This is a great question Logesh, and I’m sure everyone one us here has thought about it a lot and has some extra to add!
There are multiple dimensions to how we have been affected at YCBM
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Quite a few of our customers have been going through terrible trauma, have have their businesses cancelled overnight, and also of course could be personally affected by illness and loss. As well as making some business decisions around our tool to help them, I could also see that this was going to be a tough time for our team to help them as best we could. I wanted them to have flexibility to make offers and switch things around depending on circumstances. I wrote up a piece for our journal: which included advice not to try and expect ‘business as usual’ performance metrics and KPIs from the team, as they will be dealing with not just our own personal impact, but the impact on our customers too.
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Although we were already a remote team, and so people are used to working from home, I decided I wanted to be more in touch that usual with everyone. So I instituted 15 minute ‘lock down catch ups’ with everyone in the company - I’ve had one every 3 weeks or so. It means I get a chance to catch up with each of my team mates (we’re about 16 people) and find out about their individual circumstances and how they’re family is doing etc. I know that would be hard to do at scale, but I’d recommend managers and other senior people to be doing similar with their teams.
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We created new channels in Slack - silly stuff about music / cooking (I’m sure everyone is doing similar) and a place to post photos and updates specifically about lockdown.
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We just recently started a ‘Lockdown Win of the Week’ where after a nomination, a team member will get a certificate for something they’ve done to keep going which is inspiring or fun - here is our first recipient:
Maintaining team morale and culture is already a high priority for me as it’s easy to lose touch with when everyone is remote, so we were already aware of many of the pitfalls.