News

Centigrade wishes restful holidays, good health and thanks for 15 years

December 9th, 2020

Weihnachtskarte

Dear readers,

the year 2020 played havoc and will forever be remembered by the collective memory. The corona virus has caused staggering losses. Against the background of human losses, it seems a little cynical to write about financial setbacks. Therefore let me say in advance: Although it is one of the toughest economic years in our 15 years of existence for Centigrade and all our colleagues, all of us are first and foremost grateful that we and our closest environment are not affected by health problems.

This year our card design symbolizes the adaptability and team spirit that our colleagues have demonstrated more than ever before. The transition from close cooperation to a geographically separated home office has caused us very few problems, both technically and in terms of content, as this working mode has always been an integral part of our modern work culture. Like in a bustling beehive, all colleagues continued to work on their own honeycomb and knew what to do for the big picture through constant communication. After the first wave, however, we also noticed how many colleagues were drawn back to the shared office space. Unfortunately, this kind of  “swarming together” will not happen in the long run and will need a lot of perseverance.

In addition, we have decided to adapt our branch office strategy to the new working from home situation. For example, we moved our Mülheim a. d. Ruhr location to a smaller office in Düsseldorf and closed our Munich location  indefinitely. We have also converted many of our collaborative UX workshop and training formats to solely remote formats. Just recently, a group of participants on the customer side unanimously confirmed that this new form of collaboration is in no way inferior to traditional face-to-face events.

We continue to see a positive outlook, particularly from the fact that we have been able to gradually reduce the temporary short-time work which we had to introduce due to the overall economic situation since the middle of the year. Now we got back to our first month without short-time working.

We would therefore like to thank all our colleagues for taking these drastic steps and for allowing us to remain a functioning unit. Especially in our 15th anniversary year, this means a lot to me personally and we all toasted to this with good wine at our digital anniversary celebration.

A further bright ray of hope was provided by the fact that, together with our long-standing life science customer Tecan, we are no longer just passive observers of the corona crisis in our professional everyday work: this year, Tecan asked us to develop and optimize the user experience for certain applications. Tecan machines, which are used in many German test laboratories, are also used to perform the very important Sars-CoV-2 tests. So now PCR test workflows like this one are defining the fascinating new world of topics that our UX designers and engineers are able to address. The whole project team is highly motivated by the meaningfulness of this work. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Tecan for the trust they have placed in our work.

We would also like to thank you – especially for remaining loyal to us and for taking so many of the partly rocky new paths of cooperation with us. Without your commitment and reliability, we would not have been able to master this year so unscathed. We hope that you have been spared from the corona virus in your private life and will continue to be so.

Due to the special circumstances, we even more wish you and your family this year that the upcoming Christmas brings you some relaxing and contemplative days. I would like to conclude by saying that we wish you good health first and foremost – much more than the often vaunted business success.

Thomas Immich
Owner & Managing Director

 

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