Remote work brings out the best of our culture

There are many benefits of remote work that we actually see in our company. Here’s also some reflection on what kind of actions employers can take to support their employees.

As knowledge workers, we at OpusCapita are quite accustomed to remote work or working from home as our jobs can be done from anywhere. Flexible working time, as well as a great work-life balance, is something our employees have always appreciated. We have a strong culture of trust, and we believe people can plan their own timetable – even in these unusual circumstances. There are many benefits we actually see in our company from this new situation and also reflect what kind of actions employers can take to support their employees.

We OpusCapitans, are all working remotely already since mid-March 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. For the people who always work remotely, this has been a nice change as now they feel they are even more involved when we are all in remote offices! We are having coffee breaks together, many teams even daily in the video meetings. We even had a remote yoga session together. And we are proud that we were able to switch our operations to home offices in just a day.

Benefits of remote work

Working from home has many benefits, for once the daily commute to the office has become very short and we can save time as well as the environment by not taking the car to the office every day! But I would like to look at some of the other, maybe less obvious, benefits this new remote working life has brought us.

We have celebrated the annual “bring your kid to work” day, having over 60 kids at our offices in Finland. Many of us are parents, and especially during the lockdown many have their kids at home when working remotely. This requires good time management from the whole family. This situation has even brought us closer to each other – as many of us face the same challenges that come with balancing their work and also taking care of the kids. And every parent is happy to be employed by a company that really understands these special circumstances and provides flexibility! And it is always nice to see the kids in our video meetings!

One of the key elements in our culture is sharing. Now we have seen colleagues’ kids, pets and home and colleagues without make-up or with a three-week-long beard. We have over 75 comments on our Yammer channel in our remote work photos discussion thread. 🙂 I feel this brings us together and this is how our family-like culture is really seen. Family is not just a word in the open comments in our annual employee satisfaction survey. We truly feel we are part of the OpusCapita family.

We have a vivid culture of caring. Caring for each other, not just from the manager’s perspective. In a meeting or even in a chat we are asking if everything is fine and how is your family. Last Friday we had even virtual beers together! This was probably the first time we were having a “global party” together as we usually have summer & Christmas parties locally. Can’t wait to see all my colleagues like that again! We have also initiated the global party team to organize more global events for us!

One of our values we defined together with our employees a couple of years back is that “together we make it”. And now it feels like that is the only way how we will conquer these unexceptional times: Together we make it!

P.S. We haven’t put our recruitments on ice either – we are still looking for new family members to join us! This is the time when even the candidate can have his/her kid on the job interview – because also our recruiter might have the kids in the video meeting. 😉