Michael Peachey, VP of User Experience (UX) at RingCentral, says they saw the lockdown coming and got their team up and running without skipping a beat.
The UX team at RingCentral is a global operation; designers in California collaborate across many time zones.
“We had a two-day rehearsal at home to iron out all the kinks before the state issued a shutdown. Of course, we also had the benefit of being a US team that designs these collaborative products"
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Michael Peachey[/caption]
"A lot has to do with the collaboration tools that knowledge workers, typically they are those that can work from home, use. Many had relied on in person meetings for collaboration, so we had to get the best practices and protocols in place. For instance, we couldn’t have VPs sending out texts at 8.30pm as people at home will feel compelled to respond to prove their commitment – people have lives to live.
I believe that with the pandemic we have a huge social experiment going on right now and if this lasts another month or two then I don’t see that we will go back to our old ways of working.
Amid concerns over productivity we shut our China team office early but in fact productivity went up. We found that people were working longer; they were using the time normally spent commuting at their desks and at the end of the day people just stayed there. That is not sustainable.
As a result, our best practice has become to do a stand up with the teams at the end of the day because that’s a signal to everyone that the day is over – goodbye and stop working. It’s proved very useful for us. Look, people wake up when they wake up, our problem was that staff didn’t know when to leave.”
