As the COVID-19 pandemic challenges the world, we wish everybody good health and mind during this tough time.
Arrangements at Kovai.co
Business Continuity Plans
We have all the arrangements in place to ensure the availability of our software services and product maintenance. Our team is monitoring the platforms and performance on a regular basis so that the business of our customers is not impacted. Of course, as everybody knows, everything is now dependent on the internet connectivity and the availability of Cloud Services providers, we are constantly following up on the status and will keep you communicated in case of any challenges.
Product Support & Customer Success
We are committed to our Customers’ success and product support. We have advised our team to stay well connected and they are closely coordinating to attend to our customer needs and support them.
You can reach out to our product support and consultants through email or webchat on the respective product websites.
BizTalk360 & Atomic Scope: support@biztalk360.com
Serverless360: support@serverless360.com
Document360: support@document360.io
We Started Preparing Ourselves to Meet the Situation
At Kovai.co, we have been constantly assessing the COVID-19 situation since early February. In Aug 2019, we booked a 10 times bigger office space than what we have now in the city of Coimbatore to expand our team. Since December 2019, the interior setup works were started and our CEO, Saravana Kumar has planned to visit once in 6 weeks to connect with the team and review the progress.
He was scheduled to visit in February 2019 and that is when COVID-19 started spreading to the West and people started having some reservation in travel. Though there were not many travel restrictions or advisories declared, he decided to skip the travel to avoid risks. That is when we started planning to meet any situation that could arise.
Checking Inventory and Asset Allocation
The first thing we decided is to equip all our team members with necessary devices, allocation of laptops, communication devices, etc. We even proactively placed orders and got delivered more machines as we started receiving communications about industries being locked down in China and Malaysia and eventually costs rise.
Work From Home Option
We always wanted our team to be together and work from office for various reasons, good collaboration, bondedness, brainstorming, get to know each other, etc. Also, when you work at the office, you can be devoid of personal disturbances and focus at work. After a day 0f 8-9 hrs hard work, we encourage our team to spend quality personal life with families, friends and invest in self-growth.
Though one can argue, we can still stay focused at work while Work from Home and need not work from the office. Yes, the times have changed where a lot of companies are successful with remote or work from home arrangements, both have advantages and disadvantages.
Having a development centre at Coimbatore, one of the Tier 2 cities in India and the majority of the workforce is not experienced with Work from Home previously, it is important for us to have a better office and help them be more productive.
We prepared a list of people with whom we can initiate WFH such that we start addressing the situation and have no impact on business, otherwise there could be a disruption for a day or two when we had to take hasty decisions.
We also started rolling out a team reporting concept ‘Level 10’ from ‘Traction’ and mapped every individual to at least one reporting member, throughout the organization.
In the meantime, we also had to ask a few of the team members, who traveled to infected international and domestic destinations, to stay at home for a few weeks. Thanks to them who understood our decision in the right spirit.
We started asking employees with school going kids and infants to work from home starting early March. We then rolled out this option to the Product support team which is very crucial to maintain the business interest of existing customers. Then, to those who use public transport to minimize the risk of exposure.
Since we were assessing the situation regularly and the situation is aggravating, we declared Work from Home for the whole office since 16 March 2020. All these arrangements and steps taken in phases helped us to adapt to the situation without disruption.
Today, almost everyone is Working from Home and stay connected to meet the business requirements.
Many of them started sharing their work-spaces at home and ensured they were able to concentrate on work with the proper setup. Some even took steps to purchase new furniture. We thank all of them to have taken the necessary steps to keep them comfortable at work.
Special thanks to some of the team members from Admin, Finance and IT support, who worked behind the scenes in preparations and who work from the office with no choice to ensure the smooth running of operations.
We have advised them to stay safe and follow all precautions and minimize travel and visit office when essential.
All Hands Meeting
We organize an “All Hands” Meeting through Microsoft Teams at regular intervals to communicate the situation and address the employees’ queries or concerns. We also encouraged to organize short web meetings among team members so they can stay connected and collaborate.
At the time, when the whole world is finding ways to come out of the challenging times and worried about the impending financial crisis and job losses, it is very much necessary to reinforce faith to our near and dear ones. Individuals to their families, employers to their employees and employees to the businesses they belong to.
It is great to work under an able leadership of Saravana Kumar Here is a small excerpt of an internal communication providing reassurance to our Kovai.co family.
At this challenge times, we need to stay together and get over this. Wish you all a happy time very soon!
