A year in lockdown, a year in a new job
In our latest blog, our Business Development Manager and IFB’s newest recruit, Jana Vidis shares her insights about starting a new job in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, home working and the associated challenges and opportunities it brings, as well as a key cyber resilience project she’s been working on. Having only stepped foot in the actual office once, Jana is a key member of the IFB team.
If someone had ever told me that I would be starting my new job on the day when the whole country went into standstill and all offices got closed, I wouldn’t have believed a single word.
2020 changed everything, and with a new pandemic sweeping across the globe, #TeamIFB and myself as a newbie were forced to leave the office on my first day in the company and work from home.
I didn’t have any worries at that time though, as I was expecting it would only last for a few weeks. And anyway, I had previously worked in positions which were home based, so I already knew what home working is about.
The transition to the home office environment was pretty smooth for me. With my set-up at home and equipment and technology provided by IFB, it was a very easy task and within hours my home-office was ready for home working in a new job.
At the beginning, I encountered a bit of a challenging situation when sharing home broadband with my husband who works in IT development and school-age daughter using the connection not only for home-schooling, but as well for gaming.
The TeamIFB provided me with a quick solution - IFB 4G Mobile Broadband, which worked wonders from day one. It is now my “own” broadband connection as I always say, fast, reliable, and stable.
Working in Business Development, I got full responsibility for my customer portfolio from the beginning. With the induction training and first customer contacts using video conferencing, I settled quite well.
IFB had adopted Microsoft Teams Voice just a few weeks before I joined, and from the start at IFB, it became my only communication channel with everyone –customers, colleagues and the outside world.
I am very much enjoying the flexibility of the system and must point out, absolutely love to use only one system for calling, video-conferencing, messaging and sharing content and working documents.
During the past 6 months, I have been working on a project to promote a series of online events called ‘Exercise in a Box’, to boost cyber resilience of North-East companies and organisations. IFB has partnered with Scottish Business Resilience Centre (SBRC) and their teams of ethical hackers to grow awareness in cyber security and grow resilience of businesses against cybercrime.
The programme is fully accessible to companies and organisations of any size and is not only aimed at technical staff, but staff across all departments are encouraged to participate. The online events recreate real world business scenarios and test cyber resilience, so all staff within the business will profit from it. As it is facilitated by ethical hackers at SBRC, great insights and tips for practise of internal response to cyber issues are provided. Some of the scenarios include Home Working, Phishing or Response to Ransomware infection.
I was absolutely delighted to receive a recognition from SBRC “Shine the Light Award” for raising the profile of cyber with organisations in Aberdeen, in particular for supporting the SBRC Exercise in a Box programme in Aberdeen.
Fast forward, 365 days after UK went into lockdown, I can confidently say my adaptation process went very smoothly and apart from missing the office environment and my colleagues as well as missing seeing customers, working from home with all technology and tools works well for me.
Home working will be here for a while, if not forever to a certain extent.
#TeamIFB would like to share our experience and help you and your team to improve on up-time and operational efficiency in your business. To find out more about working from home – from set-up, phone connectivity and communication or how to increase cyber resilience, get in touch with us, #TeamIFB is always happy to help.