At Doxee, #stayhome is more than just a hashtag to us. We adopted Smart Working from the very outset of the coronavirus emergency, knowing that our digital DNA and our staff’s previous experience of working remotely could guarantee business continuity, without difficulty, even for our most technical departments. Today, we’ll be talking to Robert Dosen, Director of Product Development at Doxee.
1. Doxee recently announced that it would ensure business continuity, despite the emergency. How did you organize your work and that of your team to meet this goal?
The fact that we already work in distributed teams and the very nature of Agile methodologies that we have adopted means that we are ready to adapt to new areas and working conditions. As a result, the transition was immediate and it didn’t require any major revisions in terms of how we organize our work.
The adaptive, collaborative, self-organizing, and empowering capacity of teams, which are the basic principles of the methodologies adopted, have been fundamental to help us cope with the current situation. It is at times like this that we really test our ability to quickly adapt to major changes, and all the teams at Doxee have exceeded our expectations in this regard.
2. I imagine that the people in your team are on average young and also see the work environment as a moment of aggregation. How did they react and what do they think about the need to apply smart working? How has your team reacted to the need to apply smart working?
The ways that we communicate, how we socialise has fundamentally changed for young people, which make up a large part of our team. However, we can adopt some of the same tools that they use to enable agile working, tools for communication, exchanging ideas, collaboration that we can employ no matter where we are. I really appreciate seeing how digital alternatives are essentially replacing some of the typical ways that we work and communicate.
3. Thanks to the development and availability of new technologies, our work is less and less linked to a physical space. What role does technology play for Doxee as a company, and how does it support production processes in the current moment?
Technological innovation and the acceleration of the adoption of large-scale digital tools will play a key role in redefining the new normal. However, it is important to be aware that the transformation we’re experiencing in the current moment concerns both the culture of an organization and the technical aspects.
Technology must be there, true. But its role is a necessary condition for real agile work. The opportunity in this period, is the acceleration of a cultural change, with an orientation towards a work and a mode of evaluation that is oriented to results rather than inputs, offering teams greater autonomy and a contextual shift away from the traditional notions of space and time in which the work should be done.