The COVID19 crisis is something few of us predicted or imagined. January 22nd was the first day Romania started to take preventive actions against the virus. Two months later the president declared a state of emergency all across the country. We are now one month and a half into social distancing and home isolation. 

How is this pandemic affecting business life as we know it? I invited 3 company representatives to help me paint the state of the Timisoara business market and point out some measures to help company owners keep things going. And what great ideas I found!

Cristian Nicolae, Online Marketing Manager at web2lead.ro, a digital marketing agency, Google Partner & HubSpot Gold Certified Agency, confirms my initial thoughts that this virus should have been isolated quickly, without a global impact on the business environment, similar to SARS in 2002-2003. A few weeks before the state of emergency, I believe that everyone understood that this crisis will affect us in all aspects of our lives - personal relationships, work relationships, buying behavior, business relationships, resource allocation, public health services. He also says that history has a way of repeating itself and that he expected things to come to a halt taking into account that 12 years have passed since the last crisis. But no one expected the blow to come from an area outside the economy, business, or political life.

Businesses that managed to survive the initial shock turned an eye to raise awareness and protect both employees and collaborators. Diana Simu, Head of HR at 123Formbuilder, a local IT company with projects all around the globe, has reassured me they keep putting people first, with a tech infrastructure in place, a 10 days work from home policy and a fully mobile office by use of laptops. Nowadays they keep close through their people management software, and all colleagues can still see and hear each other every day thanks to this common hub, driving people engagement even further. Having a previous mission to create a digital HR department, the team adapted easily to the social distancing regulations and witnessed no disruptions whatsoever from a professional point of view. Emotionally speaking the HR team has always been very close: they took all kinds of events into the digital world, from various live celebrations moved to online tools, creating dedicated Slack channels to keep up the bonding and the communication across the company. Diana says that the emotional impact in their teams is estimated as being quite low as they keep the sense of belonging alive. They measure the psychological impact through employees` surveys and the scores that came back are very good and quite high, which indicates high spirits among the teams. 

Vlad Poenar, General Manager at PiNTeam Romania, a company providing industry-leading consulting services in automotive engineering, confessed that March 2020 marked the beginning of a fully remote office in Timisoara, although the automotive business was long thought of not being able to sustain such a flexible policy. Having previously equipped all employees with a laptop was the first thing that helped PiNTeam adapt to the new distancing norms. It also helped that the teams often used to communicate on project matters with a known frequency established in the past. Therefore, there was no feeling of distance, and professional relationships continued online - says Vlad. Moreover, the mass production projects started together with their partners from DENSO, continue during this period as well. There wasn’t any talk of slowing things down, as new projects have started, especially on the research side. In terms of staff growth, PiNTeam did not stop its recruitment activity. During this period the struggle was to adapt interviews and communication to exclusively online channels. Challenge that was successfully fulfilled, as numbers speak for themselves: thus, starting with March, we have three new colleagues, and in May we'll be joined by four other colleagues, declares Vlad. 

Web2lead employees were also prepared for extensive work from home even before this crisis: We had already developed an online infrastructure that allows us to operate from any location with internet access on the globe. To protect the employees, we quickly decided to work from home 2 weeks before the state of emergency was declared. We kept salaries unchanged, as well as bonuses or other financial benefits. Cristian Nicolae says it is vital for companies to invest in the adoption of online technologies: presentation websites, social media visibility, online stores, online promotion and to support tools for their business - collaborative documents on the cloud, applications for project management or tasks, billing applications, teleconferencing applications, electronic timekeeping, technical support, sales CRM applications.

In addition to all the measures mentioned so far, 123FormBuilder comes with a couple of fresh initiatives. Diana was so kind as to share some of them for inspiration. We give Kudos in HiBob, appreciating each other whenever we feel we can celebrate a good initiative or a great colleague contribution. Then, we also stay close with 3 different engagement surveys and we appreciate colleagues through rewards programs like the 123 AlmightyBuilder Award. Onboarding new colleagues is much easier with the HR software they use and they have workflows put in place to ease the entire process, emphasized by a special channel called #5thingsaboutme. Not to mention the regular shoutouts to keep people posted with updates and changes, open questions communication sessions, formal and informal channels dedicated to questions or anxieties employees might have during COVID times. A special channel is #HappyFriday with picture challenges to capture people's new work environment. And what can be more catchy than a weekly creative #GIF battle contest on Trello?

We all hope life comes back to a normal course, although we are still to define this new normality. What is the next step for companies exiting the state of emergency? We will resume the activity gradually and we are already discussing a plan to avoid all our colleagues working simultaneously from the office. We want to organize ourselves in such a way as to respect the recommendations of the specialists, to take into account the priorities on projects and last, but not least, the more obvious needs of some colleagues to get out of this isolation, says PiNTeam representative, Vlad Poenar. 

123Formbuilder is planning a huge welcome back party once they are safe and sound back in the office. They will celebrate all birthday anniversaries that were held online and enjoy some proper live socializing. As soon as present conditions will allow us, we will get back to our good old habits, team buildings and parties like karaoke, bowling, pool party, internal hackathons, trivia nights which are a great way to facilitate bonding with team members, declares Diana Simu with an optimistic tone. 

I hope that a major part of our local businesses will survive this crisis and that we all find a way to rebuild long-lasting partnerships.