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Feedback from our first week working from home

I used to be against working from home...


I have had bad experiences with Odoo employees in the past, and heard stories of friends abusing it in their companies as well. Although I knew it could be productive, I was afraid of the downsides. So, we did not have any work from home policies at Odoo.


Last week, we went from 4 to 700 employees working remotely, almost overnight. And it's efficient! Everyone is working at full speed, and collaboration is still very good. Over the past 5 days, productivity did not decline. 


Yesterday, I was able to meet with 12 different teams in less than two hours, all of which got me up to speed in just a few minutes.


In every crisis, there are opportunities. Ours was to improve the way we operate remotely.


If there is ONE company that could easily allow for remote work, it's Odoo. We are 100% paperless, from HR to operations, from finance to sales, 100% of our activities have been online for years. 


More than that, it's our core business to digitize companies, and we provide services to our clients remotely. 


Our mission has always been to offer tools for employees to work smarter, in order to make companies more productive. It's critical now more than ever before. 


Here is a set of actions we launched to help companies:


For schools and universities


Odoo eLearning is free and open source. To help schools & universities organize courses online, we also provide free support and hosting, for unlimited students, forever. You can test the platform here: https://odoo.com/slides


Contact Charline (clo (at) odoo (DOT) com) to get started.


For private companies


To help you digitize all activities, we offer 50% discount on the first success pack service for all SMEs. Our experts are available to help you transform your company for the good: electronic signatures, collaboration tools, project management, social marketing, HR apps, etc. We want to do our part, helping SME's be able to afford their digitalization. 


Our project managers work remotely, allowing us to get started right away. To get a demo, schedule an online meeting easily: 


here: https://odoo.com/r/meeting-be for Europe and Africa 


here: https://odoo.com/r/meeting-us for North America and Latin America.


You can check our pricing here:


https://www.odoo.com/pricing#implementation_service=success_pack


Note that Odoo is still free for one app. Whether you need a document management system, an electronic signature app, a website, a CRM, ... you can start at https://odoo.com/start


Tips to pass the COVID-19 crisis


Here are a few quick wins you can do to organize your remote work.


For communication, Discord proved to be an excellent tool as voice channels behave exactly like office rooms. It's free and can be set up in a few minutes.


To help our employees with children, we bought school exercise books.


That way, our colleagues can save time keeping up with their work, while keeping their children entertained. (I gave a school-like schedule to my kids, and they did not disturb me a single minute over the past days)


We hold 5-minutes daily meetings for each team, to review objectives and achievements. This way everyone stays in touch, and everyone is accountable. So far it has been working well.


We recommend to avoid mixed teams; if you have people still working at the office, they should do meetings on their laptop, using the same channel as the rest of the team. It's much easier if everyone is remote. That's the main reason why, in this crisis, working from home is more efficient than what we experienced before.


In every crisis, there are opportunities: it's key to identify which ones you should capitalize on. Although we reduced our marketing expenses, we decided to speed up the recruitment of developers. Since almost no-one is recruiting, it's the right time to do it. 


And because we all need positive news in such hard times; here is what happened to our office in Hong Kong: 


  • On January 26, following a partial lockdown, all employees worked from home. (fast reaction of the government)

  • On February 27, employees could get back to work in shifts, following social distancing and basic safety rules.

  • Our salespeople missed their target in January, but all of them hit their target in February!

  • Now, business seems to be back to normal.

I wish you all the best during these hard times. Be sure to stay safe, and take care of yourself and your loved ones. 


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