Technology is Tokopedia’s Key to Staying Advance During WFH

Sometimes some work tools can only be accessed at the office. This was also felt by the unicorn company Tokopedia when it implemented WFH for its employees. Tokopedia’s Head of Engineering, Chrystiadi Harris, shared the team’s preparations for WFH in March 2020.

This regulation was given directly by the government so as not to create new transmission clusters at workplaces. For companies, WFH is a challenge in itself how we can do office work at home.

For engineers, a VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a secure solution for users to send and receive data via the internet. So privacy and data confidentiality are maintained. Unfortunately, VPN can only be accessed at the office even though WFH is already about to be implemented.

We are aware that a VPN is still not sufficient in capacity. So we are starting to scale up our VPN to support more than 5,000 Nakama who are WFH, explained Chrystiadi at the Start Summit Extension Tokopedia’s Enterprise-Scale IT Management on Tuesday (23/3).

Technology can Overcome Obstacles when WFH

Tokopedia has a special call for its employees, namely Nakama, a word taken from Japanese. The meaning of Nakama is a relationship like a family, supporting each other in any situation by giving the enthusiasm to achieve dreams together.

Facing this challenge, Tokopedia held a workshop and invited all Nakama to explain the VPN client. Most of them use iMac, so they need to switch devices.

We switched from iMac to Macbook, they took it home. Saturday and Sunday we work on VPN and finally it’s done, ready to work from home. Everything went smoothly, WFH was running smoothly and well, said Chrystiadi.

Do not stop there, the challenges exist, running WFH makes it difficult to coordinate and assess employee performance. According to Chrystiadi, all these obstacles can be overcome only by technology. He and his team made an application for Nakama to keep working productively and attractively during WFH.

We don’t meet each other, how do we ensure collaboration, if not in the office, how do we measure it. For the most part, we have a DNA Growth Mindset to adjust as long as the WFH and the Daily Standard continue, he explained.

Nakama’s Mental Health is also of Concern to the Company

These conditions made Tokopedia build applications internally. In the application, there are facilities that prioritize Nakama’s health. Starting from Nakama Wellbeing, Doctor Nakama, E-Counseling with Psychologist, Support Nakama. Apart from that, they also hold internal events such as eating together, games, and talent shows.

So they can consult doctors as needed. There are meals together and games we chat outside of work, this is done so that our mental healthiness will increase. We provide psychological and wellbeing so we can exercise together in consultation, there is also a group for new mothers so they can share about babies, he said.

It was all built to maintain Nakama’s mental health during WFH during a pandemic. However, physical and mental health is the main thing in any condition. Because physical and mental health will also affect performance at work.

Even though everything is done from home, it does not limit creativity in holding big events. Chrystiadi said, during WFH there were 7 merger events, brand events, such as Indonesian Shopping Time (WIB).

Everything is done remotely, before the WIB event we set a load test at midnight, make sure we can handle it later. We have weekly coordination, we simulate the program, we monitor during the show, he added.

He revealed that the toughest challenge during the event was to brainstorm for a long time. Then ensure that every employee does their job efficiently and has a good performance. So they made an application to monitor Nakama’s performance.