There is no doubt that the Corona crises is a very challenging time for many companies. For CrossWorkers this is also a big change. With the Danish management team in Denmark, unable to travel to Cairo, has forced us to find new ways of working. Fortunately, we have a very professional and talented management team in Cairo and therefore we have been able to coordinate all the necessary steps from a distance.

As soon as it was announced that Europe and many other countries were implementing full or partial lockdowns, we prepared our Egyptian management team to take the necessary step in order to protect our employees. At that time Cairo was not facing the same issues as the rest of Europe, and fortunately they still aren’t.

We asked our management team to change certain things in the office. We moved employees further apart. We made sure that we had plenty of hand sanitizers, the office was cleaned several times during the day and we set up all the posters and general information which has been made by the Danish Health Authorities in English. All the employees where gathered and informed about the situation in Europe. Furthermore, we changed the possibility to enter the office by fingerprint to access cards.

But the situation also changed in Egypt and today there is curfew from 7pm until 6am in Cairo. For us European this might sound as a strange lockdown. But since Cairo is a city that never “sleeps”, this is actually a major change in the Egyptian culture.

In order to prepare our employees for further lockdown in Cairo we decided, together with the Egyptian management team, to let the employees work from home. This was not an easy decision and certainly not something we normally do. It is important that our employees are in the office and have the daily contact with other team members and our service delivery management team and not to mention contributing to the well-known CrossWorkers spirit.

So how do we maintain that?
First of all communication is key. Our service delivery team keeps in contact with each team every day. They follow up on their performance and make sure that they all have safe internet connection. Furthermore, we keep on informing all employees about the general Corona situation in Europe and how they can keep their family safe.

Some of our employees have taken the initiative to create social media groups where they can communicate, tell jokes and “meet for a cup of coffee”. But there is no doubt that they miss each other’s company and the daily knowledge sharing.

The Danish management team has also been in close contact with all the clients informing them about the steps we are taking in Cairo.

We want to keep on delivering second to none service to our clients and with the extremely talented and hardworking CrossWorkers teams, we will do all it takes to get our employees and clients through this crisis which hopefully won’t last too long.

We are grateful for the below feedback which we got from one of our clients with regards to the new working set up.
“We have not experienced any downtime or reduction in productivity due to the changes in work environment. Rather we felt that the right decisions have been taken in the appropriate time. CrossWorkers crew have been doing this since the beginning and it is now apparent that you were prepared for this sudden change and scenario”

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