What We’re Doing As a Company

In the last couple of weeks, the situation with COVID-19 has evolved very quickly for British Columbians and the required changes in our behaviour have been felt by everyone. Read on to learn what we are doing – both as a team and as a company – to support everyone we can including our team, our clients, our partners, the BC Government, and members of our community during these challenging times.

Remember – together, we got this!

Reallocating Resources

Depending on how much of this article you read, the most important message we want to share is that we are actively seeking ways to redeploy our team members to work that will help our communities. FreshWorks has recently been engaged by a number of health groups to further the development of tele-health and patient intake applications in BC to accelerate these organization’s ability to support the community as things evolve.

We are looking to reallocate our team’s capacity to healthcare services and/or education services providers to do our best to have a positive impact. Please let us know if there is anything you or your colleagues are discussing that we might be able to help with – just send an email to contact@freshworks.io and we’ll get back to you right away.

Supporting our Community

Local Business Bingo

The Victoria Chamber of Commerce released a great Local Business Bingo with ideas on how to support businesses in the community despite slowdowns and shutdowns. We’re participating as a company and also encouraging our team to participate.

Restaurant Gift Cards

We normally buy lunch for all-hands meetings at our office; we are sending gift cards to everyone so they can order takeout or delivery and help support local businesses for those occasions while we are working remotely.

Victoria Foundation Donation

On Monday FreshWorks joined hundreds of Victorians by donating to the Rapid Relief Fund organized by the Victoria Foundation. The goal of the Rapid Relief Fund is to quickly disburse funds to Registered Charities and Qualified Donees across the region. The Victoria community showed up and the target of $1million in donations was hit within the first 36 hours. The goal has since been increased to $2 million.

“Now more than ever, we need to support our community. Even a small donation, but from a lot of people, can go a long way and we’re proud to be able to contribute and help us get through these interesting times as a community.”

Sam Mod

Support Local Businesses

We shared this article with our team which provides a list of Greater Victoria businesses that are stepping up to the plate in their fight against COVID-19 so that we can all try and support them.

Mandatory Work From Home

FreshWorks has been remote-friendly for a while but last week we mandated that every person in the company begin working from home.

While this rapid pivot to 100% remote work required some adaptation, the tools we use allow for easy remote communication and collaboration. We have been fortunate to not have any notable interruptions in our ability to deliver our services to both the government and private sector.

Some of those adaptations may be useful for other companies that are supporting work from home. Check out What We’re Doing As a Team for more information on that. Our documentation and tips are often specific to our tools or processes, but we’ll include some of those tips in a separate article on Tips and Tricks for Working Remotely.

Here’s some of our team joining in for our first all-remote demo day this week. Once a month we all get together to listen to teams share what they’ve been working on over the past month.

Employee Assistance Program

In addition to health benefits, we offer an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) through Shepell Morneau to all our employees. The EAP is a proactive program offering immediate and confidential counselling and support services for employees and their families. We recognize that everyone is dealing with things differently during this time and we encourage our team to seek out any additional help they may need.

Sharing Support Resources

We’ve been compiling support resources for our team and adding them to a Google Site we made that is dedicated to all things COVID-19. Here’s the type of things we are including.

How To Stay Safe

• Links to official and trusted news sources for information on COVID-19 like the BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC)

• Information on testing and isolation from the BCCDC

• The BC Ministry of Health’s self-assessment tool.

• The live link to BC’s COVID-19 update

• Answers to FAQ provided by the BCCDC

• Information from BCCDC on childcare and schools

How To Stay Healthy

• Helpful articles on working from home with kids and a survival guide on work from home (WFH) for parents with kids at home too

• Information on maintaining mental health during COVID-19

• Mental Health and Psychosocial Considerations article from the World Health Organization

• Coronavirus: Managing Stress & Anxiety (Canadian Mental Health Association, Kelowna) – Tips and information on how to reduce and manage anxiety in the workplace due to the COVID-19 outbreak. FamilySparks also shared their Guide to Coping with Coronavirus Anxiety.

• Some tips on how to stay physically healthy (and calm) while social distancing.

How to Stay informed

Live Streams

• CTV News – daily COVID-19 update with Dr. Bonnie Henry and Health Minister Adrian Dix. at 3 pm

• Global News – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gives a daily press briefing in the morning, followed by a follow up from senior ministers. Times change between 8 am and 11am PST

Resource Links

• BC Centre for Disease Control

• World Health Organization

• Public Health Authority of Canada

• BC Ministry of Health

• Government of Canada Travel Advisories