The world is in the midst of a crisis. And with half the world population currently sequestered at home, this crisis has exerted substantial pressure on entrepreneurs, businesses, individual employees, and independent contractors. Global textware considers itself lucky to have stayed largely unaffected by the impact of the coronavirus. First and foremost, we are extremely thankful that all our employees are still in good health. As a result, we continue to be able to respond to client demand — remotely, of course.
The Global textware office has been virtually empty for several weeks, with the majority of the company working from home. We felt this would be an excellent opportunity to ask our teleworkers what their experiences have been like and share their stories.
Raymund Prins – Founder
“Working from home is relatively easy in our sector. As such, we already had an excellent infrastructure in place to do this, enabling us to switch to 90-95% telework when the situation calls for it. I myself was no stranger to working at home for years, even though I generally spend most of my work time at the office. However, the current situation has forced us to take a look at how our office will be organised in the future. In fact, the “office of the future” has long been a topic of discussion. Nowadays, necessity is giving us the chance to see what we want to change. There are countless ways to collaborate, and online programs have revealed themselves to be great tools for this. Not to mention that they are often much more efficient.”
“On the other hand, I do miss having other people around. Spending all your time in front of a computer screen is ultimately unfulfilling. Plus, it’s just nice to hop on my bike and head to the office. I couldn’t really do without all of that.”
Svetlana Been – Vendor Manager
“Working from home is not new to me. I have been working from home at least once week for some time. I’d already had a nice workspace set up and I knew the advantages of teleworking. These are primarily a daily schedule that is a bit more flexible and better focus. But now we’re at the other end of the spectrum, where I’m teleworking, but my husband and two children are home with me as well. Translation: there are several workspaces set up and a lot going on around me. Even though it’s really nice to have all four of us at home (such as having lunch or tea together), I have also noticed the drawbacks. In addition to my position as the Vendor Manager, my husband and I are now schoolteachers for our children, who are seven and ten years old. This demands a certain kind of attention, which always seems to be necessary when my work needs my attention too.”
“I would love to be back working at the office, and I miss the in-person interactions with my colleagues. All is well on that front professionally, but it is still much more enjoyable to see each other face to face, without constantly communicating through screens as we are now. I hope that we’ll all be able to see each other again at the office in a few weeks!”
Sophie Huisman – Project Manager
“I’ve never really enjoyed working from home in the past, because I prefer having a clear division between my personal and professional lives. When I work from a different location, I tend to get the feeling of ‘having the day off’ if I’m at home. But I have to admit that teleworking has suited me quite well so far. I have a more positive attitude towards it now. I have noticed that I am good at keeping the personal and the professional separate when I’m home. All in all, my work is easy to do from home and, given the circumstances, I’m simply happy that we have the option. At home, I miss out on the sense of camaraderie a bit, though. It’s something that I really appreciate in an organization. I’m in contact with my colleagues all day, but face-to-face interactions are much more enjoyable, of course.”
“I should point out that I hadn’t really worked at Global textware for very long before we began teleworking. I was still unfamiliar with a lot of things, and getting me settled in remotely requires a lot of time: it’s difficult for everyone involved. My colleagues here have been extremely helpful, and I’m very grateful for that, because I really think that it can’t be easy for them to set aside so much time for me when they have so much on their own plates already.”
Fer Dillema – Project Manager
“I actually hadn’t worked at home much before the coronavirus hit, so it took some getting used to. Since then it has sort of become the new normal, and I’ve adapted to new routines when teleworking. I feel like we’re lucky, so to speak, that we work in a sector where working from home is easy. It’s a field where we’re already used to frequent digital communication. But I miss the personal contact, the office humor, and coffee talk with my colleagues a lot.”
“There is someone who definitely has no problem with my partner and I spending every day at home: our cat, Kue. Even though he can be really distracting when he strolls across the screen during a video call, I’m still going to miss him when we all head back to the office.”
Thomas Prins – CEO
“Before all this, I thought it was nice to work from home every once in a while. For me, it used to be a day when I could finish up some tasks that I couldn’t always get done at the office without any distractions. However, there are two things that I am noticing are much easier or better done at our office. The first is that I always have everything within reach when I’m working on financial tasks. The second is that it is far less easy to communicate with everyone from home. For example, it’s not possible to go over and have a quick chat with someone at their work area when it comes to some things which could otherwise be handled in little time.”
“In order to set up my home workspace in the best possible way, I made sure that I have everything I need at hand. Most importantly, I need to use two screens. At the office I use one large screen, but that problem was easily solved by using two smaller screens. In my opinion, my work would be hard to do without having two screens available. Last but not least, I have found that filling the silence in my house with music really benefits my productivity.”