Our Plans for Dealing with the Coronovirus Situation

3-Mar-2020 by Inflectra Company News

We recently published an email to our employees outlining our current plans for dealing with the unfolding Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic that is affecting communities and countries around the world. We felt that it would make sense to make parts of this email public to our customers and partners so that they know what our current plans are, and also it may be useful for other companies looking to see how they should respond.

***We have updated this blog to include a section on Inflectra's response as it pertains to giving a short term relief to our customers and community in general.****

We see the current situation with respect to COVID-19 affecting these main areas of our operations:
  1. General economic impacts
  2. Impacts to our company offices
  3. Impacts to travel and conference schedule
  4. Inflectra Response: Customer Care

General Economic Impacts

This is hard to predict, but we can expect to see that with the fall in the stock market and worries of global economic activity, the company won't be immune. Some of our prospects may decide to delay purchases because of budget freezes, some customers may choose not to renew because projects have been cancelled. For the most part, the ability of our products to cut costs and allow distributed collaboration may mean that some loss of business could be offset by gains. However to be prudent, even though we've had a strong start to the year, we are continuing to work under the assumption that the rest of the year may not be as strong, so the company will keep costs under control and avoid any unplanned expenditures. Any changes to this plan will be communicated to the teams immediately. 

Company Offices

For those employees or contractors who work from our offices, we always have a liberal telework policy in place. However, in the context of COVID-19:
  • As per the CDC recommendations, we strongly encourage our colleagues that if they are feeling under the weather, it is better to take a day off or work from home (depending on how they feel) than to come into the office sick. It is Inflectra's standard policy that team members do not come to the office if they have any flu-like symptoms. This policy has become more strictly enforced of late
  • Should the situation in a specific metro areas worsen, Inflectra may decide to institute mandatory telework for all employees for a period of time for that office. So we recommend all teams make sure laptop, VPN, phone, and other tools work remotely now
  • In the meantime, we will be installing hand sanitisation stations at the entrance of our offices so that everyone can easily disinfect after going to the bathroom, using the elevator, etc. We have requested our landlords to install similar facilities in the building lobbies as well. 

Additionally, all Inflectra team members should be aware by now that the company offers an excellent and generous health insurance package, including for its part-time employees.

  • In the short run, all employees are encouraged to seek medical attention if fever and/or flu-like symptoms are observed. As a best practice, we also recommend team members get their seasonal vaccinations taken care of in a timely fashion.
  • Should any member require assistance in getting their or their family health insurance adjusted, they are encouraged to follow the proper channels internally. 

Travel & Conferences

The potentially biggest impact in the near term will be to our planned conference schedule. We are actively monitoring the upcoming events and working with the conference organizers to see if they will be going ahead as planned or will be cancelled. Currently no events have been cancelled, Swiss Testing Day is under review right now, and the word from JFTL, STPcon and TechWell is that they will proceed with additional precautions in place.
If a planned event is not cancelled by the organizers, our current plan is to attend the conference as planned, with extra precautions in place for the air travel and interactions at the booth / event. Depending on the severity of the situation in the location of the event and the health conditions of the proposed attendees, we may need to reassign some of the people we had planned on sending. If a team member is listed as attending an event and s/he doesn't feel comfortable attending, it should be communicated to the management and appropriate substitutions will be made.  Similarly we may ask some colleagues in the coming weeks to step in and cover an event if someone else is not able to travel due to a health condition. All teams have an absolute right to decline travel at this point in time. 
 

Our Response: Customer Care

With the global pandemic raging outside our windows, we are offering help to our customers and the community of users in the following ways:

  • moving on-premise Spira instances to the cloud (AWS) to facilitate teleworking (cherry on top - take 20% off!)
  • additional staff training for Spira, and Rapise (free version available) as more staff and resources are being re-assigned to testing, QA and automation
  • fast-tracking the provision of additional licenses for new team members or newly trained staff (take 20% off!)
  • extending all existing Inflectra trials to avoid loss of clients' data and to allow for a more in-depth understanding of powerful capabilities of our software products
  • providing guidance on how to telework and teleTEST effectively, including while using Rapise and Spira family of products.

If you need any of this taken care of, please do not hesitate to reach out #TeamInflectra at sales@inflectra.com. 

 

Stay safe, wash hands, keep your distance.