The power of a pandemic shift

[badsha0025]

With April 2020 and work from home orders coming into effect, Smile (along with all the other office-based employers) shifted our team to be fully working from home. Having company-provided laptops made the initial switch reasonably painless. I can’t imagine how that went for companies that relied on tower PCs.

Creating home offices
Having a laptop at home doesn’t always mean you’ve got a workable setup, though. Pre-COVID, sure you could spend an afternoon working from a coffee shop or your kitchen table, but the former just wasn’t possible anymore, and the latter simply wasn’t always feasible—at least not without some help.

“A man is only as good as his tools” – Emmert Wolf

To make creating a workspace more feasible, every person on the sweden phone data team was granted a $1000 available credit to create a home office setup. Whether you’d just started or had been a long-time employee, if you had worked out of the HQ or lived on the other side of the world, you got the credit.

Our work from home credit is as flexible as possible, too. If you need a desk or chair, use the credit. If you needed a new router, use the credit. If your internet speed wasn’t fast enough and you wanted to upgrade, use the credit. Power bars, keyboards, mice, seat cushions, headphones—if you could think of something to help your setup feel just that little bit better, you had some cold hard cash you could use towards it.