How has COVID-19 impacted your Automotive job?

[Bridget]

Hello, Automotive workers! 

I hope this message finds you healthy and safe. I can't think of one industry that's not impacted by COVID-19. I'm particularly interested in how the Automotive industry has changed.

I'm wondering - how has COVID-19 changed your role/projects? How are you using Atlassian tools to help manage these changes?

Perhaps we can learn from each other's use cases! 

Cheers,

Bridget

[mmquasar]

Hi Bridget,

generally spoken we try to continue best we can. In regards to the Atlassian tools we quite often come back to Confluence and we use it for Scrum events like Product Backlog refinement or Retrospectives a lot. We use bullet lists and indenting for splitting stories and it works exceptionally well.

The Collaborative Editing feature is truly awesome and brings collaboration to another level. So glad our admins enabled this. Unfortunately Atlassian jumped off the chat train by abandoning Stride which torns a large hole for the most crucial part of collaboration which is 'Just talk'. So many opportunities here still waiting to be served e.g. Team mgmt incl chat rooms, chat room macro (did I mention that's really awkward juggling with MS Teams links?)

And no, Slack just is no option for Europe based companies in particular since Privacy Shield has fallen. Probably this gap is to be filled by 3rd parties in the future ...

Best, Michael

[Bridget]

Hi Michael! Thanks for your response. Yes, I too am using Confluence more than ever. And oh my gosh, the collaborative editing feature has changed my life ;). 

Really sorry to hear your company was impacted by the decision to sunset Stride - hopefully a better chat tool can fill that void - I know how important those quick messages are to moving work forward (especially if you're working from home at the moment). I didn't know that Slack isn't a good option for European countries - hopefully those Privacy Shields can be reinforced in the future? 

Cheers, hope you're having a good week so far! 

[Sebastian Tschörner]

For me it makes no difference if I am sitting in the office or at home when having a call with my colleagues in India. Nothing has changed.

Our private conversations are now a lot on COVID-19 and how the situation in Germany and India differs... and both sides would really like to visit each other again to keep up some friendships.

Our work stayed the same. If there would be a perfect monitoring on all the activities and you would look at the graphs, then I would guess that you would see no change at all.

[mmquasar]

That's interesting because to me it feels more stressful as there are no more "micro-breaks" like chatting to your desk neighbour or to the guy walking down the floor. Probably it depends a lot how your communication streams look like normally. 

Of course we also miss getting in touch with our partners in person a lot!

So for you no additional streamlining with your partners was necessary due to Covid-19 in regards to Atlassian tools or comms?

[Bridget]

@Sebastian Tschörner , very interesting! I'm sure your company is happy with that outcome - the best result is that everyone is happier and more productive WFH, but i think the best to expect is that activities and performance stay the same. 

How is the situation differing from India to Germany? I have many interesting chats with team members from our Bangalore office, and I think the biggest difference is that they are stuck inside in a city, which is not always ideal! 

[Bridget]

@mmquasar , totally hear you. I do miss seeing my colleagues in person! My team was already remote before the pandemic, but we did get together once a quarter for an offsite. Without those in-person meetings, it's definitely harder to make those in-person connections that consequently strengthen our working relationships! 

Has your company started doing any new practices to make up for the lack of "micro-breaks" etc.?

[Sebastian Tschörner]

It is homeoffice, noone can stop you from making your own "micro-breaks". Simply make a coffee or tea, sit on the couch in the living room and relax a bit. When a meeting is finished a few minutes early, you could stay for a short private chat with the colleagues. When my wife is also working from home and our non-meeting times match, we even go for a spontaneous 30min walk into the nearby forest or fields.

Normally I loose roughly an hour for the daily commute, so this time can be easily spend for breaks without extending the usual working time.

@Bridget : Not everyone stayed in Bangalore. Quite a few colleagues went to their family in their hometowns. "They can live with the little worse internet bandwidth in their hometowns" can be taken quite literally in this situation.

[Bridget]

@Sebastian Tschörner - I think you really hit the nail of the head here. "Micro-breaks"are a godsend after staring at Zoom for meetings and it is so nice to weave some time for connection into your workday. 

Also, quite happy that you're saving 2+ hours every day on your commute! I am a firm believer that the time spent commuting every day can be super draining, even if people just consider it as part of their job. Glad you are using that time to get work done so you can finish earlier!