A Day in the Life

We recently asked two Bellese employees to document their day to day routines while working 100% from home. Tolga, a full stack developer and Morgan, a business analyst shared their experiences and how things have changed since Bellese began a work from home policy.

Morgan is usually up making breakfast for the family at 7:30 every morning while Tolga is able to take it easy and sleep about an hour later than normal since he no longer has to get his kids ready for school. Tolga then enjoys a coffee, reads the news and gets himself ready for work.

Both Morgan and Tolga have dedicated areas in their homes to work but Tolga says he likes to work mostly in his living room in front of a big window for good views, and he finds quiet spaces when he’s on calls as he has two kids, a dog, a cat and his wife is also working from home now.

Morgan’s day usually starts with calls on critical tickets or environment statuses. Then it’s on to stand up calls with her two teams, where the teams have taken to making or finding memes relevant to the Agile environment to lighten the mood a bit.

She still finds time to get in all her standup calls with her teams by around 11 am, then takes the time to work on a new tool to pull Google form submissions into a Trello board.

One of the many memes getting us through the pandemic

Lunchtime for Tolga is usually handled by him and his wife as they like to cook all meals for the family and take care to make sure all grocery deliveries are cleaned and safe for storage in the house. But, working from home has resulted in his wife and him having more time for chores as they no longer have commutes to and from work to worry about. Another plus that Tolga is enjoying is having better coffee at home than he has at the office, and being closer to the coffee maker which results in him drinking more, which he says is a good problem to have!

Morgan takes time at lunch to eat and get in a walk outside to get a break from screen time and give her air pods time to charge back up. Morgan said before the work from home order she rarely got in walks at lunchtime but now she has the time and enjoys the little break. Once back from the lunchtime walk Morgan takes the afternoon to get ready for the next day and to triage any trouble calls her team gets during the day. She’s also helping the team working on a security compliance audit and takes the time to get documents updated and uploaded for that effort.

Morgan then takes a bit of a mental break around 3:30 while Tolga likes to play with his kids in the backyard and takes his dog for a walk in the neighborhood most days to wind down from his day.

Morgan’s day ends with making dinner for her family on the grill, having a Facetime call with her best friend and playing in Bellese’s Tuesday Night Trivia game on Zoom and Slack.

Tolga likes to watch TV with his family or play games on their phones. He says his bedtime has gotten a little later, not much else has changed for their nightly routines.

Overall both Morgan and Tolga say working from home hasn’t changed their work too much. They are still able to get just about everything done that they could in the office and have more time with family. Not spending that extra time commuting is a plus for them.

When the COVID-19 warnings started to hit and state and local governments began talking about social distancing and possible quarantine, Bellese sprang into action and directed office employees to test working from home on March 16th-17th. As the news became more grim and schools were closed, the decision was made for Bellese to go 100% remote on March 16th. While some companies have had to scale back employees or production, Bellese has continued to meet our goals, hired 6 new employees and hasn’t seen much of a hiccup from the change.