Running a business in a COVID crisis

**This started life as an email to The Hallway's clients on Friday 20th March. I hope it's a little bit of use.**

Friday 20th March: The week that was

Eighteen months ago I set a personal goal of competing in the Masters Sailing World Championships. It was due to start this week. Of course it’s not happening now (as it shouldn’t be). Instead I’m back in Sydney learning how to run an advertising agency when your staff all work in their own (home) office.

First things first. This is all new. Yes we had a business continuity plan. But we didn’t have one that said the whole world would be contagious with a virus that was only discovered three months ago. So we’re very much learning as we go. Which is scary, but also a massive opportunity.

I do think one positive from this crisis is that it will force us to find a more flexible, more effective, way of working. And that’s pretty cool. 

In the spirit of collaboration, I thought it might be useful to share my learnings so far.

Managing the communications

Last Sunday we convened an emergency leadership team meeting. We agreed it was our duty to protect our people and to do what we could to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. We sent an email asking all those that could to work from home and invited everyone to attend a Google Hangout at 9am Monday for more updates.

This was our first stroke of luck. We migrated the agency onto Google’s G-Suite five years ago. In 2016 we opened our Melbourne office. Since then we’ve very much worked as one agency with two doorways, avoiding duplication of resources wherever possible. That necessarily requires a lot of collaboration between our two offices. And we’ve got reasonably proficient at it. 

The first all staff hangout went well. So we decided to make them regular.

We set up two daily hangouts for everyone to attend. 9am and 5pm. These are 15 minute check-ins where the whole agency gets together. Major news can be shared and anyone can raise any issues or concerns. 

Having one person acting as host is important. Rather than being a newsreader, their role is more one of compere. There probably won’t be major news announcements twice a day, but there probably will be lots of things people want to raise in the group forum (there has been so far anyway). Using the chat function in hangouts means it’s easy for people to ask questions and then the host can curate who talks when. So far so good.

Protecting the culture

Agencies over index on culture. They do it for a reason. Creativity flourishes in certain environments, and dies in others. 

One of the big things we’ve been wrestling with this week is how to transfer the culture that oozes through our buildings into everyone’s virtual offices (aka sitting rooms).

We’re definitely experimenting here. One of the comments that came up early on was the loneliness of working from home every day. It’s not so much the lack of dialogue - email, chat, hangouts are going all the time. It’s more the ease of making every conversation a functional conversation. That’s not how humans like to live. The casual chat is super important. We want to understand each other as individuals, it’s how we empathise, contextualise and understand.

On Wednesday morning our Operations Director Jess shared a picture of some chillies and flowers she picked in her garden. She asked others to share a snapshot from their days and suddenly ‘Pic of the Day’ was established. We’re doing it on all staff emails at the moment. This isn’t ideal so we are going to experiment with Google Hangouts Chat (similar to Slack, but keeping in our known ecosystem). Channel aside, the power of this type of authentic communication is undoubted. Just seeing a glimpse into each other’s worlds is really heartening. 

The next thing that happened was the rapid evolution of the daily town hall into a fancy dress extravaganza. It’s funny. It gives you something to think about as the call approaches (gotta have a good outfit). But most important it’s human. And that’s probably my biggest learning this week: having and using the tech is but step one. It's the less obvious, but arguably more important, human interactions that you need to recreate. They really matter.

Tonight we’re having agency drinks. Virtually of course, over a hangout. I’m wondering what everyone will wear for this one. And I’m definitely looking forward to raising a glass with a team that has done a brilliant job of moving so smoothly to a virtual way of working.

Stay healthy everyone.