How To Support Your Community While Working Remote

Authors: Abhijeet Malik and Benedikt Schmaus

As companies around the world are telling staff to work from home to limit the outbreak of COVID-19, society is making its first proper experience with New Work, including its opportunities and challenges.

Two weeks ago, I presented my tips on how individuals can get into the right mindset and balance work, social life and themselves. If you have gotten used to the routine of working from home by now – being able to manage work and family life while also perfecting your grocery shopping – you may realize that your situation may not be as bad as some of those in your community.

If you still need some advice on how to balance your partner and kids while being productive, these tips will help:

However, you may notice that you have a lot more to be thankful and grateful for. You are reasonably healthy, have a secure and beautiful home, technology to communicate properly with loved ones, entertainment options, as well as transport possibilities so that you can continue to work stably from home. This may not be true for everyone in your community. Besides the long-term health challenge, many would not have access to basic necessities we take for granted. They are more at risk of falling sick and the traditional modes of help and support they depended on have stopped due to social distancing.

In this article, I would like to share some helpful ideas on how you can leverage your situation to support your community or society as a whole. With this, I would love to suggest that we change the term “social distancing” to “physical distancing”, while keeping special attention on social proximity

Start with the simple basic things:

Do you have elderly people or people with physical challenges in your community that you know? Could you offer to ring them and help buy their groceries or medicines (and leave it at their doorstep). Perhaps they just a need call from you to know they can count of someone in case they live alone. Perhaps they need some time to talk about what’s going through their mind. Here’s what a good friend of mine recently posted in her building:

Help with your ideas:

More than anything, a lot of community organizations and charities are struggling with how to function in situations of lockdowns and physical distancing. Some are struggling with supplies, some with funding. Some on how to communicate with public authorities and volunteers. Some might be struggling with organizing their spaces in a more responsible social distancing model.

Pick one. Give them a call, try and understand their situation and offer advice. Whether you are a manager than can help them see the big picture, a programmer that can help with their early digital steps, a graphics designer to help with communications or simply another helping pair of hands. Participate in hackathons from governments or (social) organizations such as the UN or even organize one in your company like we did: over the course of one weekend, a joint team of PwC, Strategy&, IXDS and SIS Software collaborated and developed the “Us against Corona” smartphone app to fight the further spread of Covid-19. And we created hackathons across the globe to generate even more impactful ideas. Whatever you choose – we can all make a difference.

Help with your network:

A lot of times, the groups you know need help and support that is best given by someone you know rather than yourself. Use the time of working from home to play the matchmaker. Call your friends, coworkers, neighbors and find our who is ready to help and with what. Organize video conference calls and virtual community meetings. If you can work virtually you can surely connect the “needs” of organizations to the people who can best help them. You are obviously savvy in social media if you are reading this – make use of its power, too.

Help with your time:

If you have a family, especially children and you are doing fun activities with them at home than consider if you could setup a virtual video link to others you know with children who might benefit from a virtual link to your activities. That could be dance lessons, special academic tutorials or just simply good stories to tell if you good at that.

If it is community organizations, help out by sharing any workload that you could take on for them - making calls, writing email drafts, designing virtual flyers and posters. You might be a freelancer with an empty order book these days – can you apply at Robert Koch Institute for help, help a local food bank or support your local farmer for harvesting? Every little bit helps. 

Help with your skills:

The most important thing, anyone needs right now might be your skills. Are you good at setting up virtual communication systems? Are you good at helping them setup an online donation system? Are you able to able to help plan a crisis management plan? Are you able to hold a tutorial on using simple virtual office tools? You would be surprised the basic skills that a lot of community organizations may need at this time and would benefit immensely from being offered this additional help that they cannot afford.

Help with your money:

If nothing else and in case you have stable source of income, you can always look at the myriad of options of online donations to various charities and organizations, online. And if you are getting supporting for keeping your house in order, for driving kids to school, donations for kindergarten or school, or many other things, now is the time to maintain those financial commitments even if you temporarily do not get the full benefit. Show you care.

We are in this together versus the situation: It does not matter what you do or what you are able to do. What matters is that if you can do something, do it. Do it now. It matters and it counts. It may very well help someone.

As step one, I recommend to make a list of five values that are important to you (or maybe your company values). Write down one behavior per value that you want to apply in the next weeks. Who do you want to see when looking backwards next year?