Tekmos is Moving

After 6 years at our present location in east Austin, Tekmos is moving to new facilities in west Austin. And we are taking advantage of the move to address the new normal for professional employees. Before the Covid pandemic, we had perhaps 10% of the company working remotely. During the initial lock-down, this percentage went up to 75%, though it has drifted back down to about 50%. We believe that there has been a fundamental change in office organization, and that working from home is not a temporary reaction to the pandemic, but instead a permanent change in the way of doing business. We choose to embrace this change.

The new facilities are mainly for manufacturing. Testing, baking, tape and reeling, and shipping must be done on-site. On the other hand, professionals will work remotely, reducing the need for on-site offices and cubes.

There have been problems associated with half of the company working remotely, with the main one being communications, both external and internal. Externally, the traditional phone system doesn’t work well when there is no one around to answer the phone. So, we are replacing it with a VOIP based system. As a side note, switching to a VOIP system has led to interesting discussions about who really needs a phone.

These days, almost all external customer communications are through video calls. The only calls coming in through the land line are an occasional new customer query, an occasional finance question, and with the clear majority of incoming calls being spam. Does an engineer need a VOIP license, or will he be equally served by transferring the occasional call to him? We decided to drop engineering and most manufacturing from the system, and will use call forwarding to cell phones for those few legitimate calls.

The big communications issue is internal communications, which is mostly resolved with IT solutions. We have provided cameras and headsets, and switched to Microsoft Teams for meetings and informal conversations. That is working well, with most people having adapted to using it as the main means of communication. We are going to switch to a cloud based Microsoft mail server to allow for a tighter integration of email with Teams. File sharing is more difficult, since we are no longer on the same network. We solve this by doing a two-step transfer, using the company servers as an intermediate step. Accounting is also affected, and we are going to switch to a cloud based system.

We will have office space available at our new facilities when in person collaboration is required. For example, it is impossible to remotely use a scope on a chip. Finally, we are going to have a weekly company lunch, which will bring everyone together and make it easier to communicate.

With professionals gradually moving to working out of their houses, there is no exact move date for them, and the transition should be seamless.

Manufacturing will be shut down for about 3 days during the move. This will not affect delivery schedules. The exact move date has not been set, but will be in early March.

Tekmos Phone 512-342-9871 & website www.tekmos.com will remain the same.

Notifications will be sent to all customers and vendors with our New Address and the effective date.