Our take on working from home
Crisis situations clearly reveal character. And we were us in the #directfromhome mode, in the last little over two months of working from home at the time of the pandemic.
We immediately tightened our ranks so that our partners can rely on us in crisis moments, but not only that. We felt obligated not to allow the industry to come to a halt. We wanted to be a mobilizer. To send word that we must be strong when it is hard.
We talked, wrote, designed and respected.
The United Group, which we are a part of, donated $3m in aid, in order to end the crisis as soon as possible and reduce the number of people affected by the pandemic to a minimum.
It laid the foundations and then we went into action in several fields.
First we initiated #CarpeDMday where almost every day, one of the employees, through social networks, presented their home routine. How the work environment is arranged, what it looks like, how they relax and have fun, including the most interesting thing: food. The point was that we encourage ourselves to be able to get everything done and that we can do anything.
On the tenth day of working from home, Direct Talks From Home webinars started, on which we addressed professionals on various topics. Hence, the webinars discussed the media, brands, trends, innovations, human resources, corporate communications, social responsibility and, of course, the unavoidable topic of Covid-19. More than 30 speakers participated in Direct Talks and the number of visitors who listened to the webinars exceeded 1500. If you haven’t watched one yet, you can find them all on our YouTube account.
In parallel, webinars were organized among employees. More than 20 employees played the role of lecturers in the Direct Online EDA project, presenting to their colleagues their respective field of expertise from the creative, digital, media and HR fields. They shared solutions, examples, successful projects and the discussions were lively and inspirational. The aim was to maintain team spirit, but also learn something more during the quarantine.
The employees were also been offered a set of Direct Support mechanisms for adjusting to working from home — from lectures on the topic of how to reconcile office and family duties, through workshops for developing emotional intelligence to taking part in psychological support webinars and the possibility of scheduling individual psychological sessions.
We also supported the Applause at Eight ritual. Our creative team, in cooperation with Alma Quatro, created a OOH campaign, which for some was craziness, because who on earth walks the streets during the curfew? But we thought it was perfect, because it was precisely our heroes who walked the streets, the very “recipients” of the Applause at Eight, who thus could see what awaited them at 8 PM, giving them, we hoped, enough energy to cope with yet another day of heavy fighting.
But there’s more. If you happened to lay your hands on April’s edition of the weekly Nedeljnik, you should know that its cover “Covid19 – the Invisible Enemy”, worthy of the Time Magazine, was created by our Art Director Stefan Gajic, who together with Buro Serbia played with the most famous front pages of international magazines, imagining how they would look like during the coronavirus pandemic.
Speaking of the creative team, there is also One Post a Day. The design part of the team published every day an artistic post on their Instagram profile, making the day of all art lovers. We warmly recommend you to visit the Instagram page of Direct Media Creative (DMC).
In the first week of working from the office, we launched the Direct PERSPECTIVES – a survey on doing business in Serbia in the post-Covid period. Because your views are important to us. Because we need to know how to proceed.
Are we satisfied with what we achieved? We are.
And even more motivated to continue creating. To be a driver and a pillar in times of uncertainty.
Your DM Team
#directfromoffice