On June 16th, 2020 we hosted our 1st CheMondis Digital Paints & Coatings Summit. Our vision was to connect big and small industry players from the Paints & Coatings industry in Europe and to match them with digital players. This vision turned out into the idea of hosting a fully digital event.
During the summit, we hosted three different streams where participants could listen to short & crisp talks from industry leaders about:
1. Industry Innovations from Paints & Coatings 2. Digitization in the chemical industry 3. CheMondis Marketplace
You are now wondering which speakers we won for this event? Check the agenda slides below.
Next to attending talks about innovations in the industry, the most critical part of any fair is to get in touch with your potential and existing business partners. Therefore, we provided all participants with the opportunity of “matchmaking”.
Participants were able to make appointments with other registered participants, for them to meet privately in a separate video call session (technically facilitated by us) and talk about business. We ended the day with a round-table-session about “Marketplaces as a Mean of Digitalization for Paints & Coatings – 3 Examples”.
By the end of the day, we had 180 attendees and more than 40 1:1 appointments scheduled. This is more than we had anticipated, and we are very happy that so many of you joined.
Moreover, based on our post-summit-survey, every attendee was keen to attend such an event again in 2021. So stay tuned as we are already thinking of something for you!
From the feedback we received, we learned that it was the right format.
Based on the analysis of our survey, we noticed that most of the attendees rated the amount of new information they learned as excellent. This showed us that the content proposed by the speakers was the right one.
Data also revealed that many attendees liked the opportunity to choose between different talks at the same time. Even when one of the talks was not of interest, there was a chance to switch to another stream.
Furthermore, the networking opportunity was highly appreciated by many attendees, as the chance to find potential new suppliers, buyers, or products was high.
Of course, we also had our lessons learned and we will improve a few things in the future.
Unfortunately, as many of you requested right after each session, we did not receive the consent from all speakers to share the presentation afterwards. We hope that you do understand.
In case you are still interested in one of the presentations, please reach out to us and we will get in contact with the individual speakers to check whether we can share this presentation with you.
For future events, we will aim sharing at least one handout per presentation with you, if it is not possible to share the entire presentation.
We will also work on getting a balanced ratio of producers and raw material suppliers as we believe it is the key to the success of such an event.
Regarding the matchmaking functionality, we also received the feedback that more filters like “Interested in” and “Being a provider of” would improve the quality of your matches tremendously. Of course, this is something we will also take into consideration in the future.
To sum it up, for us as Chemondis, the entire event was a pleasure and lots of fun.
Still not convinced? Watch the video below to get a pick at the behind-the-scene.
What do you think?
If you would like to help us to improve this kind of event for the future, please send us your feedback at: cpc-summit@chemondis. We highly appreciate any kind of feedback, so please do not hesitate to share your thoughts with us.
Thanks for taking the time to read the CheMondis Blog.
As promised, we recently deployed two additional filters to the search functionality on CheMondis.
Both, the quantity and package filters improve the experience for all CheMondis customers – buyers and suppliers. These two opportunities lead to an even better experience for all CheMondis Customers, buyers, and suppliers.
These are the quantity and package filters for Buyers.
We know that the desired quantity and package type of the product are an important factor for you when sourcing any chemical. With CheMondis you can now filter quantities and packages suppliers offer by filtering within our product search. Doing this before quoting saves you a lot of time due to fewer communication needs.
Use the product search and then find all filter on the left-hand.
Search for products with our search bar or browse product groups and industries
Add as many packages as you like on the left-hand side
The filter applies automatically after clicking adding ticks to boxes
These are the quantity and package filters for Suppliers.
Now we offer you the opportunity to provide more information for all your products to any potential buyer. This will help you to receive more relevant and fitting quotes and order requests. You can provide the information about offered quantities and packages on company level for all products at once.
By default all packages are pre-selected and no maximum or minimum is applied for the quantities. We describe below how to set them up.
Set Quantities as Supplier
Set the generally offered quantity on company level (all products at once)
Select those packages that apply. This will be the default value for all products.
What do you think?
Do you have any questions about the filters? Did you already try them out? What are your first experiences? We appreciate any feedback in order to improve our product every day. Leave a comment below or contact us.
With our latest deployment, we introduced the Incoterm filter to our search functionality on CheMondis. It improves the experience for all CheMondis customers – buyers and suppliers.
By using the Incoterm filter, you as a buyer can filter any product on CheMondis by the desired Incoterm. The Incoterm filter in combination with the delivery country filter makes it easier for you, as a buyer to find the right offer. The filter also helps you, as a supplier to only receive quotes and orders they can execute.
What are Incoterms?
The delivery on CheMondis is fulfilled in accordance with the Incoterm, that you have agreed on with the supplier.
Incoterms® (International Commercial Terms) are predefined commercial conditions used in international trade. They help to understand tasks, costs, and risks of the parties with respect to the transportation of goods. Currently, we have Incoterms® 2010 applicable on CheMondis.
This is the incoterm for buyers.
You want to have products delivered or rather want to pick them up yourself? With CheMondis you can now find the desired Incoterms the suppliers offer by filtering within our product search. Doing this before quoting saves you a lot of time.
Use the product search and find the Incoterm filter on the left-hand side next to industry, product group and country filters.
This is the incoterm filter for suppliers.
Now provide the Incoterm information for all your products to any potential buyer. This will help you to receive more relevant and fitting quotes and order requests. You can provide the information on company level for all products at once. Then you can choose different Incoterms for particular products in a second way. We describe below how this works.
Set the generally offered Incoterms on company level.
Select the Product and select the Incoterms that apply for this particular product.
Stay tuned: More filters to come.
We will even further develop the filter functions with introducing more filters that improve your CheMondis experience as a buyer or supplier. Soon we will explain our packaging and quantity filters – stay tuned!
What do you think?
Do you have any questions around the Incoterm filter? Did you already try them out? What are your first experiences? We appreciate any feedback in order to improve our product every day. Leave a comment below or contact us.
Thanks for taking the time to read the CheMondis Blog.
During three sessions, we guided more than 30 participants through our first webinar series on “How to Buy Chemicals Online – Quick & Easy”. We are happy to report that it was a great success for both us and all participants.
Next to learning how to use CheMondis in the best possible way, attendees had the chance to ask all the questions they had. At the end of each session, we had exciting discussions on several topics with our Key Account Manager David who has more than 14 years of experience in Marketing & Sales of chemical products.
All attendees joined the webinar remotely – even the staff.
When we planned the webinars, we had some concerns that it might be technically difficult to bring so many people together in a virtual place. Especially, because our team was holding the webinars from home as well. Does everything work with the process? Does the Internet remain stable? Will someone ask a question in the discussion part? Of course, we were prepared for all these cases in advance. And fortunately, things could not have gone better.
Participants were excited about the new format.
Asking attendees how they liked this webinar, we received very good feedback. It makes us proud that rated our first webinar series with 91/100 points. And we were even more excited that 95% would come back for another webinar in the future.
This encourages us to expand this program and to develop more sessions on other interesting topics. As soon as we have developed these concepts and scheduled the next sessions you will of course be the first to know about it. You can expect the dates to be released this summer.
A webinar premiere for Chemondis – how did our team experience it? We asked them.
I have done many 1:1 demos with our customers over the past years, so I am used to the process. Not being able to see a reaction from my “audience” felt weird during the first webinar. Sometimes I thought to myself “Are they still there? Does this make sense to them? I hope I am not too fast…“.
During the Q&A session at the end, with many questions being asked I was reassured that people were following closely and that made me very happy and much more confident in subsequent webinars. The fantastic preparation by Daria and Caroline also helped tremendously, really great team effort!
Many customers became active on our platform just a few minutes after the webinar closed and that shows me how effective this tool is. I am looking forward to the next rounds!
It was definitely a great experience! Personally, I enjoyed both the preparation and the webinars themselves. It is an interactive way to show all the most important features of the marketplace and how procurement managers in the chemical industry can benefit from the platform use.
After the session, we had the Q&A, which was really helpful as we got direct feedback from the attendees. Thank you all for coming and giving your input!
Honestly, I was a little nervous before our first webinar. You put so much work and effort into it that you want everything to go smoothly in the end. I wanted our attendees to be able to take out what we had put in over the previous weeks.
When I noticed that the participants followed with great interest and sent many questions, the tension slowly subsided. I was really pleased to see how customers were able to profit from our webinar and how they could put their learnings to action on the marketplace immediately after the webinar.
It seems that both our customers and the webinar team agree that this new format works very well, and we will certainly see each other more often in sessions in the future!
What do you think?
Did you attend one of the sessions? Do you share the view on the feedback we received? Do you have any wishes on potential topics we should discuss in a webinar? Leave us a comment below and let us know.
Thanks for taking the time to read the CheMondis blog.
We are happy to announce that registered suppliers of every size can now create their own Brand Shop on CheMondis. This is a big step forward digitalizing the chemical industry.
Buyers can find each Brand Shop within the product description page or by a unique link the supplier promotes.
Advertise your entire portfolio online
CheMondis Brand Shops help you to sell your products online without the effort of developing or maintaining an own online shop. Your Brand Shop on CheMondis will profit from the wide range of already registered companies and will therefore ensure a high relevance from the very beginning. CheMondis is also helping with online advertising efforts to acquire buyers for the listed products.
As a supplier, you will receive a unique link (URL) for your own Brand Shop, through which your shop on CheMondis can be accessed directly. Either by you or by dedicated buyers of yours which you want to redirect to your brand-new shop. You can, for example, add the link to your e-mail signature or can promote it on your website. Existing and new customers will immediately be forwarded to your Brand Shop, like to a usual online shop.
It is very easy to create your own Brand shop on CheMondis
To create your own Brand Shop you need to be a registered and verified supplier on CheMondis. Please find following link to register for free if you want to join our marketplace as a supplier.
The creation of a Brand Shop is very simple and contains only 3 steps:
Add your company logo to your company profile within the account settings.
Prepare a banner image for the top of the page in the dimension of 1440 pixels x 200 pixels.
Prepare a description text of your company (Not more then 50-70 Signs).
Then, please contact your personal Business Development Manager who will create the Brand Shop for you or reach out to us via phone, email, or our chat. We are very happy to assist creating and adjusting your Brand Shop.
We will activate the Brand Shop-feature for your account. With a couple of clicks, you can enter and upload the prepared information and you are good to go. After the activation of your Brand Shop, you can add and adjust your description and images yourself – of course, we are also very happy to assist here.
The Brand Shop will show all active products that you have uploaded on CheMondis. Your products will appear in alphabetical order. Customers can apply different filters to find the product they are looking for faster.
Brand shops on CheMondis can easily be found and promoted
The search functionality on CheMondis is specifically designed to find the right products. So how do potential customers find your Brand Shop? There are two options.
On every product detail page of one of your products, customers or interested buyers will find a button “Visit Brand Shop” and will be forwarded to your Brand Shop.
Your Brand Shop will have a unique Link (URL), that you can share on your website or by any other channel with your customers.
Check out our already existing Brand Shops and start with your own. Register on CheMondis for free and get in touch with us to set it up.
Thanks for taking the time to read the CheMondis Blog.
You are a registered buyer on CheMondis or an interested buyer of chemicals and would like to learn more about how to use the marketplace in the best possible way? So that you benefit from it most? You are on the right way.
Due to the international crisis around COVID-19 almost all events, fairs and congresses had to be postponed or even canceled. As a fully digital player in the chemical industry, we are ready to go the complete digital way, that’s why we decided to offer webinars. In today’s blog article we would like to give you all the relevant information you need on the webinars we are planning.
If you are more interested in selling chemicals online, there is no reason to be disappointed. We are planning more Webinars in the next couple of weeks!
Your advantages in joining our webinar.
During our webinars, we would like to offer you an additional opportunity that helps you to get a better understanding of a digital sales solution for chemical buyers and the features we are offering.
Why we have chosen the channel of webinars? Because there is no better way to provide you with information in a maximum flexible and non-binding way. You have no effort to join the session, just register via the provided link and you are in.
What to expect from a session?
You will learn about all the “must-knows” when using CheMondis.
During a live demo, you will see how to use our most relevant features with just a few clicks.
You can send us your questions via chat and we will answer immediately through our speaker.
You will be able to see and hear us, but not the other way round.
How to register?
We’ve planned three sessions on “How to buy chemicals online -quick & easy”, one in German and two in English for May. To register for a session click here.
In a nutshell
In times like these, digital opportunities like Webinars are a perfect solution to discuss a topic short and crisp. Therefore we offer three Webinars on “How to buy chemicals online – quick & easy” to all interested buyers within the chemical industry end of May.
Now it is up to you
What are your experiences with participating or hosting webinars? Do you have any tips you would like to share with our community? Do you have more questions? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Thanks for taking the time to read the CheMondis Blog.
During the past months, many of our users have asked for the opportunity to send out multiple requests to different suppliers at the same time, with only a couple of clicks. We have worked continuously on this wish during the recent weeks and are happy to provide you, our customers, with a new feature on our marketplace: the Multiple-Quote-Request (MQR).
Within this article, we’d like to give you a short overview of the new functionality and provide you a 6-step-quick-guide on how to send multiple quote requests.
Multiple Quote Request – what’s that?
If you’re a buyer of chemical products, as of now you have the chance to request multiple offers from different suppliers (or also all from the same supplier) in one single step!
We know that when you are looking for a new supplier, you want to be able to compare. Therefore, you are always going to request several offers. Instead of sending out individual requests to each supplier, re-stating what you are looking for in terms of price, volume, etc., you send out one request to multiple suppliers.
Our Multiple-Quote-Request-Feature automatically applies the same terms to all of your quote requests. For the follow-ups CheMondis offers you a clear and structured dashboard which allows you to see the current status of your requests at a glance.
You’re concerned about various restrictions on the supplied products? We solved this issue by implementing standard quote units (kg, l, t) and standard currencies (€ and $) that are set to all products.
When you request products on CheMondis you can request with these units and currencies consistently across the platform. No more dealing with supplier-specific requirements on request details. On negotiating an offer, you can still request a broad variety of different currencies and units in which you negotiate your deal.
Is this feature interesting for my company?
We have designed this Multiple-Quote-Request-Feature especially for all buyers who want to compare offers from different suppliers, but who do not want to double, triple or even tenfold the time, which they need to invest for this. If you feel the same, this feature will definitely help you out!
What does it look like? A 6-Step-Quick-Guide
To give you an idea of how the multiple quote request works, we prepared the following guide for you. As you will see, it works quick and easy and it will be a real time-saver for you! For a more detailed description, we also prepared a tutorial for you, which you’ll find in the help center of our marketplace.
Step 1: Go to www.chemondis.com/marketplace, login into your account, and enter the product you’re looking for in the search bar.
Step 2: Add the products by clicking on the ‘Add to requests’ button from the suppliers of your choice to the request by using the checkbox.
Step 3: Decide whether you’d like to send a quote or an agreement request. A short explanation: A quote request is a request for a single order. An agreement request leads to multiple orders over a defined period of time (e.g. 6 months) at a negotiated price.
Step 4: Fill in the form by entering the parameters you’d like to request for the selected products and suppliers.
Step 5: You’re receiving only one confirmation e-mail summing all of your requests. Furthermore, you can see an overview of your requests on your personal dashboard.
Step 6: As soon as the suppliers are sending you their offers, you can negotiate every quote or agreement individually as you are used to it already.
In a nutshell
Our new feature allows you, as a buyer, to request products from multiple suppliers at once. We are convinced that the Multiple-Quote- Request-Feature improves your experience when using CheMondis significantly.
Try it and convince yourself. In case of questions, you can always reach out to us via the chat function on the marketplace, your business development contact person or via our social media channels. Or check out the tutorial, we prepared for you here.
Now it is up to you
What are your first experiences with the Multiple Quote Request? Do you have any questions about the new functionality?
Besides the huge human impact of Covid-19, there is also a lot of discussion about its impact on the global economy. From bottlenecks in logistics and plant shutdowns to downturns in business investments and consumer spending.
With today’s blog article we are trying to evaluate the effect of Covid-19 on the chemical industry in these difficult times.
Not only the epicenters of the epidemic are economically affected.
China, EU and the US, the three regions affected most by Covid-19, are also the biggest chemical manufacturing regions. They account for more than 66% of the world’s chemical sales.[1]
The current crisis forces many factories to drastically reduce or even stop their production lines. And this is happening due to very different reasons: production may be reduced or closed due to a lack of workforce, employees are sick or in quarantine. It may be a company decision to protect the workforce, thus a protective measure. Or, it can happen because production capacities of suppliers have also been reduced and raw materials for production are becoming increasingly scarce in the market.
The reduced rates or stoppages in many facilities will continue to impact the global supply market, also in those countries which might (still) be less affected by the virus. Looking at the past experiences made in China, restrictions linked to the Covid-19 outbreak have caused China’s chemical industry to suffer a 15-25% slump in demand during February.[2]
Most probably, not only chemical production itself will be affected, but restrictions in transportation may aggravate the issue by hindering imports/exports and by limiting the servicing of domestic customers.
In response to this, the German Chemical Industry Association VCI (Verband der Chemischen Industrie) cutted the production forecast for 2020 on early March and stated that they are not expecting the situation to improve in the first half of 2020. [3]
How is the chemical industry coping with the crisis?
The chemical sector is of critical infrastructure, and currently also in the center of all efforts to combat Covid-19. Chemicals are used in countless products that will be needed to support good hygiene and treat those who are infected with Covid-19 in the upcoming weeks and months.
The global chemical industry is stepping up to battle Covid-19 outbreak with a massive focus on the production of key raw materials for hand sanitizers and other disinfectants, as well as for the Covid-19 Test kits.
This leads to the split effect that while in some industry segments the demand has dropped, others even had a boom in requests and sales, such as disinfectants and raw materials, materials to produce packaging, medical supplies, protective equipment, lab supplies and raw materials for the pharmaceutical companies.
How we evaluate the situation
In the graphic below we simplified our expectations for the development of chemical sectors that might be affected, based on a precise research. On the Y-Axis you find the profitability impact, clustered by low, medium and high impact.[4]
We are expecting low impact in essential industries like food, cleaning products (disinfectants), water treatment.
For the plastics and rubber industries we are expecting a mediate impact, since the demand due to masks and gloves and other protection materials increased, but this is unlikely to match the previous industrial demand.
In the category of high impact, you can find industries that have lower priority so they are most likely to stop the manufacturing processes.
On the rise: the demand for polymers, disinfectants, reagents and medical gases will increase
We expect the demand for Polymers, Disinfectants, Reagants and Medical Gases to increase throughout the crisis. The answer to ”why?” you will find in the following paragraphs.
Polymers
Polypropylene (PP) are used to produce for key personal protective equipment such as face masks, surgical gowns and antibacterial wipes
Polyethylene (PE) is extensively used for food and equipment packaging
Polycarbonate (PC) and polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) for clear protective screens
Polyvinyl chloride (PVC), used in the medical sector to produce medical tubing, blood and intravenous bags, pipes and vinyl siding and sometimes also for medical glove production.
Latex/Nitrile Rubber for medical glove production
Disinfectants
Alcohol for disinfectants: IPA, Ethanol, n-propanol
Hydrogen peroxide disinfection of medical instruments
Hypochlorite solutions for disinfectants and surfactants for soaps and other cleaning products
Others
Raw materials, such as glycerin, gelling agents such as carbomer, preservatives, biocides and plasticizers
Reagents and chemicals used for COVID-19 testing
Chemicals for RNA extraction: such as Tris, EDTA, chloride salts, TRIzol and raw materials for PBS solution, TE Buffer, and Lysis Buffer and other
Chemicals virus transportation media, such as: chloride salts, D-Glucose, Gentamicin sulfate, magnesium sulfate and other
Medical gases
As Covid-19 can affect the respiratory system, the demand for oxygen gas and medicinal gas mixture has increased with the number of patients being treated with supplemental oxygen via masks
Which solutions are the industry proposing?
In times where supply and demand tend to get out of balance, the right matchmaking is an essential success factor for the industry to be able to operate. On CheMondis we have established separate areas on the marketplace that service particularly the need for disinfectants and testing materials (RNA extraction and virus transportation media).
The large need for disinfectants has also affected chemical regulations. To increase the manufacturing and supply of disinfectants on the European market, the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) is supporting EU/EEA authorities to apply derogations from the normal authorization requirement for biocidal products.
Companies looking to quickly access the market with their disinfectants that contain an already approved active substance can apply for time-limited derogations from the standard product authorization requirements in situations where there is a threat to public health. [5]
In a nutshell
The chemical industry is affected in various ways by Covid-19. Some segments will be severely affected, while others will almost boom. In order to ensure the health of humanity, the entire chemical industry is working at full speed to combat supply bottlenecks and difficulties in the value chain.
Now it is up to you
What are your first experiences with the current crises? Do you have the same experience on the future like we have? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Thanks for taking the time to read the CheMondis Blog.
[1] The European Chemical Industry. (2020). Facts & Figures of the European chemical industry. [2] Independent Commodity Intelligence Services. (2020). Petrochemicals to recover slowly after the coronavirus outbreak. [3] Reuters. (2020): Germany’s chemical association cuts production forecast due to coronavirus. [4] Roland Berger. (2020): Latest update of our corona economic impact series. [5] ECHA. (2020). Speeding up the supply of disinfectants.
We care about the well-being and health of our team, all their loved ones and society as a whole. The current corona crisis is demanding all of us to go new ways. Already last week Monday, we closed our office and started working from home. We are deciding week by week on how to progress in this unusual times.
Luckily, our technical set-up and working culture have always allowed us to work from home. So from the moment that the decision was taken, the “how” was very clear to us. With today’s blog article we want to give you some insights in how we practice remote working (+ what it actually is) and hope that you might find one or two ideas which will help you in carrying on business as usual, as much as possible in these times, as well. Enjoy the read!
Of course, for our customers, nothing changes. You can contact us anytime by phone, e-mail, our chat or via our social media channels if you have any questions or need support.
“Remote work” – A new buzzword in society?
We’d like to kick off with clarifying briefly the differences between “remote work” and “home office” as these two are currently on everyone’s lips. Remote work is a working model that allows employees to work from wherever they like. This means, they are not tied to a specific work location (the company’s office), but can decide from where they want to do their work. In this case, it does not matter whether it is someone’s home, their favorite café, or even an exotic island. This shows that home-office is one possible alternative for a place of remote working.
Advantages of an alternative working model are a higher flexibility, with a better balance between family and career and those who like to travel can work from every time zone.
As many of us will be staying in our home offices for the next couple of weeks and traveling can currently not be recommended, we will talk about working from home rather than working remotely in any other location in the course of this article.
One of the biggest misunderstandings in context of remote work is that we all just sit around in our pyjamas, searching for a new series on Netflix and doing our laundry. But how did this image get into the minds of so many people? Maybe it comes from the idea that if you can’t see someone physically working, how can you be sure that they’re working?
Fortunately, faith in humanity is not yet lost. Studies after studies have shown that employees, working in home-office are more productive than the employees who come to the office. For example, a Harvard Business School study measured employee productivity of employees at the US Patent Office who were allowed to work from anywhere. The results were very clear: employees allowed to work from anywhere were 4.4% more productive than their “in-office” counterparts. The increase of 4.4% of employee productivity represents up to $1.3 billion of annual value added to the U.S. economy.[1] This, of course, is a general observation, which largely depends on the function and job description the individual is fulfilling.
We will be able to see the effect on the European market soon. By end of this year more studies, maybe jobs where you thought it would be impossible to work remotely will experience the breakthrough. It seems like a chance to reinvent the world of work all around the globe.
Remote working at CheMondis: how we structure our working days
CheMondis is a young and technically advanced company. This means that everyone is equipped with all the technical necessities to be able to work from home. In theory.
A well-structured and functional home office is an obvious choice for people working primarily individually. Many essential things can be done within your own four walls, the strict local ties are actually eliminated.
As we are organizing our work by the SCRUM methodology, frequent discussions are the crucial basis of our daily work. And this is the point where working from home becomes more tricky. It is essential for us to have the right tools at hand to structure and plan our work accordingly. In order to be effective, we depend on perfectly functioning communication tools.
For different purposes of alignment, we are using different tools, which you can read below. A crucial success factor is that anyone needs to have access to all of these tools at any point in time.
Our working routines
But for many of us, it is not the organizational part or digital infrastructure, which are tough. It’s more to get used to a new kind of routine. For example, spending a large part of your day alone at home instead of around your co-workers in the company’s office. Or trying to focus during a call with your kids running around bored, asking you to play with them. We asked some of our team members, who have spent already some experience in practicing remote working for some practical tips.
1.) Find a proper place to work
The choice of a proper working place is essential for your productivity. It would be ideal to find a place in the house or apartment that feels at least like a separate space – like “heading to work”. This will help you at the end of the day to mentally disconnect from your work. Make sure that the light conditions are good for your eyes and the seating is good for your back. And, ideally, that you can close a door when you have an important call.
2.) More is more when it comes to communication
A major obstacle in exclusively virtual communication via e-mail and chat programs is that the body language is completely missing. According to studies, 93% of communication takes place non-verbally, which includes eye contact, gestures, facial expressions, and accentuation.[1] For successful virtual communication, this 93% must be compensated somehow to prevent any miscommunication.
A couple of tips which might help: Inform your colleagues when you’re really busy with something and can’t respond right away. When it comes to meetings and the need to have a discussion with someone it always helps to set up a brief video chat. We really recommend you to keep the video running during the conversation. Why? Because it prevents you and all other participants from doing something else at the same time.
Checking your Whatsapp, checking another e-mail, making a coffee. You would never even think about doing that when you’re in a face2face conversion. So don’t do it in video calls either. When chatting, use emojis and reactions to underline your emotions. Within the last week, we already noticed a huge increase of slack messages that we sent. The rule is: Over-communication is better than giving room for assumptions.
3.) Create space for social interactions
To forester the communication and to really know how your co-workers are doing, it helped us to create some space for social interactions – anytime and without any business-relevancy. We set up a “CheMondis-kitchen” channel in whereby to meet for a coke or a coffee and to have some non-work-related conversations. Exactly like you have it in the office when meeting your favorite coworkers in the company’s kitchen, just virtual.
On Fridays, we usually celebrate our renowned beer time at 5pm. We relocated this ritual into a virtual room as well. And in case you’re missing the lunch dates with your coworkers, we can recommend you “social cooking”. Just agree on a meal you all like to cook, move your laptop to the kitchen and turn on the camera. You’ll see it’s definitely more fun than preparing lunch and eating on your own.
4.) Initiate daily routines
The missing local separation of work and home can lead to becoming lazy. We’ve all been there. Nevertheless, in terms of productivity and well-being, we recommend to not neglect your daily care rituals. Get dressed, put on your make up, and read the daily news. Keep your daily routines to feel fresh and energetic to start into the day. Also, try to stay hydrated even though you’re not going to meet your coworkers in the kitchen.
Just prepare your lemon water and coffee mug on your desk as usual. When it comes to the lunch break – take the time! It’s important to switch off your mind and being surrounded by other topics for a few minutes. Additionally, physical activities shouldn’t be neglected. Take a short walk after lunch or start your day with a morning workout.
In a nutshell
In times like these, home office has become a critical component to all of us keeping up “business as usual”. Many essential things can be done at home. But we know that in many other industries this is not common and the current situation comes unexpected.
We hope that our tips will help you make the best out of the current situation and let you work from home happily and effectively. And keep in mind that the argument of decreasing productivity is rejected – you’ll see. Stay safe and healthy!
[1] Choudhury, P. , Larson, B., and Foroughi, C. (2019). Harvard Business Review., [2] Mehrabian, A., Ferris, S. (1967). Journal of Counselling Psychology (31), pp. 248-252.
Thanks for taking the time to read the CheMondis Blog.
