Yota Air: what does outside work teach?

About the benefits of working outside the office told a lot. For any IT-company that keeps pace with the times, it is not difficult to competently organize the remote work of employees. And who can now be surprised by work at home, in a park or a cafe? But we at Yota decided to go beyond the usual remote work and made an interesting project in the field of improving the quality of customer service.

Embodiment of ideas

The project in question - Yota Air is not a new initiative. The first such action took place in our company in September 2010. And the idea was not “lowered from above”, but originated from the employees themselves. Everyone liked the creative proposal and quickly found its embodiment. It would be a mistake, working in Yota, not to study and not experience the possibilities of our mobile Internet. And now, for the sixth year, any Yota employee can work once a month not in the office, but where he pleases.

So, Yota Air is not only a way to test yourself in conditions of complete freedom and personal time management, but also an additional tool for studying the quality of communication (employees can work both in a remote corner of the park and at least in a semi-basement library).
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Over the years of observation, it was noticed that participation in Yota Air activates creative thinking - you will be surprised how unusual conferences can be, whose participants are at the same time in the pool, in the middle of a traffic jam, in a cafe and on a golf course. Many departments use Yota Air to host retreats.

On Air Day, our employees can help other departments or, for example, work at our outlets, where there is a chance to look at our services and products through the eyes of customers, ask for their opinion directly and help the company to become better. This is a possibility for Yota employees in all regions.

How it happens: the employee informs in advance about his desire to visit a particular outlet, goes through a little training and works on a specified day with the retail team. After that, he draws up a short report that helps us improve interaction with partners and look with fresh eyes, first of all, at our workflows. In addition, directly at the point of sale you can communicate with the customers themselves.





Of course, it is impossible to reach everybody with this project - for example, due to the peculiarities of the competencies, the retail and contact center employees remain at their workplaces. In addition, people of some professions always have tasks that need to be solved strictly in the office or in retail outlets.

Virtual office

At one time the necessary working tools of an office employee were a writing pen and a pack of paper or a notebook. Today - computer and internet access. And that, and another in Yota each employee is provided. When a new person comes to our team, he is given a laptop and a Yota modem with mobile unlimited Internet connected to the corporate tariff.

From the software we usually use:

• Yammer is our internal social network;
• Jira is a well-known task scheduler;
• iKnow - corporate knowledge base Yota, similar to Wiki;
• Skype for Business.

What do we have in the end? On the day of the Yota Air, an employee can sit in the park with a laptop and work with the necessary "heavy" applications. Only they are executed not on the laptop itself, but on our servers, and all interaction is carried out remotely through Citrix. The main thing is that there is a more or less stable Internet at a speed of 1-2 Mbit / s. So when an employee decides to take part in Yota Air, nothing prevents you from using the same familiar digital working environment. The same can be said about all other situations when members of our team have to work outside the office. The flexibility of the cloud system allows each employee to be very mobile.

The necessary conditions

The difference between the offer “let us all work without an office - we will save on rent” and the desire to improve the quality of service delivery lies in inconspicuous details. Many are trying to draw our attention to the fact that for Yota Air is dangerous to choose Friday or Monday - they say, then the staff just add yourself an extra day off. We never had such a problem. Yota Air can “fall out” for any day of the week. For many years, we have seen that the quality of work expressed in simple KPIs (sales, preparation of documents, reports, etc.) does not decrease on this day, but only grows — just inform the campaign in advance so that people start planning their calendar accordingly. .



In general, we love Yota Air! We also love the fact that according to its results we can get the most unexpected results, because informal working conditions help to find non-standard ways to solve common problems.