A Look Back at Get Ahead Day
Since fully transitioning to remote work on March 12, managing Zoom fatigue, homeschooling, and pets pawing across keyboards has become part of our daily grind.
In late April — more than six weeks into the throes of a global pandemic — our CEO Tim Hwang offered a respite from the routine. A company-wide “Get Ahead Day” was announced, enabling and encouraging employees to turn their focus inward; to do whatever needed to simply get ahead.
“We trust that your definition will ultimately translate into what’s best for both your mental health and the company,” Tim wrote.
Get Ahead Day’s straightforward goal is simple — to free up time for employees to do whatever they deem necessary to get ahead. By significantly decreasing internal meetings, direct messages, and the general volume of intra-company activity over the course of a business day, FiscalNote hopes to provide an opportunity for relief from all the COVID-19-induced chaos. And nobody is better to identify what that relief looks like than each individual employee.
But it’s near-impossible to deploy a company holiday that brings business operations to a grinding halt while the outside world continues to turn. While clients and vendors still buzz with activity, FiscalNote’s inside hums with core systems, infrastructure, and client communication that require our undivided attention and around-the-clock care.
Our reporters constantly navigate an ever-evolving news cycle. Research and Development teams must constantly monitor our systems and push forth critically needed product features and updates. Client Success, Support, and Business Development functions inform and maneuver delicate client relations — and mitigate issues amid this ever-evolving economic crisis.
Employees’ daily displays of resiliency and leadership are nothing short of commendable. There are families pulling split-shift workdays to accommodate 24/7 childcare and looming deadlines. Superhuman production efforts delivered the kinds of critical COVID-19-specific information to our clients and readership that have helped them better navigate such unprecedented public health and economic times.
Over the course of the Get Ahead series — we’ve observed the days on May 1, May 22, June 26, and July 24 thus far — employees have proven as creative, dexterous, and exemplary with this unstructured time as they’ve demonstrated since the first remote work orders were handed down in mid-March.
- “I worked on my FiscalNote platform product knowledge, revised my sales pitch, focused on prospecting and account planning.”
Long, late-afternoon lunches surrounded by family have followed no-meetings mornings marked “zeroing” out the inbox.
- I was able to use the day to finally finish a strategic project that had been sitting in my to-do list for literally months. It was a really important thing to get finished but it was really difficult to prioritize over other work, and especially hard to find the heads-down time it required…”
There have been stories of hiking, yoga, meditation — the antithesis of standard workplace productivity, but the replenishment and nourishment of self.
Some have recharged by reading books to better hone their respective crafts and beats, while others enrolled in online classes or dove into passion projects for both their personal and professional development. (Think: DIY garden boxes, a barn-door installation, language mastery, puppy training, and more…)
- “I spent part of the day on wellness. Took a break from work to regroup with family. It was refreshing and I was rejuvenated.”
FiscalNote’s next Get Ahead Day is slated for Friday, September 4.
