Supporting our colleagues while working from home

Of course, the difficulty with planning was that no one knew how long we’d be living the pandemic. And with 97% of our employees continuing to work full time, in the initial couple of months we focused on developing and launching a training and education programme around improving our employees’ product knowledge and educating them on best practices to work from home, weekly at home workouts and meditation. Following the success of this, the meditation sessions still run twice weekly to this day! 

In addition, we were also lucky enough to attend live workout and stretching sessions hosted by Olympic athletes, thanks to the partnership that Bridgestone has with the Olympics and Paralympics. On top of this, we also partnered with a trained yoga instructor to host an online stretching at your desk session, applicable to all ages and abilities, the instructor gave us some simple routines and tips on how to stretch at your desk – for those times when it’s too hard to get away. 

Around this time, our social committee teams collaborated and started hosting virtual “Keep calm and drink coffee” meetings, to help replicate the kitchen coffee break vibes a lot of us were missing without the office. This was also a unique opportunity for people from all of our global locations and from across different departments to come together and chat for the first time. It also helped many cope with the anxiety of the unknown during the pandemic. 

Company wide virtual pub quizzes became a regular occurrence with everyone stuck inside at home. These events always took place after working hours and were a chance for our employees to sit back, relax with a drink and have fun. The negative side the quizzes – we’ve revealed how competitive we all are! 

Many of us found new ways to keep busy during lockdown. With this in mid, we set our teams many challenges during 2020 to show off their skills. Whether it was a dance challenge, a cooking photo or best selfie challenge, it was great to see the teams coming together to create unique videos and photos despite the distances and lockdowns!

Have a look at what our colleagues have been up to during our #stayhomechallenge:

We understand that the lockdowns have been hard on everyone, but we have noticed that parents particularly have had a difficult time. In-between being a parent for extended hours of the day, keeping to work commitments and on top of all of that home-schooling, we wanted to offer parents in our company some additional support. Therefore, our HR team offered an additional 5 days annual leave over a restricted period of time for parents who had children that were unable to go to school. This extra time meant that the parents could bring some more time back to their children without the added work pressures. 

In addition, we partnered with Start Within, a company that specialises in employee wellbeing to host a series of Parents Evening sessions. The idea was to create a safe, open, honest and judgement free space for parents to talk with each other and share their experiences of parenting during lockdown.  

Throughout the lockdown, we have been encouraging our employees to get-up and move – either outside if the rule permit, or inside, by doing walking meetings. These are a great way to move, get away from your desk, connect with your colleagues and take part in a productive meeting. We’ve been loving to see some of the photos from the walking meetings taking place all over the world.