Mediawide is a small global company with multiple offices in Europe, the US, and India. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, we were all housed in our local offices, working together in small teams.
We are all starting to move out of lockdown; nevertheless, we will continue to work differently once this pandemic is over. We have already heard from one of our main partners, Opentext Inc., that they are closing over 50% of their local offices. This is because working remotely is just as efficient as working from the office. Their remote workers have maintained productivity throughout this pandemic.
Mediawide is now reducing the number of employees working in the office because of the exact same reasons.
At Mediawide we have several different departments with different numbers of employees. The largest is Development and Production, with over 80% of our employees in these two departments alone. The remaining 20% are located in Sales, Marketing, Quality Assurance, and Accounts.
Mediawide is mainly a development house with products such as the Personalized Video Platform, and the long time running Creative Management Platform being developed in-house. Development teams are always working on an agile development process, and so working from home doesn’t hinder this process. Having stand-ups remotely via Zoom, development teams can plan sprints and releases with confidence.
Since many Mediawide Clients also use our creative production teams, these teams are some of the more challenging to get working from home. There are issues of large file transfers, disk space, hardware, etc. But with the plan Mediawide had from the beginning of the pandemic, we had all the remote equipment required to cover our primary production workers.
Like the development team, we have workflows and processes to adhere to, so we needed to modify these somewhat to help the remote working. Some of these required holding assets locally rather than centrally due to bandwidth issues. Still, moving forward, once the lockdown is lifted, we will be able to overcome these hurdles with faster and more reliable internet access to these workers’ homes.
As the production elements Mediawide creates are uploaded to our Creative Management Platform and Personalized Video Platform, these platforms already support remote workers. Creating print, digital, and video templates, then uploading them to the relevant servers is seamless, and works out of the box. Most of the clients we work with actually have their own CMP or PVP instances, so we would have to upload remotely anyway. Working from home, or the office is the same, as we ultimately always upload to their own servers.
Mediawide also uses Mediawide platforms internally to manage the creative process. When new graphics are required for our Blog pages or social media campaigns, the marketing team can quickly and efficiently create these from templates in the Creative Management Platform. This is the whole idea behind the Creative Management Platform – allowing companies to efficiently and rapidly create new marketing material based on templates.
Apart from the business cases to move from an office-based company to a remote working company. The lifestyles of the employees have also improved. Some of our employees had long journeys to and from the office every day. These can be over an hour-long, stuck in polluting traffic, so not having that commute enhances the quality of life. With the Indian office also working with European and US companies, some employees have to start late and finish late. With the natural breaks during the working day, they are now able to spend time with their families, which they could not do before. They would often only see their kids before school as they worked to a later GMT plus time zone, but now they manage to spend time with them every day.
There is still a need for physical offices for accounts admin and in-person meetings. Nevertheless, these can be done from much smaller offices, saving Mediawide quite a large chunk of overheads.
Mediawide is not going anywhere during this current situation. However, we are learning to operate leaner and more efficiently while still maintaining, or even increasing productivity.
