After two months of confinement, in support of public safety policies that embraced with a sense of civic duty and care for one another, we felt a growing sense of fatigue and restlessness beginning to emerge.

When will this be over? While we have experienced a definite slowdown in gaining new customers, our current ones have remained with us. This allows us to keep our workforce largely intact. We have been able to adapt our remote service delivery. This means that my co-workers and I have been working since March 13 from our home office settings.

My workdays ended up filled with Zoom videoconference calls with colleagues, customers, prospects, and partners, especially in the initial phase. We had to make lots of adjustments to a different way of delivering services (remote vs. in person) and to our financial plans for the year.

Our work-from-home policy was revised every couple of weeks, in order to follow guidelines from state and federal authorities. From monthly Zoom meetings, we transitioned to bi-weekly ones, and now we meet every week just to make sure that everyone is in the know.

I slowly realized that exiting a period of social distancing, connecting only virtually and dealing with uncertainty required that I pay greater attention to my employees’ needs and feelings, and thus, to avoid breaking relationships of trust that bind our company.

First and foremost, I have made it our primary commitment to keep everyone in the company safe.

With my management team, we decided to go beyond the guidance provided by government authorities and discern, as a company, what the future might look for us. We launched a company-wide survey to poll the employees on how they felt about working from home, how they see the ideal office setup in the future, how long they would like to keep the flexibility to work from home, what is the most effective tool for communication and collaboration, etc.

As soon as we gave the signal, we started to get unsolicited feedback from employees who opened up in ways they hadn’t before. Within the first three days, 70% of our employees came up with responses that varied from anxiety to enthusiasm about returning to the office.

We discovered many things. For example, an introverted software developer realized he was actually more focused working at home. A member of the same team missed the “water cooler discussions,” the interactions that helped to brainstorm. Many said they were cramped in an apartment with children around, and working in those conditions was getting quite stressful. Then, there are those so fearful that they wouldn’t return unless a vaccine is found.

Since part of our company culture code is to put the other person first, we decided to resist the temptation to issue a top-down policy about returning to work. We received emails from employees so grateful for having this opportunity to express their concerns so that whatever the final decision will be, they felt listened to.

Based on early feedback, we believe that the future may look different from what it is now. Some situations, we discovered, did not require everyone to be in the office all at the same time. We want to support those types of activities that actually work better from home, as well as those who appreciate the flexibility of working a few days at the office and a few days at home for a variety of reasons, such as avoiding the long commute and covering family responsibilities.

The office layout would also be different, with fewer desks, spaced further apart, and with meeting rooms expanded. While not everyone will agree 100%, we feel that for the most part, the team will comply, because some of these ideas are also coming from them.

How do we know they will continue to work while at home? We give them our trust and treat them as adults, who know how to use their time to meet the expectations we’ve set.

We have not yet seen any abuse of this trust. There was one case in which an employee was performing below expectations, and we realized that he didn’t have quiet space at home. So as an exception, we allowed this individual to come to the office to work all by himself.

Moreover, we allocated some money for people who needed a chair and table to set up a home office. We are monitoring this closely and have noticed that production has even increased to the point that we tell our employees not to forget to set up boundaries while working at home.

This period would’ve been an easy time to make cuts and let people go to maximize the bottom line. But we didn’t. Like many small businesses, we had applied for the payroll protection plan (PPP) offered by the administration; we got awarded funds of $1.5 million on a 30-year loan, potentially forgivable.

It was practically getting free money. We thought it would help us build additional reserve and secure employment, if things do go down. Yet we knew that there were other companies whose cash flow had stopped from day one of the pandemic, while we still had some money in the bank.

After some debate, we decided with our investors and management team not to take that money and to make sure that the government allocated that money to other businesses that needed it more. I am happy that the sense of solidarity with other businesses out there won over the temptation to take that money offered to us.

We don’t know exactly what the future holds for us, but this period feels like one of those precious moments to which we need to pay close attention. The emotional bonding, unity, and mutual support that we may have achieved during the COVID-19 crisis are not a given and can be easily shattered, if our desire for getting out of this mess leads us to go it alone.

On the flip side, discussing together how to live through this period of progressive reopening can be a defining moment, leading to more productive and lasting outcomes that can cement our bonds for years to come.

Nicholas Sanna

(Living City, USA)