Being a team but individually — A Covid-19 update
It’s April 1st and it’s not funny here. At Variant we made the decision to work from home starting Friday the 13th of March. Long before NYC became the US Covid-19 epicenter, we encouraged our employees to work from wherever they felt safe since we anticipated that the pandemic would probably last awhile. The following week, NYC shut down in an attempt to #FlattenTheCurve. We asked everyone to be available more or less during working hours (eastern time). As of today, we are in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Charleston, Boston, New York, and the Isle of Mull (Scotland).
We are a very young company. Our two most recent employees, Paloma and Scott, started in February! How are we supposed to function as a team if we can’t interact face-to-face? We came up with a plan and are now testing it. It all revolves around Zoom, partially thanks to their custom background feature. We implemented a daily team update every morning, which mimics the social time around your first office coffee.
We chat about Covid-19, quarantine, the future, eating too much, and how nobody laughs at Peloton anymore. We are accidentally learning a lot about our coworkers’ lives by being unofficially invited to their houses and cars. We have seen the inside of Tom’s Land Rover (the only place he gets decent-enough internet to support a video conference call), filled with camera gear, and Scott’s pool, and we are all very jealous. We now know that accidental muting is better than accidental unmuting. We can also now recognize the voices of everyone’s significant other and/or mother.
Like (presumably) many other teams in this situation, we are taking full advantage of Zoom’s custom backgrounds and we have implemented a weekly contest for the best background. Unfortunately, Erin and Anne-Katrin can’t get their Zoom backgrounds to work, so they keep losing every round. Well, almost every round, since Scott’s last submission was so bad he lost to no background at all…
Finally, we implemented a company-wide happy hour on Fridays. We encourage everyone to grab an (optional alcoholic) beverage and discuss future partnerships. We started Variant around partnering with populations that are extreme outliers for phenotypes of medical relevance. We have a number of such partnerships currently in the works, but recently we have all been focused on the short-term things: building out our analytics pipeline, booking helicopters for doctors in the Himalayas, cold-chain shipping from Madagascar, finding a lawyer in New Caledonia, etc.
Now we all spend a few hours a week researching future projects and finding better ways of identifying and defining epidemiological outliers, evidence of adaptation, and what constitutes medical relevance. The first round of brainstorming focused on tropical islands and warmer climates — understandable given the current situation. The next promises to be more relevant.
