Working from home became the new norm in the past few weeks for many businesses. At Sarepta, even though we had people working remotely most of us were in an office setting. Transition into remote working had different effects on everyone, and we all learned something from the experience. Here is how it went for us:

Catharina: 

Having to work from home was a real nightmare scenario for me initially. Whenever I am travelling and try to work away from the office I always feel so distanced and out of the loop. It is more challenging for me not being able to just walk around in the office and see how people are doing. It is a lot easier to see when people are available for a chat when you walk around in person, remotely you are at an even greater risk of disrupting people’s meetings and flow. During creative meetings I also communicate largely with drawing on a board, gesturing with my hands, interpretive dance… This gets more difficult when working digitally

Luckily, the change over to home office was a lot smoother than anticipated. Of course it might be slowing some things down, but overall we have gotten more systematic with the use of our Discord communication. For “Standup” we use the general voice chat channel (which Discord has updated to now allow 50 people during this crisis). We still end our meeting with morning stretches.

As I write this, I am sitting working at the kitchen table in my boyfriend’s apartment. Realizing that I could work from anywhere, why not go to Finland and stay there a while? Of course, the huge downside is the lack of a proper desk but I am finding ways to be creative to get variations.

Things are going a bit slower right now, and I still miss the team, the collective, our offices but feel insanely lucky that we have the technology and the means to continue working through what is happening.

Things that help during creative meetings:

Using facecams & shared screens are very helpful to keep the meetings as real as possible. We also use small sketches to describe what we say and write our suggestions on screenshots to write in our suggested changes (Windows Snipping Tool is useful)

I can also recommend Gyazo as a tool to create small gifs and videos that you can download or even just get shareable links to. The free version gives you 7 seconds screen capture, while the paid one gives you 1 minute. Super fast and helpful and it stores your captures in your personal profile.

Discord Tips:

• Set some general rules for the communication.
  
• If there needs to be a longer chat, consider just calling.
• Update your Discord status regularly so people will know what you’re doing.
  

 

 

Yvette:

To me as the new member in the team and also being new to Norway working remote is hard. Not because of the work itself but because of the lack of personal interaction e.g. with the team in general or having a nice chat while getting your coffee. The first days I also lost my daily routine, which I built up around going to work but I started rebuilding this as best as possible. Besides the lack of personal interaction I lost a lot of movement opportunities (gym closed, walk to the office is no longer necessary) which has a major impact on your body if you have an inactive desk job. So I try to be as active as I can. I start my day with a short home workout, make a walk in my lunch break and make sure to walk or ride after work is done for at least 30 minutes. 

Since everyone of us has an inactive job I try to motivate everyone in our team to be a bit more active and started the “Push Up Challenge” where everyone tries to do as many push ups as possible every (other) day. I would also love to improve this with more workouts to keep everyone a bit more active during the day. It is also great to push everyone who is a bit more competitive to have a new fun challenge that can be timed whenever they have the time during the day. 

This is, to me, a nice way to combine the need for movement and to have more interaction with the team

Besides that I am happy to have the opportunity to work remotely with great tools which make it easy especially in these “chaotic” times. It also gives us the opportunity to improve our work from a different angle and is, also, a new challenge for everyone. We can learn and adapt better ways to communicate and work with each other. This will lead to improvements back in our office days when we will meet again face to face.

Health Tips:

• Be active (short home workout, walks, ride your bike, go out with kid, dog….), short coffee walks were always good for me to “get the blood running” again after a long time sitting, just make a few more smaller breaks with some movement to stay focused
• Open the windows to let some fresh air in and also daylight 
• Eat healthy (eat your vegetables and fruits and do not fall back on many sweets or “processed” foods)

 

Eylul:

Since I’ve been working remotely for quite a while now, the whole office turning remote actually made me very excited! Thanks to discord, I became more in tune with what everyone else has been doing and set a better office situation for myself since I used to create my own hours and work as much as needed to get a task done, instead of doing the good ol’ 9-5. However staying at home this much does take a toll on one’s productivity and mentality. I found a few things that helped me in this situation.

First, have a designated workspace. Remember people saying “don’t do anything else other than sleeping in your bed”? Same goes for your working area as well. It helps your brain to get into ‘work-mode’ and enhances focus. Once you start doing other stuff in your workspace, your brain will start drifting. If you want to check reddit real quick while working, get up and do it somewhere else. This again, helps to both keep you from scrolling endlessly without noticing and will help with the differentiation between work area and play area in your brain.

Second, create a to do list for the day and put time limits on your tasks! Since you’re home, it is easy to overwork yourself without realizing since you have that one task that you have to get done TODAY. It leads to burnout quickly and dreading the time you spend at home working in the long run. If you put hour limits on the work you’re doing you’ll be focused better and will know when to end the work day if you’re making your own hours.

Third, if you find yourself getting too distracted during your breaks, do a small chore. It’ll keep the productivity flow going and will get another task out of the way. (We’ve been using the push up challenge as a quick break activity.)

General Tips:

• Always work at the same space and play somewhere different (if possible).
• Create to do lists and put times on tasks to refrain from overworking/underworking each day.
• Do small chores during breaks to keep productivity going
• Drink water, don’t live on coffee.

Overall, we are extremely grateful that we have the privilege to keep working remotely . We will learn more and make the best of this situation to bring our new games to you, and we hope everyone going through similar scenarios can do the same. Have your routines, take good care of yourself and learn ways to cooperate with your office in this new setting. But most importantly, stay safe and healthy.

 

-Sarepta Studio