Going Virtual
COVID-19 hit like a freight train in the spring of 2020. We went 100% virtual in a day. And began learning and evolving our approaches to work to adapt to a new reality. Here are some initial reflections on our particular case study for the impact of the pandemic on our team.
COVID-19 hit like a freight train in the spring of 2020. I remember hearing vaguely about a novel respiratory virus, but other respiratory viruses in my lifetime had never directly impacted my world. Our software-as-a-medical device startup was deep in product development at the beginning of March, with our first submission to the FDA nearly complete. As a tech company, we had the tools that allowed team members to work from home sometimes, but most of the time, most of us were in our office together.
On March 5, we were stunned when just four days before the kickoff of the 45,000-person international Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) annual conference, it was canceled outright due to the unacceptable risk of COVID-19. On March 11, COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, and our entire team began to dig in to understand this threat better. The news was scary. Team emails and slack messages boiled into a torrent late into the evening. On March 12, at our team’s 9 a.m. daily standup meeting, we discussed what we had learned in the past 24 hours. I asked my team, “Does anyone think we should be coming into the office anymore or should we go virtual for a while?” The reaction was unanimous. We could and should go virtual. With the decision made, I declared, “After our Board meeting this afternoon, take whatever you need and, effective immediately, we are virtual.” Now, 15 months later, in June 2021, as mask mandates are being lifted in Michigan, we still have our office space that sometimes gets used when someone needs it, yet we remain a 100% virtual team, at least for now.
At Fifth Eye, we were lucky when COVID-19 hit. We were recently funded, did not yet have regulatory authorization to market our regulated medical device so we did not have customers to support, and had enough funding in the hopper to accomplish our next tranche milestone. We already had the infrastructure in place to make a decision and convert our entire team to 100% virtual with a single 15-minute meeting. Yet, the ripple effects on our team were extensive. Lots of our patterns, practices, and tools had to evolve. It is undoubtedly the case that there is a great diversity of experiences resulting from COVID for different companies of different types, stages, and scales, so I do not want to imply that our experience at Fifth Eye is anything more than a single case study in a sea of them. I am quite interested in what others are thinking now and welcome any comments, observations, and feedback on this post. Hopefully, all of us can continue to learn together what the impact of this COVID season has been and will be going forward. So now, with the experience of 15 months under our belts, here are some of my emerging and evolving reflections on this season in our startup, Fifth Eye.
Changing Communication Patterns
What was once a peek over to see if someone was available for a quick in-person touchpoint that sometimes spontaneously incorporated others who overheard the conversation had to evolve into much more deliberate calling of meetings. We learned to use slack for more of the quick back-and-forth and became more intentional and formal about calling virtual meetings. We lost the spontaneity of the practice of MBWA (management by walking around). We had to figure out new norms for who to include in what conversations and be more deliberate and explicit. We had to master new remote work tools. We became proficient at zoom and seemingly endless alternatives that did some things the same and some things differently.
One thing that seems to have been lost in the shift towards a virtual team is the power of the “overheard” conversation. Prior to COVID, we worked in close proximity to one another in team rooms. That meant, for example, that my CFO and I shared space and overhead many of each others’ conversations. This made staying in sync highly efficient and allowed for lots of learning by osmosis. We have definitely missed that! And we are not the only ones. We have had to develop new ways to collaborate – and to some degree, something has been lost as staying in sync required more time and effort, and with some of the team.
Erosion of Work-Life Boundaries and Balance
As a result of COVID, commute time is down. Wildlife is up. My husband observed, “Without a commute home, you don’t transition from work anymore. It permeates the house.” On one hand, recapturing commute time was great, but it also made us aware that sometimes that the process of commuting also enabled a shift from working to being home. Many on our team observed that working virtually made it much harder to set boundaries and separate from work. Prioritizing time for family seemed harder, even though we were all physically closer together for more hours than ever before. I found that I would go back into my office after dinner and work until bedtime.
Work-life balance suffered as the fun personal things became much harder to do. While recently reduced COVID restrictions are making some of those personal activities and travel easier to engage in now that we are emerging into a new season, there is an inherent difficulty drawing the line between work and home life when those activities all happen in one place.
Social Isolation
I believe that people are inherently social creatures. Even the introverts among us generally benefit from human connections. Social distancing, working from home, masks over faces, and other impacts of the pandemic reduced interaction and connection with others. Getting together for coffee, networking events, water cooler chats, before and after meeting socializing became impossible, stripping away social relationships at work. Isolation was further exacerbated as we went into lockdown. There were fewer opportunities to do social and personal things like connecting with extended family, faith friends, gym/workout buddies, and social get-togethers. The negative impacts of social isolation became increasingly pervasive and evident, triggering all sorts of difficulties. It was noticeable that stress levels spiked on our team, and people worried about themselves, their families, friends, and colleagues. Lately, relaxing requirements are easing this burden – and I am hopeful that this will get better.
Increased Productivity
While COVID certainly created new hurdles and distractions, in some ways, it did benefit our startup. Work productivity climbed as people took back commuting time, and boundaries between work and home grew much fuzzier, with the workday extending when there wasn’t our normal “end of day rituals” like a homebound commute. While that may not be entirely good, it has meant that the fast pace of startup progress has not diminished.
Perhaps a silver lining to the loss of some in-person work patterns has been that more isolation has also meant more focus and less interruptions. Reclaimed commute time has often been converted into productive work time. The warmth of relationships has diminished, yet it is clear that more task work is getting completed. I wonder sometimes if the costs are worth it, but as a startup leader, I would have to be blind to not see the uptick in productivity.
Increased External Meeting Velocity
Not traveling to meet in person meant that many more meetings could happen. Distance diminished in importance as everyone became more accustomed to meeting virtually. Partnership meetings moved more quickly. Potential customer meetings seemed more inclusive as fewer people had to convene physically. VC friends commented that they were able to engage with more companies now that there was less travel overhead. That increased velocity meant more competition in some ways as the physical limitations became easier to overcome.
I wonder if COVID has forced a decisive shift towards greater acceptance and competence in conducting virtual meetings? While I do believe that some meetings benefit from an in-person component, now it seems much more special. I wonder if the pendulum will ever swing fully back, or will we continue to leverage the velocity enabled by using virtual meeting options at least some of the time? While I think we will do more in-person, I think the option of meeting virtually will continue to be leveraged to increase velocity and productivity, similarly to how email overtook more manual communication systems, and we never moved back.
Professional Acceptance of Work from Home
There has been a dramatic shift in what is considered professionally acceptable due to the massive shift towards working remotely from home. Interruptions by pets, kids, lawnmowers, and other disruptions are now tolerated in a way that was not true before. Seeing a wide variety of background environments, chatting about someone’s art or guitar collection has opened up interesting new connection opportunities.
In addition, many people have decided they strongly prefer to work from home, likely for various reasons, to the point that as some employers are asking people to return to in-person work, they are opting to search for a remote working arrangement elsewhere.
Where do we go from here?
For us, that remains to be seen. We had some scary encounters on our immediate team and their families with COVID infections in 2021, so we all remain a bit cautious about taking on risk as the CDC continues to relax their recommendations and we all creep out of our COVID-imposed isolation. It still feels strange to not wear masks, see smiles on others’ faces, and start enjoying hugs again.
As a software company, the compelling business case for returning to an in-person workplace is not yet clear. However, unlike some, we have chosen to retain our small leased company space to maintain a “home base” with the capability to support our team as needed rather than commit to fully virtual forever. I suspect we might explore some kind of hybrid solution at some point; however, I do not feel any pressure right now to make firm decisions.
For me, for now, it feels right to just continue to listen, reflect, watch for what makes sense to facilitate the work and meet our team’s needs, and let the situation evolve for a while. If new pressures emerge that make a direction clear, we will tackle that as a team. In the meantime, we will continue to focus on building value and determining on a situation-by-situation basis what is the best approach. I certainly am interested in how others are thinking about this topic and welcome the opportunity to discuss and learn.
