreseable future. Our new approach to collaboration and transparency on productivity might have started from being “stuck” at home, however it will be one of the positive new capabilities for our team when we are back collaborating together as physical instead of only virtual teams.
