Collaboration in Times of Uncertainty During COVID-19

We’re living in a unique, challenging and historical time, a time filled with many uncertainties. A time where a virus is changing everything about life and work as we know it.

But even in times of uncertainty, it’s warming to see businesses, including our own, focus on how to best protect and support families, employees, customers and communities as the crisis continues to unfold. It’s about putting people first.

One such example is Adobe reaching out to our customer community in Australia and New Zealand to help promote another customer’s workforce that had recently been stood down. We’ve had a great initial response and are hoping to help provide more jobs through our Adobe network.

Collaboration

Looking more broadly, I’ve always spoken about the importance of collaboration across the tech industry – and there’s no better time like the present to come together and help businesses and educators navigate these challenging times. Now is the time to focus on the human impact technology has on people’s lives, and collectively recognise the critical role our technology plays in human connections, creative pursuits and business success.

This has shown true in a recent collaboration between Adobe and a number of other technology companies with the AIIA. Collectively, we’ve supported the launch of a new ‘Business Continuity’ website, bringing together the sector’s support for Australian businesses during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Resources

We’re also proud to be working on several initiatives across the region to provide assistance locally. For example, we know how challenging this time is for students and teachers who usually conduct lessons in person. With that, we’re arming teachers and staff with new online resources for educators through our free Adobe Education Exchange portal. On this portal we have curated a vast amount of distance learning resources to help educators, school leaders – and now, in many cases, parents – discover inspiring projects, best practices, and new ideas so they can continue to drive valuable learning in virtual environments.

In addition, given that many schools, colleges and universities are facing challenges with international student attendance, physical campus closures and moving to online learning, Adobe is giving students free personal in-home access to Adobe Creative Cloud applications in place of their schools’ in-classroom license. We hope that by offering access to these tools will make the transition easier for everyone.

Communication

The way we communicate with friends, family, colleagues and customers has changed in a short amount of time and we know that keeping in contact with each other is key to sharing correct information. Over the last few weeks we’ve with worked with businesses across Australia and New Zealand to leverage our conversational marketing technology solution Adobe Campaign. We’ve successfully completed one of our customer’s biggest campaigns and helped another scale successfully to send out urgent mass communication on COVID-19.

We also know that delivering engaging experiences remotely is a new challenge for many customers. It was a challenge we came up against ourselves when we moved our North America Summit to an On-Demand Experience last week. In three weeks, Adobe successfully pivoted to deliver a high-quality virtual event – a new norm we’re seeing amongst our customer base as many reach out to host new experiences virtually.

Connections

The other new norm is working from home. As more workers transition to remote working, our platform Adobe Connect helps by giving people the ability to join meetings and training from their homes. We’re offering, via the AIIA Hub and direct from Adobe, free 90-day access to Adobe Connect our web and video-conferencing solution to help during this time.

Whilst many of our customers were used to doing this once or twice a week – moving a whole workforce remotely was a new experience for most. At Adobe, we know what that’s like. We’re trying our best to settle in for the mid-term and keep collaboration, creativity and connections as tight as they were in person. We’ve put together some great tips and best practices on how to work remotely here.

Whilst all of this is important, nothing is more important than the health and well being of our employees, customers and communities. And while we’re all trying to work out the best way to navigate through this experience, Adobe is committed to offering the support and resources to try and ease everyone through this challenging time.

Take care and stay safe.