ManGO!'s online session "Back to the Future: Business After Quarantine"

Readjustment to an office environment after remote work, weakened or enhanced performance, fear of getting sick and the need for social distance, experience in office communication via a microphone, and mastering technical skills without face-to-face mentoring - these and other things were topics of the online session we held on July 2. We also invited Ekaterina Gulina as a special guest to present her interesting case. Read on to learn more about the event!

Mission: Run an online session for ManGO!'s guests to discuss the different solutions companies use to respond to the changing environment.

Background:

With the quarantine coming to an end, each company will have some tough decisions to make. Should the employees come back to the office or stay remote? Or maybe a piecemeal solution will be more effective? How to organize the office workflow in pandemic conditions, and how to manage employees in a crisis and COVID-19 risk context? Over the past two years, we all have accumulated stockpiles of questions, ideas, and thoughts to share and discuss. Our solution was to provide a forum for this discussion.

Solution:

The feedback received from the previous meetings proves a group discussion to be particularly popular among ManGO! event attendees. That is why this time we allowed more time for this type of activity. Of course, the real highlight of the meeting was the report made by Ekaterina Gulina, the Director of Personnel Management at JSC NVBS.

To make the event happen, we used the traditional online meeting tools:

• Zoom videoconferencing platform.
• Surveygizmo survey software.
• Mural online facilitation board.
• We also used some interactive Zoom features including labels and breakout rooms.

Ekaterina shared her experience in change adaptation and elaborated the specifics of moving the core business functions from an offline to online format. Her report was primarily focused on the company's reconsideration of mass recruitment and employee adaptation processes. Through rapid adaptation to current events, they managed to restart the business workflow in 5 days while maintaining the recruitment funnel and even improving some regions' performance.

The session provided the participants with an opportunity to exchange ideas and draw a number of conclusions about how to handle uncertainties and hold their ground in the unstable VUCA world. We hope the event made them all more seasoned and confident, as well as better prepared for the challenges ahead.