COVID-19

Since March, I have seen dozens if not hundreds of articles and posts related to remote working and how the COVID-19 situation has already changed the face of working forever. The news still keep on coming and the change is already showing. Latest polls say that the amount of people who plan to work more from home after it is necessary due to COVID-19 has doubled since March.

It seems that some companies have been completely unprepared while other companies have been doing this since forever. Those that were not ready had to naturally adjust; some fared well, some not so much.

For example, the University of Eastern Finland has adapted so much that they are starting the upcoming semesters with distance teaching even as it’s not mandatory given the current state of new cases of COVID-19 in Finland.

Some companies have even thrived. Clearly, those that provide tools for remote working are accelerating and releasing great Q2 results.

Home office or office at home?

This much should be clear: home is neither an office, nor a workplace (for most of us.) You can build an office in your home, but there are certain limitations. Not everyone has the space, for example. People who live in the metropolitan areas of the world have less and less space in their apartments. It is still possible to build a home office if you are living in a country like Finland but try to do that in Hong Kong or London.

However, your office does not have to be in a tall building located somewhere in the city equipped with cubicles (or clean desk open space, yey!), meeting rooms and the complimentary coffee machine and water cooler combo. Most of our partners and peers can confirm that your office can be anything from a normal apartment to a custom-built space in your home village. All you really need is a table, chair, electricity, and a reliable internet connection.

Into the wild

Finnish people are lucky, because most of us have summer cottages, so in April it became quite popular to move your laptop and yourself to the forest or island of your choice and set-up your working station there. This is the perfect solution for a country with the best mobile network in the world and unlimited mobile data for practically everyone and everywhere. For a moment there was a hitch to this downshifters’ paradise while the government put the capital metropolitan region under siege and restricted the access from and to the region due to the fear that sick people would put too much burden on the healthcare systems of smaller counties.

People working in the pharmaceutical industry are used to working with colleagues from several different countries and backgrounds but probably a PV associate calling in from a cottage on a small island would still be a rarity.

International pharmaceutical companies

Pharmaceutical companies usually split the countries into clusters, to make things more regional but still almost everyone attends international teleconferences daily or weekly. Flying to visit team members or to attend a conference in other countries is a monthly activity for many. Personally, I would guess that for us the biggest change brought on by the COVID-19 situation will probably be that the webcams will be switched on intentionally and not just by mistake caused by yet another new teleconferencing app or an update rolled over during the weekend that we were unaware of.

The tools are there, but are we using them?

In other industries, such as software development, the webcams have been the standard for ages. Books about distance working have been highlighting the importance of using different type of technologies correctly. The number of regular youtubers is in the millions. Most of us have posted some type of selfies on Instagram or Facebook.

Pharmaceutical industry is used to remote working, international collaboration and having TCs with colleagues all around the world but our industry is still about couple decades behind other businesses when it comes to the tools that we use.

The most concerning part of this is that the technical inferiority gets worse the closer we get to the patient. In the R&D phase pharmaceutical industry uses and develops cutting edge technology but when we are in direct contact with patients, we are suddenly happy if our computer system supports a mouse.

Even countries like Finland are unable to track electronically the vaccinations received by a person. We still use cardboard books where we write down the vaccination dates. Don’t even mention getting all the patient information in one database.

The Tepsivo way of doing things

Our company was founded by people living in different countries during the COVID-19 lockdown. On paper, the timing or the working environment(s) could not be considered ideal. These conditions had almost no impact on the ideology of the company. It was our goal from the beginning to approach pharmaceutical industry from an experienced point of view but still trying to disrupt and significantly improve the ways of working of the industry.

Tepsivo’s official address is a virtual office which gives us the chance to receive mail and have reception services but does not require us to pay rent for a space that we currently do not need. The virtual office gives us the flexibility to rent a working space or meeting room for an hour or for a month, if we want to have a f2f meeting. And this works around the world, at a minute’s notice, if really needed.

Operating without a permanent physical location frees us from several burdens, like rent and cleaning, but gives us a lot of flexibility to work closely with our clients or to collaborate within the company. We hope that the time of face-to-face co-working is not over, because even though there are great ways of working remotely, it will be hard to surpass the experience of meeting someone in person, working out a solution together and grabbing a beer afterwards to celebrate it (and yes, we are aware that drinking beer online has been probably the most popular way to use Zoom lately.)

At Tepsivo, we create all our processes to support remote and flexible working. You can do your work on a beach in Thailand, in a cubicle at an office in New Jersey or at your grandmother’s house, whichever suits you the best.

This blog was written on a terrace in Italy, reviewed in a kitchen in the Czech Republic, polished in a café in Switzerland, re-edited in a Finnish cottage, and finally published out of Spain.

Martti at home

For me personally, it has been a surprise that remote working has been such a big change for so many people around me. It seems that I have lived in yet another bubble. I have always had the chance to work from home and have taken this for granted.

Bad example

In my past work experience, I got to understand the freedom that comes with remote working is a privilege, and not a generally accepted habit. Working at my previous company, I had the chance to dictate how much “home office” the team members I managed could take. As I did not have anything against people working from home, I basically gave them free hands to do as they like. Most of them decided to take home office regularly but chose to limit the remote working time to a day or two per week.

When my team expanded to other countries, we ran into a problem. The remote working policy did not generally apply there. These offices had their own rules laid down by the office manager. The same office manager happened to be responsible for three countries, in which all of them I had team members. In one of the countries we had a team member who was working from home full-time but in the two other countries, remote working was possible only with a special permission requested individually from the office manager (who was responsible for more than 300 people.)

The HR of those two countries were checking daily the arrival time of every employee and the line manager would receive an email if employee would fail to arrive to the office by 9.00 am. The explanation for these insane rules was that: “it is the way things are done in these countries”.

This is just one example from my personal experience. I am sure that similar situation can occur in all industries and all companies. Sometimes there might be some valid reasons behind policies like the one described above. Generation gap definitely affects the situation to some extent. Also, the practices differ greatly between fields of work. I am not trying to heavily advocate against working in the office, because the importance of personal contact cannot be underestimate; working from office can bring a lot of fun. Also, there is a reason why conferences and different industry meetups are still popular. Personally, I wouldn’t want to step away from the office environment completely, a distinction between the couch and office is still needed and I’m a lot more productive working in an “office” type of environment.

Going all remote is not the way

I have personally tried to work in isolated places, something between an office and home, but without the rent of an office or the temptations and responsibilities of home. COVID-19 pushed us to a difficult situation because most of the offices, co-working spaces, and libraries (my current favorite) were closed and left us with few choices. After the libraries in Finland opened again, I have continued working from there. The new central library of Helsinki provides working spaces for everyone including workshops, meeting rooms, workstations, recording studios, video game rooms etc. For free, all in the heart of the city.

Another one of my favorite places for remote working for the past two decades has been at my grandmother’s. She is a 90-year-old retired high school teacher living by herself in a house with 20 rooms. She knows how to give peace to a person working but also keeps them fed and clothed. Of course, COVID-19 limited my usage of this working space as well.