I wanted to share this calm, thoughtful, and socially responsible messaging about moving employees online at home when practical. Similar messaging might help when talking to people wondering about whether or not to hold physical gatherings. The writer is CEO of a tech company based in New York. -- Pete
Starting today, we¡¯re telling all our workers to work from home at @glitch. I¡¯m encouraging other business leaders to do the same immediately for every employee who can. I wanted to share a little bit about the rationale & logistics here.
First, I want to clearly acknowledge the privilege that we have working in tech, and that we see in adjacent industries like media and finance. We¡¯re fortunate to even be able to consider this choice, so we have an obligation to act.
In nearly every country around the world, we¡¯ve seen a reluctance to act until it¡¯s too late, often resulting in disaster. That¡¯s true even in countries with paid sick leave, universal healthcare & competent heads of state.
I expect the United States will experience the same failures as other countries, but worse. We have fewer hospital beds & tests per capita. So, the key thing we can do to mitigate that is enable social distancing. Employers have more power here than almost any other entities.
At our company, we've been able to move quickly to distributed work because much of our team was working remotely already. Yesterday, we asked workers based in our HQ to take all their necessary equipment home and to make sure they had an appropriate workspace.
I know this solution doesn't accommodate gig workers, or people who work in retail or other jobs where they have to be physically present. We don't have a social safety net for them, so we have to reduce the risk for them by distancing ourselves.
This work is what many describing as an effort to "flatten the curve". We're not saying millions of people won't get infected, we're saying we want to slow the rate so everyone doesn't get sick *all at once* and overwhelm our healthcare systems (and civil society's resilience).
Just from an execution standpoint, @operaqueenie gathered some very good resources if your organization is new to remote work.
Our particular processes at Glitch live in our handbook (with more updates to come soon):
But at the highest level, we have to make it seem kind, positive & helpful to stay home and go beyond handwashing to really reduce social spread. This is about shifting culture to normalize a huge change quickly. Doing so can save lives. Let's get to work.
