Our team's coronavirus policy + wfh guidelines

Update: We officially closed the office on Friday, March 13, 2020 until further notice. Below are some guidelines for working from home that you might find helpful to adapt to your teams.

The FNF/FNA Guide to Working from Home, aka Can You Imagine If We Didn’t Have Slack

2020 was always going to be interesting!

As we embrace the remote nature of our work until further notice, it’s important to remember:

Our values: Optimism, Compassion, and Integrity come to the fore. Our guiding question is how we can make life better for others: our colleagues, partners, lawmakers, candidates, our community of supporters, and fellow Americans. Mission first can only occur when we are healthy. Commitment to the truth leads us back to optimism, compassion, and integrity.

The ground rules we agreed to as a team 

Don’t go feral

• No, really. PJs are fun for a day. More than that and we’ll start to worry. In fact, you might want to plan your outfit the night before.
• Set a rule for going outside at least once per day and get up at least once every 1-2 hours to walk away from your desk and stretch.

Listening to each other is more important than ever

• Empathy matters. Make it a habit to check in with each other.
• If you are getting your wires crossed, go to video or phone call ASAP.

Asynchronous communication will dominate

• You won’t get real-time responses for the majority of your questions. We’ll need to plan for that when thinking about timelines.
• Please overcommunicate--there is much less visibility when we’re not in an office together, so PLEASE use slack and other means to communicate.

Meetings MUST have: purpose/goal, agenda, and a reason for every participant to be present

• If more than 30% of your meeting involves a 2-way conversation between 2 members while everyone else sits in silence, something is wrong. 
• Often it means you’re trying to do too much with a single meeting.
• Prioritize the pieces that require everyone’s input, start with those, and let people off the call as you go through the agenda.
• Prioritize shorter, faster interactions over longer, drawn-out conversations: 15-min calls are better than 60-min calls.
• Remember: you don’t have to take up the full time AND you can postpone if the team is not ready to have the discussion.

We still need to socialize

• We’ll be setting aside screen time for the full team, but . . . 
• Make it a habit to check in with each other, either 1:1 or in small groups. 
• If you’re part of a larger team, make sure you gather as a team.
• Gifs are our friends

Make sure work doesn’t take over your home

• It’s easier when you wfh to end up working until all hours of the night. 
• Make sure to get off your phones regularly in the evenings and weekends.

Coronavirus-specific:

• Stress and anxiety are bad for your immune system.
• There are lots of mindfulness tools out there that can help (Headspace, Calm).
• We're available if you need to talk--whether it’s about work, personal stuff, or just to vent some of the anxiety.

Trying to just generally survive? Check out the Morning Brew guide to wfh.

One of the most useful things anyone ever said to me about working remotely was that for every in-person interaction, you need an online equivalent. So we've come up with a translation guide.

Offline action --> Online equivalent

Casual info-sharing at a desk --> Use the Q times (one of us or all of us) + daily standups

Grabbing coffee with a co-worker --> Zoom coffee meeting! We’ll pay for coffee/a snack, up to 3x per week.

Grand entrances --> Add your Walk Up Song to this team playlist

HR issue -- non-urgent --> Slack DM to Ops

HR issue -- urgent --> Call Ops

Question for ED --> Daily 30 min and/or OH, just drop in if daily, schedule appointment slots if OH

Question for Legal --> 30 min 2x/week, just drop in

Question for COO --> Daily 30 min, just drop in

Question for Senior Leadership --> 30 min 3x/week, just drop in

Team time --> Every Friday 1230-130 pm (bring your lunch!)

General guidelines

We expect folks to be available and responsive from 9 am to 6 pm.

• Available: able to respond via slack, email, or text
• Responsive: within 30 minutes
• If you can’t be responsive for more than 30 minutes, please make sure it appears in your calendar and/or let the team know about your time offline in #general! This is more about managing expectations than it is about us trying to micromanage you.

--

There's a lot of information to parse right now about coronavirus, and as small businesses and organizations, it can be difficult to identify the right course of action. If it's helpful to you, we sent the below email to our team, which includes an update to our coronavirus policy (and reflects our commitment to sick leave more broadly). I'll follow up tomorrow with some thoughts on working remotely, especially for teams that are unused to it.

--

Hi Team,

As we all know, information and expert guidance about coronavirus are changing rapidly. Based on the current recommendations, we believe it is best to update our policy during this period.

As we monitor the situation and develop the best policies we can, we have a couple of critical considerations in mind: We want to do whatever we can to support the physical and mental health of you and your loved ones. And, consistent with our mission and values, we also take seriously our obligation to the broader community.

For those reasons, we are now updating our policy to further encourage social distancing by grounding travel, minimizing in-person external meetings, and encouraging you to work from home.

If you have questions, concerns, or would like to talk through anything, the senior team is always available.

This is a strange time. Thank you all for everything you are doing to help us get through it.

--

Updated Future Now Action/Future Now Fund Coronavirus Policy

Unless updated beforehand, this policy will be in effect through March 22.

• If you are sick or have a person at home who is considered at-risk (elderly, compromised immune system), stay at home.  
• As of today, we are grounding everyone: no work-related travel during this period.
• Minimize in-person work-related meetings with people who are not members of the team. Please convert as many existing meetings as you are able during this period to video call and generally schedule new meetings during this period as video or phone calls.
• Based on the most recent government guidance, starting tomorrow, March 12, we urge you to work from home if you are able. If you do not feel able to work from home, the office will be open or you can use our account to access another co-working location.
• If we do close the office, we will do our best to announce that closure by the prior afternoon so you are able to get any essential items.
• As we expect that some or all of the team will decide to work from home, we will do our best to provide resources, tools, and policies to make it as productive as possible. We'll be sending out some resources tomorrow and are available to answer any questions.