There’s a human impact from what’s going on in our world right now – and it’s very real – and frequently ignored in most of what I’m seeing professionally. The separation between work and home life has narrowed, blurring the lines physically and emotionally. Cats, dogs, and kids are now our coworkers – there is some good and bad in there! But most people are doing their best to pick themselves up each day, master the work-from-home (WFH) situation as best they can, and with a nod to the UK – keep calm and carry on.
As the head of operations for a technology company, I’m viscerally aware of the human impact the COVID-19 drama is having on our employees – my colleagues, my friends. Not only as COO, but as the head of our internal COVID response team, I know the ups and downs, and am doing my best to help where I can.
Our internal response team meets every week to talk about the changes we’re seeing from COVID, circumstances around the world where we have employees, and ways we can better engage with and support our team members remotely. Out of this response team, and our desire to do anything we can to help make the human impact less challenging for our employees, we came up with a questionnaire. It’s a beautiful amalgamation of many a google search, but it has provided us with insight we wouldn’t have been able to access at scale across our organization at this time. The questions center around how our staff is dealing with the WFH situation, since the reality is who knows how long we’ll be at it but it doesn’t look like we’re getting back to the office anytime soon.
From this questionnaire we’ve also been able to gauge the productivity of our employees – and it’s been pleasantly surprising. For example, engineering productivity has skyrocketed. What’s changed? Well, our team members on the west coast (looking at you, Bay Area folks) aren’t making 1-2 hour commutes to the office so they’re logging on earlier in the morning. This means the overlap in time online between west coast and east coast is greater, giving teams more time to work together in a day. Hello, productivity!
Now, although there are a million unknowns around this crisis, we do know that software can’t have cooties, so that’s a plus. But many of our customers have still been impacted by what’s going on. We don’t know the human impact but we do know their infrastructures are strained, remote workers are taxing systems and applications, and so on. So we’re available and responsive to not only our employees but our customers as well.
I think I’ll share our questionnaire (see here) since maybe it will be as helpful for you as it’s been for us in understanding and empathizing with our company internally – and perhaps it will shed light on how we can all do more for our customers.
If you have other suggestions, please do share in the comments below – we’re all in this together.
#wereallinthistogether #humanimpact #COVID19
Kailani Joy
Marketing & Communications
