Helping Your Team During the Coronavirus: Going Beyond “Let’s Work From Home”
Thoughts on How to Protect and Motivate Employees and Serve Customers During Uncertain Times
In these times, one of the things I love about working in technology is our community’s willingness to collaborate and share information in the interests of the common good. This has been more evident than ever over the past two weeks, as companies and individuals share internal communications and provide benchmarks. I have had several calls with fellow CEOs where we quickly diverted from the planned topic of conversation to discuss how we were handling Coronavirus planning at our respective companies — conversations that I found hugely beneficial.
In that spirit, I wanted to share some thoughts on how we are approaching business decisions around Coronavirus / COVID-19 at Invoca and trying to serve our employees and customers most effectively.
[Note that this is focused on operations and communications, not the finance-centric question of “how much capital should I be investing / saving right now?” I’ll leave that topic for the venture capital community!]
Being authentic. Authenticity is one of my core values as a leader, and part of my intrinsic DNA as an individual. For me, authenticity means acknowledging my expertise and my limitations. (As an example, when I am in an internal meeting, I’m very conscious of the proclivity for everyone to defer to my opinion as CEO. So I will explicitly state whether the topic is one where I have deep knowledge and expertise — “look at me as an ‘expert witness’ in this discussion” — versus one where my opinion is really no more valid than any other participant — “look at me as just another colleague with a vaguely informed opinion.”) So, in conversations and broad communications with employees about COVID-19, I am explicitly acknowledging that we are in “uncharted territory” — a situation with few historic precedents, rapidly changing information, and little personal experience that can help with pattern recognition. That is not an excuse — it’s my job to do the best I possibly can under the circumstances — but I believe it builds credibility with employees more than pretending we have all the answers.
Providing clarity to help people stay focused. While striving to be authentic, I also recognize that in times of heightened stress, people crave direction to help them focus on the task at hand. For many, the incessant lunchtime conversations, discussion on social media, and updates on the evening news create anxiety. Our approach has been to create a small, cross-functional working group focused on COVID-19 and provide regular updates to the broader organization. We are not aiming to replace a professional news organization as an authoritative source of information, and acknowledge that employees with passionate interests and/or background in epidemiology may have more real-time insight than our working group. Rather, our goal is to instill confidence among most employees through consistent updates (through written communications and periodic all-hands video meetings) that we are taking relevant steps to safeguard their health and the business, so they can stay focused on their work and avoid some of the cognitive load associated with all of the information about the epidemic.
Outlining guiding principles. In these situations, every decision, now matter how seemingly trivial, becomes more important. Employees are hesitant to make decisions on their own, and naturally want to ask colleagues and leaders for “rules.” But the endless combination of scenarios make it almost impossible to give concrete answers on every potential situation. (I am imagining the potential amounts of variation on things like, “This weekend, I had dinner with some neighbors whose in-laws visited from Seattle two weeks ago. Should I self-quarantine or am I OK to come to the office?”) We are providing explicit guidance and policies to employees, but we are starting our communications by repeating the core guiding principles that are shaping those decisions. The goal is to help employees understand why we are doing what we are doing, and in the event they have to make a real-time decision on their own, to maximize the probability that the call they make is aligned with what we as a company would have done.
Adjusting best practices for our company. Best practices are a great source of insight, but it is important to consider the elements that make your organization unique. At Invoca, there are several factors that have influenced my thinking and approach. First, the majority of our employees are in Santa Barbara, where they mostly commute to work by walking, riding a bike, or driving — and thus have less need to use mass transit. Second, we have already developed a strong remote working culture — we have offices in Denver and San Francisco, and a decent number of people that work fully remote. Third, as a software company, we have little need for physical resources / machinery, and we have no material “supply chain.” As a result, we recommended that Bay Area employees work from home during the first week of March out of caution. Meanwhile, we have stated that employees in Santa Barbara and Denver can choose to work from home or come into the office — their choice. If our headquarters were in midtown Manhattan, and 80% of employees were commuting with crowds of people through Grand Central daily, we would have been more authoritative in telling employees to work from home.
Being mindful and supportive of individual risk tolerance. As a CEO, there are inherent risk versus reward calculations in every decision I make — even under “normal” circumstances. When it comes to COVID-19, we as a company are generally taking more precautions than what we see governmental authorities doing (in general, it feels like the private sector is being more conservative in its approach than the public sector.) But I also recognize that individual employees may view risk through different lenses. We may not be aware that a specific employee has a history of respiratory problems or has an older relative living in their house, thus making them especially sensitive to epidemiological risk. (For example, my mother in law lives five minutes away and stops by to visit and eat dinner several nights a week.) So we are emphasizing that employees can adopt their own approaches and being very deliberate in our use of language to reinforce this. For example, instead of saying that working from home is “OK” (with an implied nuance that it needs to be “OK’d”), we are saying “work from the office or work from home — your choice.” Our objective is to make sure every employee — even someone who joined the company a week or two ago, and doesn’t have a lot of confidence yet to voice their opinion — feels comfortable making and acting on their individual choices.
Testing organizational readiness for remote work. Thankfully, we have built a remote-friendly environment over the past few years. We have three separate “hub” offices, and nearly 20% of our employees work out of home offices rather than from a hub. While we have the technical infrastructure and company culture to execute a “work from home” stance relatively easy, we also recognize that having everyone out of the office simultaneously will be a significant operational and managerial change, especially for some teams that collaborate closely in the office. (For example, we have two pods of SDRs in Santa Barbara and Denver that have daily in-person stand-ups and frequent live coaching sessions with managers.) So even in advance of going “100% work from home” across the company, we are starting to run “full remote day drills” with specific teams to identify unforeseen issues, and make sure we are prepared as possible if we need to move to an “everyone work from home” posture.
Staying customer focused. Finally, in times of uncertainty, it is easy to turn inwards and focus on ourselves with questions about work from home policy, availability of hand sanitizer, and travel guidance. All of those things are important, and by creating a point team, our goal is to minimize the amount of time that employees need to spend thinking about these issues. But it’s also important to remember that these are times of anxiety for our customers as well, as they make decisions about their own businesses and customer relationships. Times of discontinuous change (as opposed to incremental evolution) provide opportunities for us to step up to new levels of strategic partnership, especially in industries strongly affected by the outbreak, like health care, insurance, and travel / hospitality. As leaders, we’ve challenged our company to be creative in thinking about new ways to help customers at this critical juncture, whether through product, sharing data and insight, or higher levels of service. These provide the ultimate opportunity for us to step as a strategic partner and collaborate with our customers more closely than ever before.
Hopefully, these practices will spark some ideas in your own Coronavirus preparation plans, and I welcome any suggestions or feedback so we can learn and adapt.
I’ve also included a few resources below that I found useful over the past few weeks.
- Dave Kellogg, How Startup CEOs Should Think About the Coronavirus, Parts I, II, and III
- Nick Mehta, Five Positive Things SaaS CEOs and Leaders Should Do to Get Through COVID-19
- Coinbase, Coinbase Planning and Response to COVID-19
- Salesforce, COVID-19 Coping for Teams on Trailhead
- Elad Gil on Twitter
- Johns Hopkins real-time data on Coronavirus cases by geography
