Border closures and lockdowns are placing additional pressures on project delivery. The impacts of the pandemic are clearly seen in the longer lead times for equipment and the delays / difficultly mobilising teams or resources to site. In addition, lockdowns and working from home have taken their toll on many of us personally, with many employees feeling disconnected from colleagues, stressed or overwhelmed.
Throughout the course of the pandemic, Amalgamotion has been implementing initiatives for keeping our teams connected and do whatever we can to maintain our mental health. We’ve embraced a range of ideas – mostly practical but some purely for fun. Daily catchups, care packages delivered to home, virtual team dinners / cooking challenges and regular, one-on-one check-ins have all contributed.
Here’s are some of our top tips, as shared by the team, for maintaining connectedness, mental and physical wellbeing while working from home:
- Pick up the phone rather than email or instant messaging
- Each day, ask someone in the team how they are doing today
- Have a routine
- Exercise, or just move every day
- Find a ‘switch off from work’ trigger or activity
- Determine the balance between work and home that works for you and put some boundaries in place to hold to that
- Do whatever it takes to keep a sense of humour
- When you are using video conferencing turn on your video, no one cares about the mess or how you look today
- Turn the coffee catch ups that you have at work into virtual coffee catch ups
- Take what’s good about this time and work out how you are going to hold onto it when the world moves out of this phase
- If you need help reach out and ask for it
Please get in contact if you or your teams have come up with other creative / engaging ways to help maintain the health of the team throughout the pandemic – we’d love to learn from what you are doing!
Gareth Rumbelow
Managing Director