Reported by Sean Foley:
This year has been one for the books, in more than one way. Companies of all sizes are making tactical changes to stay afloat while keeping their employees’ safety and health at the forefront of managerial decisions. The largest and most notable shift has been the switch to the work from home model. While it may seem easy to identify all the downsides to this change, let’s focus on the upsides.
One of the most significant impacts of the transition to working from home is the sudden realization that you do not have to limit yourself geographically. If you found yourself back in the job market due to the pandemic, do not limit yourself to jobs in your immediate area. You now have limitless opportunities to explore a new position. We here at SpinSys have typically recruited new talent in the areas immediately surrounding our offices. Now, with that restriction lifted, we can hire all across the country. SpinSys had employees working in 16 different states pre-pandemic, and we are now up to 23 and counting.
Another unexpected advantage of teleworking has been the accessibility of other team members. I can get in contact with anybody at any time. This is a big plus in my particular field as an IT Recruiter, where timely communications are vital to securing the best talent in a competitive market. Sometimes you find yourself working later hours, whereas if you were still in the office, you would’ve shut your laptop and hit the road already. It is crucial to separate yourself from your work life and home life; however, these two worlds suddenly overlap with mostly positive consequences.
From top left: Lou Ferrucci, Sean Foley, Bhavana Goyal, Jennifer Nuessen
Reported by: Bhavana Goyal
It’s been nine months since we began to work from home, and what a journey it has been! Two members of the Performance and Analysis for Continuous Excellence (PACE) team have been hired at SpinSys right when the pandemic started. They have never seen the SpinSys office or met the PACE team members in-person to date.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I was concerned about starting as a new member of the team and managing a 100% remote team. I felt this would be very challenging and risky. However, the PACE team has worked very well together by continuously performing and accomplishing continuous excellence, just like the name states. The team has not only excelled in delivering all the milestones as planned but also bonded professionally.
Some of the significant advantages of working from home are:
- No pressure of dressing up and putting on makeup before coming to work.
- No work commute, which increases productivity and reduces travel stress.
- High flexibility in work schedules based on individual schedules.
For example, one of our team members had to work out of a hospital in another state. She mentioned what she loved remote work because she could work and take care of her loved one without taking time off. A few other PACE team members have been able to use the commute time to exercise and improve their overall physical and mental health.
While we look forward to working at the Spinsys office soon, we are truly blessed to continue being a high functioning team that strives to perform over and above, despite the given situation.
Reported By: Jennifer Nuessen
More people have transitioned to working from home in the past year and many struggled with navigating their jobs and maintaining growing workforce relationships. These last few weeks, we have seen multiple articles released saying that work from home just isn’t working. Here at SpinSys, that has never been an issue.
I’ve been at SpinSys for over ten years. I started in our small regional Kansas office with no more than eight employees, while the management team worked from our Virginia headquarters office. From the beginning, I was introduced to SpinSys’ culture of engagement. We would have regular phone meetings, constant IM communication, and group training sessions from our technical training lead in Virginia. We rapidly developed a rapport with our co-workers in Virginia that was reinforced through scrum meetings, frequent calls, and Instant messenger. By doing these things, we found that when we traveled for business and saw each other in person, it was like we had been in the office physically together yesterday.
Move forward a few years, and I became our organizational training lead. This brought new challenges, how do you institute a company training program when you have remote workers across the country and several offices? Not only that, but how do you get to know new employees? To answer these questions, I started by scheduling a phone call with all our new hires on their first-day discussing training classes, how our Learning Management System worked, when onboarding training was due, and a few minutes getting to know each other. Following that, I was available when they had questions regarding training and career development. We transitioned them to our first online LMS system in a series of training rollouts for our current employees. Moving to an online LMS allowed us to deliver, manage, and record training online for the first time. Employees had access to their training records and liked the convenience of taking training online.
As we grew in size, we transitioned our LMS to a more sophisticated out of the box application. This transition allowed a more seamless onboarding and training experience for our current and new employees. The main focus, though, with the training department and our company is constant, clear communication and getting to know the people within our organization.
Reported by: Lou Ferrucci
The year 2020 has been challenging for many companies not poised to resource or leverage a remote workforce properly. While many were dealing with the new reality COVID introduced, SpinSys didn’t skip a beat of continuous support to our customers. Our successful cloud transition for the Defense Health Agency was deemed by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Professional Services Engagement Manager as the fastest of its scale conducted in AWS’s history! Our team, from numerous states and geographic locations, executed this accelerated migration project six times faster than scheduled with no face-to-face meetings (after the pre-COVID kickoff) due to travel restrictions and social distancing guidance.
At SpinSys, remote work remains intrinsic to the professional and efficient support of our federal customers! We have a proven history of recruiting, hiring, and retaining talented professionals close to our corporate offices and around the country by supporting and valuing our entire workforce’s contributions. While the provision of exceptional computing resources and collaborative tools (e.g., instant messaging, video/audio conferencing) optimize productivity, our corporate culture provides the collegial fabric for interwoven and connected teams regardless of location. SpinSys disproves the myth remote work is an unsustainable, temporary necessity with an unwavering commitment to its integral role in delivering enterprise sustainment, modernization, and cloud-based integration solutions for our customers!
