We all see nowadays the psychological repercussions of the COVID-19 crisis, as this recent article states, and it is also the case in corporations. To help with the situation, IT services department plays a central role as it enables communication and collaboration between teams providing a secure and stable environment.

As organizations need to adapt their operating mode during and now “after” the pandemic, how can they combine security with a great level of interactivity? That was the question that we had to answer quickly and efficiently in Doctolib.

We will see in this article how we adapted our operative model, especially in our offices at Doctolib, in order to organize a serene and secure “back to the office” experience for everyone.

How can we adapt company meetings to a different workplace occupation ?

In order to respect barrier gestures we divided by two all our meeting rooms capacity. For that we performed the modification directly in our productivity suite (Google Workplace) and displayed “Covid” capacities for each room. It’s more simple like this for employees to choose the best room and do a meeting in a secure way.

An agile system to keep interactivity alive in big meetings.

Our main challenge was to maintain a great level of interactivity while having to host large scale meetings. Here’s how we managed to combine efficient tools and a high level of engagement between employees.

Of course, it was no longer possible to put 500 or 800 employees in the same location at the same time to celebrate the end of a quarter or to broadcast huge corporate announcements. Thankfully, we were already ready for that before COVID because after our move to our HQ in Levallois Perret (Paris), we decided put in place a streaming system to show everything that is happening in our Conference Center of Levallois (150 seats) into coffees area screens on each floor of the building. The advantage of this system is to be able to broadcast announcements to employees without asking them to go to a unique central place not secure in terms of protective measures. With this in place, people are splitted in 12 different areas in the building to hear and see the presentation of our CEO every month. People can also decide to follow events from their personal laptop at their desk or from home remotely. It’s completely up to the employee. This broadcast system is based on multicast technology and IGMP. We are equipped with Cisco Meraki switches and some Crestron NVX-350 for sending and receiving HDMI flow over our network.

What alternative communication method to email to engage employees?

In the previous point, we spoke about the broadcast system in all coffee areas in our Campus. We wanted to take advantage of these screens also when they are not used to broadcast large meetings and it was natural to think about digital signage. This system was also present before the COVID. It’s basically a player where we can play a playlist of visual contents displayed continuously on each common area. These contents are managed by our internal communication team to push and update the content to all the screens in the building. The main player is a Google Chromebox with a kiosk app called “Playengo” and this app is a SAAS platform to manage playlists, contents and players in different locations. We can make modifications directly from this app even remotely and very easily.

We continue to use this system to communicate on incoming events, meetups or important news and it’s appreciated by employees.

Fake meeting attendance in meeting rooms.

Our rooms in Levallois were appearing all the time busy in Google Calendar, but soon we discovered that was false for two reasons. First when employees booked a room without really using it and secondly because of recurring meetings. Indeed, since COVID, presence days at office are now for the majority of our employees 2 days per week so all the bookings done before COVID were no longer relevant. What we did to solve this problem is to change our room booking app. We chose to use Envoy Rooms in order to display the status of each meeting room in real time. This app has 2 powerful features to solve our issue. First feature is “Room check-in”, if you do not check-in your room 5 min before or after the beginning of the meeting, the room is automatically released for other employees. (You can check-in physically from the tablet or remotely from Slack in a reminder at the moment of the meeting) Secondly with “Recurring meeting cleanup” : Missing 3 check-ins removes the room from the calendar event and notify the event owner. Some analytics shows that attendance rate is 43%. (Percentage of scheduled meetings that were checked in). We clearly realized now that at any time of the day it’s easier to find an available room for a meeting thanks to these two precious features.

Digitalizing visitor registration at the welcome area.

To limit physical contact between external visitors and welcome employees, we decided to put in place “Envoy Visitors”. It’s another product in the Envoy suite. This product allows visitors to register themself on a web application instead of on physical documents.

This application can be used on a tablet at the welcome area or directly from the web browser of the smartphone of the visitor by scanning a QR Code. Visitors can follow a process to fill in theirs personal information and who they are visiting. In this case their host is immediately notified by a Slack notification or an SMS of his presence.

Flex office as the new normal mode for everyone ?

Doctolib is hiring more than 100 new employees per month, this number sounds crazy but it’s been the reality for multiple years. When I arrived at Doctolib in 2019, we were 500 employees. Today in 2022 we are more than 2500. If we take the example of our headquarter in France, before 2020, we were dispatched to 4 locations in Paris. We moved all employees to a big campus in Levallois Perret just before the pandemic in January 2020. Unfortunately, with repetitives lockdowns we didn’t take advantage of our campus at 100%. This campus can welcome 1200 employees maximum at the same time and we are already 1400 employees assigned to France Headquarter.

That’s why we had to find a solution to be able to continue our growth and respect our building’s capacity. Our HR department put in place “flex office” as the new standard and each employee has to choose between 3 possible modes : Office based (daily presence at the office), Remote (mostly remote with an occasional presence at the office for team rituals) and Hybrid (2 or 3 days of remote per week).

Thanks to this organization, it was comfortable for all employees during the beginning of the pandemic to choose their preferred mode by themself. We decided to keep this organization in place today in order to respect the new living arrangements of everyone and also because it gives us the opportunity to continue to be compliant with our building’s capacity limits for some more months.

Of course, all of this new organization cannot be activated without software to manage daily presence, building limits… We put in place a Saas solution to manage that but the engagement of the employees on that new application was not good and we are currently managing to boost usages or plan to change the solution.

Conclusion

We all hope that COVID 19 will be completely behind us soon, we all know that it can come back at any time. IT had a huge role to play during the 2 previous years in order to maintain security and interactivity for employees. We are now completely ready if needed in case of a future new crisis. This pandemic helped us to develop our remote policy, our security and our communications tools internally. What we realize now is that it’s still difficult to offer the same interactivity level than when employees are in the same room for brainstorming. Maybe new technologies like virtual reality or augmented reality will soon become the new standard in all companies. We have to be prepared and also we have to be careful of the impacts these new technologies can have on our health. Stay safe.