Where were you the night the COVID-19 nationwide lockdown was announced?

I was on the sofa sipping a beer in the flat. I’d turned down the opportunity to go out for drinks with a friend and said I’d meet them the next day. 

That was just over 3 weeks ago and now I IMMENSELY regret that decision. 

But, you live and learn…

Anyway. Now that the whining’s out of the way. Let’s talk about something positive – like what’s going on here at Elastic. 

I think we all need something lighthearted to keep us smiling!

In many ways, it’s been business as usual.

You know. Apart from the fact that, for most of us, the word “usual” really isn’t all that relevant to anything that’s going on in our daily lives right now.

As I mentioned in our recent article on our top tips for working from home, we made the decision to work from home pretty rapidly – over a week before the official lockdown was announced. 

Sensing that a nationwide lockdown was imminent, Lauren quickly set to implementing remote working tools for the team and getting them up to speed on how to use them.

From Slack and Zoom to Basecamp and Trello, we had all the tools we needed to easily communicate, share, ideate, and implement. Which, I’m sure the team will agree, made the transition to working from home pretty effortless.

One of the most important challenges we faced, however, was ensuring we carried on producing the goods for our clients.

We’ve got a reputation for delivering stellar marketing results and world-class designs – and, by the Hammer of Thor, no lockdown was going to stop us from keeping it that way! 

In fairness, it didn’t end up being that much of a challenge.

Despite not being able to have in-office break out sessions to brainstorm ideas and riff off each other, the designers and marketers alike began hosting Zoom brainstorming sessions to keep the creative juices flowing. 

The designers have even been hosting live design sessions between themselves to allow for quick edits, improvements and enhancements to creative work via screen sharing on Zoom.

We’ve also finally fully transitioned to Google Docs – which has been a massive workflow enhancement – allowing the team to easily add comments and edits to copy and spreadsheets quickly without having to build up to “Client-WebsiteCopy-FINAL-NOREALLYTHISISTHEFINALONE-V539.docx”. 

If you work in design or marketing, you’ll know what I’m talking about…

One of our proudest lockdown achievements has been rapidly turning around the creation of a full social media and Google Ads campaign, complete with landing pages and blog content, in just under a day.

Although we probably don’t want to put the team under that much stress too often – it felt great to support a client who has courageously kept their factories open to support the NHS with PPE and safety gear.

Not only that, but there was a real sense of camaraderie and team-spirit that created a buzz that could be physically felt between both teams – despite many of us being miles apart!

It took some good old fashioned elastic thinking to make it work. But, well, since that’s what we do, that’s what we did.

While this whole working from home thing has taken a little getting used to, it hasn’t stopped us doing what we do best – support our clients to deliver killer results and stretch our elastic thinking muscles to make it happen.

We might all be working from home – but I can honestly say it’s business as (un)usual here at Elastic HQ – even if that is more of a metaphor than a physical location right now!