Our Head of Sales Galina Goduhina on remote work, team spirit, and open source collaboration tools

Galina Goduhina, Head of Sales at ONLYOFFICE, shared her thoughts on remote work and using open source collaboration tools in 2020.

How did your team’s work change in 2020?

We have never planned to start working from home. Historically, we are used to working at the office and discussing many points in person. We have always been supporters of non-formalized personal communication and many ideas were born during spontaneous meetings in the office corridors.

This year we were forced to quickly recognize the need to change our habits and reorganize our working rhythm, the home office became an unplanned requirement for ONLYOFFICE and, since we treasure every member of our team, we were ready to do the impossible to keep our colleagues safe at all costs and help them to organize the work from home without any additional stress.

We had to technically equip our employees with everything they need for work: laptops, stable internet service. The equipment and connection good enough for online shopping and watching Netflix doesn’t always cover the work needs, especially for our developers or QA guys.

Since we had no idea how long the situation with COVID-19 would persist, we had to keep the office workplace and help arrange a new one at home for the whole team. Each team member, in their turn, had to find a calm place to work at home, which is not easy when you have kids.

I also have to admit that it got more complicated for team leads, they had to work more to organize the processes online, make their teams feel the team spirit, and share the ideas behind the project with the new team members.

What collaboration trends have you noticed this year?

The work hasn’t changed so dramatically as many IT companies are used to working online. Many field activities like conferences became online events, and, honestly, and I can not say it is worse or not that effective. Now it is easier to take part in them without going on business trips and losing time between the flights at the airport.

We have arranged two conferences for educational institutions from Germany and France ourselves and held a nice online event called ONLYOFFICE Web Week dedicated to major releases we had this year.

Do you feel your team’s succeeding in remote collaboration?

We are quite successful in working from home, our team leaders’ dedication played an important role in this. We keep our work atmosphere calm and stable and encourage everyone to maintain a healthy work-life balance.

ONLYOFFICE is used by many remote teams. Do you use it too?

Yes! We enjoyed understanding the usefulness of our own project. I’m proud to say that the ONLYOFFICE team continues working with the help of the ONLYOFFICE collaborative platform – with its mail and calendar services, project management system, CRM, and collaborative document editing with end-to-end encryption in newly released private rooms. Productivity increased when we started to use our own project more.

What other tools do you rely on?

We started using Telegram as a corporate messenger and Zoom for online conferencing.

What’s really cool is that Telegram is already integrated with the ONLYOFFICE platform as an option for receiving notifications, for example, about being shared a doc.

What’s more, we are working on integrating Jitsi, an open-source Zoom alternative, into our platform and we almost finished a Jitsi plugin for the editors. It will allow users to create a video discussion of the collaboratively edited document.

We also plan to integrate Rocket.Chat – for now, we are working with their team on the integration – and Matrixx technology to guarantee not only the highest quality but also security and data protection.

You have an open-source project. Do you think one can organize remote work based on open-source tools only?

Yes, all the heavy proprietary projects have their open-source alternatives. If you have the goal to use open source and all proprietary software is strictly prohibited in your company, you have plenty of options.

Many companies have been moving in this direction for several years already, we know some huge scientific institutions who switched to open source. Governments, corporations, and financial institutions worldwide are moving to FOSS too. But the big issue here is the quality of the alternative you use. I would recommend choosing software with a passionate team that constantly supports and improves the project.