Staying connected during a pandemic

Before the world went into lockdown, roughly 60% of Snowplowers were already working from home, so logistically, we’ve not had to make too many changes to the way we work. Zoom calls were already a very big part of our lives and it was quite normal to go months without seeing our team members in the flesh. Saying that, nobody was really ready to spend the most part of the year in the confines of their own home.

Since March, we’ve been trying to find more and more ways to keep the team engaged, which has been pretty tricky considering we have Snowplowers in time zones ranging from GMT-7 to GMT+8.

Jen from our Customer Success team says “It is not the easiest to feel connected with most of my coworkers working in very different time zones, but I do participate in our weekly Donut chats (which are awesome) and I also try to strike up conversations with people as I want to be friends with all of my fellow Snowplowers.”

Donut is a Slack App which pairs people within the company and encourages them to meet for a virtual coffee and chat. This is just one of the things that we’ve introduced over lockdown this year.

We have a very active #snowplow-social Slack channel, where we start the day by saying good morning to each other. Throughout the day, we’re constantly sharing homelife updates, painfully relatable memes and interesting articles we find online that we think everyone will enjoy reading.

Quizzes and online games have also played a pretty big part in keeping us all connected, especially at the start of lockdown. We played a very fun game of “Through the keyhole” where we all submitted internal and external shots of our homes and the rest of the team had to guess who lived where. It was a great way to get to know team members we perhaps wouldn’t normally speak to on a day-to-day basis.

Nobody knows how much longer this will all be going on for, but the People Ops team at Snowplow are trying their best to keep everyone smiling and connected. We’re all in this together, after all!