Newsletter / January 2022 / How did we work in the second year of the pandemic?

How did we work in the second year of the pandemic?

The second year of the pandemic at Mavi Kalem was another year in which we gained a lot of experience and learned. With what we learned, we reviewed our work and adapted it to new situations, did not hesitate to change our plans, sometimes we went back and redesigned and always learned something new.

The measures we took regarding the pandemic in 2020 were primarily aimed at protecting our teammates. Thus, we were able to protect both our working areas and the people from the target group more effectively.

Our goal was the same in 2021, but our methods have changed, they have improved further with the experience of the first year.

This year, we continued to work locally in all our offices, but we have also permanently included remote work in our working style. Depending on the content and features of our offices and centers, our teams switched to mixed working system. We aimed to work alternately in a mixed working style and to have our offices open every day. We have also achieved this goal by changing our office hours according to the speed and impact of the epidemic.

We continued our practices such as the “hygiene stations” we set up at office entrances, the “pandemic prevention committee” that evaluates our working order according to the fluctuations of the pandemic, and the “compliance statement” we prepared to encourage compliance with the protection measures. Compared to 2020, we saw that our teammates’ capacity to comply with and implement the measures increased. For this reason, we have left it to them to ensure the continuity of our applications. As a result, measures to ensure mask, distance and hygiene were implemented without the need for external control.

We provided regular briefings to encourage our teammates to be vaccinated against Covid-19. We have added the vaccination status to our daily health follow-up records of all Mavi Kalem team, which we have implemented since the pandemic announcement. In the second half of the year, we saw that all our teammates received two doses of vaccine. As reminder doses are opened to different age groups, our teams continue to have the reminder doses.

During 2021, 11 people from our entire team were treated at home as Covid positive in a 14-day quarantine period. Six of our friends stayed at home during the 14-day quarantine period due to primary contact.

In the second half of the year, we started working face-to-face and organizing events. Both the coincidence of our working hours to the peak hours of public transport and the initiation of face-to-face activities overlapped with the emergence of infectious variants such as Delta. The number of our teammates who were Covid-positive started to increase. Thereupon, we started to control and record the risk status of everyone who came to our offices via Hayat Eve Sığar (HES). We informed the beneficiaries who did not complete their vaccinations and who had risk warnings, and referred them to our online activities. This practice also required us to refer our refugee beneficiaries who are not registered in Istanbul to our online activities.

We enter 2022 seeing that we are effectively supporting the protection of our workgroups and teams from the epidemic.

At the point we have arrived at, we can see that our capacity to share the right information, to regulate our working style according to needs and to protect occupational health and safety has increased.

In 2022, we will continue to work in the light of what we have learned.