Like everything else, the pandemic has left an impact on the work culture across the globe. For most of the small businesses like ours, pandemic brought a huge shift in the way we work and forced us to work from home, while dealing with the challenging scenario. It's a new experience that many of us are gradually adapting ourselves to. We closed down our offices on 17th March 2020, much before the government mandated lockdown happened and were hopeful that we will be back in our office with a few weeks. How naive were we!!!
The Pandemic challenges
Within the first few days we figured out ways to manage our marketing and business strategy operations, accounting procedures, finance and administration operations and an over all team-work & virtual coordination between technical and operational teams. In the initial days, we completely focussed on maintaining positivity and confidence within our small organisation and hoped that things will get better as long as everyone stays safe and learns to cope with this new way of working. The marketing operations were able to finally initiate activities by the month of May when the logistics became operational and that was the time when we started limping back slowly.
Need of the Hour
But at our core we are a research based organisation and how do you do experiments when you are away from the laboratory??
Our product development teams had to deliver on many products and rallied around by putting in a lot of effort on paper research using literature compilations, brain storming meeting and loads of discussions and debates. We kept on hoping that we would be able to go back to our labs in June, which transformed into July and these hopes just did not materialise. Being a virtual company we were dependant on our partners to open up their labs so that we could begin our work efficiently.
We had to take a call
Finally, in the last week of July we lost patience and realised that the coming month of August also looked grim and it seemed impossible to go to the labs for research work. That was the time when I decided to go and collect all the required material from our office. The lab ware was ordered online and the experimental work began on my dining table, which has now become our lab bench at home. Once the thought occurred and we started discussing it, the possibility of doing it just fell into place one by one.
If we can work from home, we can also lab at home !
This week we started our experimental work for the development of our new products at home and the way it is progressive, it often makes me think, we should have given it a thought much earlier. We plan the experiment together and the team comes together on a video call and observes while I execute the plan. They stay online for observations & suggestions. The testing is also being planned using some kitchen implements. It is extremely exciting to be back in the huddle with the team once again, strategizing and developing new products & watching our dreams take shape. It is so liberating to have beaten the Corona paralysis for now.
Maharukh Rustomjee
Founder, AMATERASU LIFESCIENCES LLP
