A Year in a Pandemic: Now What?
It has been over a year since the COVID-19 pandemic started impacting our teams and businesses in the United States. Traci Barrett and Rob Harr dive into what has changed for them, their businesses, and how they plan to continue being human in the workplace this next year and years to come.
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Announcer:
Welcome to the Overly Human podcast where we discuss all things human in the workplace. Because it's not just business—it's personal too.
Traci:
Hey, Rob.
Rob:
Hey, Traci.
Traci:
So we were just looking at the calendar and realizing that it has been an entire year since the world went into lockdown, and we thought that it might be a good idea to talk about it. I have been dying to ask you a ton of questions, especially with Sparkbox and everything I'm seeing with my clients of what this year has been like, what you've learned, and what we feel like the future holds for us.
Rob:
Yeah. It's been a wild one. Sometimes it's hard to believe it's actually been a year and other times it's like, has it only been a year that we've been doing this?
Traci:
I know. It's the longest shortest year.
Rob:
Yeah. Yes, exactly. It's the longest shortest year, that's a good way to put it.
Traci:
So tell me, I just kind of want to be reminded because I know we've talked about it, but tell me what your first thoughts were as an owner, as a leader of a company. At the time of the pandemic, I remember you guys were clipping along. Things were great. You've always had this amazing space, just a great team coming together, very vibrant. Every time that you and I would Zoom to do the podcast I could see people bustling around in the background. So tell me what went through your mind when the reality hit, “Ok. We have to shut things down. We need to get people home.” The first few months of the pandemic, what were you thinking as an owner and a leader at Sparkbox?
Rob:
Oh, wow. So I remember back February of last year. So February of 2020, we were having a conversation in the office. And I remember saying to Nikki, one of our HR admins that, "Hey, Laura and I went to Costco this weekend, and we're stocking up on meat." And she looked at me and she's like, "What did you say?" And I said, "Well, there's this thing going around that we're preparing our house and making sure we've got what we need." And she's like, "You're not a prepper. That's not who you are." And she was frightened because that was out of character for me.
And I remember watching this happen and just being like, "Okay, here we go." But I was actually on a business trip when the world kind of came to a stop. March 11th is kind of the day that I remember everything kind of changing. And that was the day the NBA canceled the season. Then the next day schools in Ohio closed and all of that,
We made the decision really quick to shut down the office. And the thing going through my head is this isn't going to be real short. I don't know how long it's going to be, but everybody on staff was like, "How long will the office be closed?" And my answer remained pretty consistent as, "I don't know. And I don't know when this will change back." I don't know that my wildest imagination, I would be thinking the office would still be closed a year later, but here we are. So it was really just consuming a lot of news and a lot of media to make sure that we were keeping people safe. That was my number one concern was about the humans.
And then it was once schools started closing is what can we do to help make it so that we can continue, right? Everybody's worlds, radically changing. There is people who have living situations who they didn't plan to be in their house all the day. There is people with family situations that didn't assume their children were going to be living with them while they were at home while they were trying to work. So how do we start doing these things to make this something that we can survive for lack of a better word, not from a health perspective, but just from a mental perspective? That's what I remember going through my head, constantly during that time.
Traci:
Yeah. And then what did you think at the time about business? I know a lot of my clients and even at Navigate the Journey, we were feeling like being a company that does most of our work, our sessions in person—our team building and our strategic planning sessions in person—there was this kind of, “Oh, no” moment where we were trying to think, "How do we pivot?" And we pivoted rather quickly and smoothly into virtual, I mean, of course it helps that everybody's virtual. So you can kind of conduct your meetings and sessions in the same way, just via Zoom.
But how quickly did your team fall into place? And then how quickly were you able to sort of address clients and kind of lean into business again?
Rob:
Our average sales cycle for new clients is three to six months for the size projects we do. So it was very much just hang on with both hands and see where things go. We had projects that were signed stop. We had clients come back and say, "Hey, we're extending our payment terms” in some cases doubling or tripling them. So there was a lot of business realities kind of hitting us too. I think a lot about our operations and our cash flow and how all these pieces work together.
And there were assumptions that we made as a business that had always been true for 12 years. And all of a sudden some of the things that we assumed were true that would happen a certain way because they always did stopped working that way.
And it was like this questioning moment of, "What don't we see coming?" Or, "What are we assuming that can't change is going to change?" And I don't know that I've been through a moment like that in the same way ever. And I'm hoping to not have to go through it again, obviously, but it was so much change so quickly that we also had to pivot and find new opportunities rather quickly. I think that we were in a decent position, both cash-wise and business-wise to be able to afford to make that pivot. We haven't had to lose any staff or any of that stuff, which is great because that's kind of the deal we make with people is to take on that risk for them. But there was several moments in there where it got real scary real quick.
Traci:
Yeah. I think one of the things that's interesting and I saw it with your team for sure is the clients that we have, or even the friends I know in the business that went into the pandemic with a healthy team, like a strong culture, solid operations, they were able to pivot pretty quickly and help each other well. And I definitely feel like, although our leadership skills were stretched to the max during this period of time, and we had to think in ways we'd never thought before, boy, talk about reaping the fruits of your labor when it comes to how much time you spent on culture, on trust, on making sure you're a well-oiled machine the best you could, running a smooth operation, having processes in place.
Do you feel like you felt that? Were you keenly aware of, "Oh thank goodness we have the team we have" when you were going through this?
Rob:
Yeah, absolutely. The thing I remember most about that period, and I'll say that period started around middle of March and lasted probably through May was just clarity. I remembered very, very strong clarity of what the purpose was and what had to be done. We had our models, we knew where we had to be. We knew what decisions had to be made because we had good visibility into all the things that needed to be done to survive that.
And here we are a year later, now I think we're experiencing this collective fatigue from the last year. There wasn't this fatigue yet. There was this clarity and sense of direction of what had to be done. And there was an immediacy to it that allowed—at least us—to act with purpose and to make decisions and to be prepared, to make decisions.
We ran through every scenario I can possibly think of what happens if this, we modeled it all out and we had the resources and the spreadsheets and the foundation ready to go there to be able to say, "Okay, well, if this happens, this is what we have to do to react." And it was all really clear and there was a sense of unity among the leadership team and even with the company about these are the things that we're surviving together.
Traci:
Yeah. And what's interesting about that is it paints a picture of kind of the phases of what this last year has been like. So in the beginning, great teams are rising to the occasion. They saw the challenge at hand, they were going after it, we were getting ourselves settled. There was a newness to what we were experiencing and good, bad, or ugly there's still this kind of energy that happens when you're sort of trying to navigate a new crisis or a new situation.
And so there was this sort of heightened energy in the beginning. Then everybody seemed to find their stride, and get settled in, and kind of accept that this was going to be longer than they thought it was going to be. And then, like you said, towards this these last six months of the year, just this increased fatigue, different than our normal burnout that we can experience in work.
This was just a heavy fatigue that seems to be rather universal because we don't have access to the same ways that we blow off steam or the same ways that we replenish ourselves and replenish our energy. Some of those are unavailable to us because of the pandemic or some of them were just not able to lean into, because of all the responsibilities that we have, whether it's children homeschooling or whatever it might be.
Announcer:
Traci Barrett is the president and founder of Navigate the Journey where she helps entrepreneurs discover their motivations and strengths, build their leadership skills, strategize their own life vision, and ultimately reach their full potential. Follow her on Twitter @barrettraci to get even more insights.
Traci:
Now we're coming out the other side—fingers crossed—let's assume we are, there's a light at the end of the tunnel. People are getting vaccinated. Thank goodness. And we're starting to see numbers decrease and keeping our fingers crossed on variants and all that.
But moving now, coming out the other side, I know there's things that you and I've talked about that we feel very strongly, that companies need to kind of keep their eye on. And especially because there's a lot of our listeners are in the tech world and they do what you do in your space. And if there's one industry that's definitely benefited from the pandemic, there is this reliance on digital and digital platforms now more than ever.
More average Americans understand digital platforms and software now than they did pre the pandemic have learned what they can get out of it, the great uses for it. And so there's this higher demand a lot that's happening. And I can see with my clients that everybody's hiring, work is coming in, and yet we still have this fatigue that we're trying to manage and get through.
So what are you feeling on your team when you think about this increased utilization, this kind of strain on capacity as you look forward?
Rob:
Yeah. And I think it's really interesting about what you just said is I think there was less fatigue when there was more quarantining, right? Because there wasn't this risk assessment, it was everything was risky. We're staying home. We're not going anywhere. There was this cloud that was lifted. It was like, "Oh, well I know what my tomorrow is going to be. I'm going to wake up. I'm going to stay home. I'm going to do this and all of that."
We exist now in this place where I think this is good because we see hope as humans, but it also introduces all of these choices to be made. Like there's a fatigue and emotional labor that goes into having to make those decisions again and what that means and all of that. So I think that, and plus its just time and trauma and all that other stuff kind of gets stacked up in there.
But I think that what I'm seeing in the industry is, everybody I talked to, everybody's got work and plenty of it. And a lot of opportunity, which is great. Everybody also is trying to grow their teams and struggling to do so because finding good talent has become really difficult because there is so much opportunity and their both internal and external of our clients. So those two things, I think, lead us into some really interesting things about what we do and how we manage that for our teams.
I'm keenly aware that everybody's kind of... Burned out is the wrong word, but everyone is in a heightened sense of stress and reality. And I think what's really interesting for me compared to other times we've been through seasons of high demand and high productivity, high utilization is it's everybody, it's our leaders, it's our directors, it's our individual contributors. It's everybody feeling because the stress and the trauma is the water, the air we exist in.
And so we're trying to do things to build culture and to build connections and to get ready for whatever that new normal next season is. But at the same time, even the people who are responsible for preparing that are also suffering from the same environmental trauma that we've all been through, that we're not quite done with yet.
Traci:
We are in this weird phase. I just heard somebody say the new phrase is “FOGO” instead of “FOMO.” It's this “fear of going out.” And I saw the New Yorker cartoons are just so hilarious right now, but they have a group of people in a room and all the thought bubbles are kind of like, I forgot how to speak or how do I have a conversation again? There's this reentering into society and how do we manage business trips? Do we just hit the road? Do we go back to seeing clients in person? Do we expect our staffs to do that as well? How are we handling people being vaccinated and not being vaccinated?
And then also as we reenter and people start to feel more excitement and more freedom, then we're going to see vacation start happening and those requests are going to go up, of course. But there's going to be this need to build or rebuild even personal connections with each other as a team.
So do you consider, how you're going to bring your team back together in person? What that's going to look like? And tell us a little bit about what you've decided space-wise cause I think this is really interesting what people are doing with office space.
Rob:
So just to remind everybody before pre-pandemic, we had two offices: we have an office in Dayton, Ohio, and an office in Pittsburgh, as well as a group of people, fully remote scattered kind of throughout.
We've made some decisions, we've closed the Pittsburgh office. We had a place to get out of our lease last summer. So we made that decision so we weren't spending money on a space we couldn't use. And as things went on, we made the decision to close our Dayton office, which was a big deal for us. That had been our headquarters and kind of HQ since the beginning. We started as a centrally located company. So we've decided to go forward as a remote-first company. So we were a hybrid company and now we're going to move forward and think about things in a remote-first way.
We did open a smaller office here in the Dayton area, more of a place to get mail and kind of run things out of. But we went from 17,000 square feet here in Dayton to 2,000 square feet. So it's not the same thing at all, but I think it'll serve us well.
When we first started asking our staff what they wanted in the future, when the pandemic kind of first started, there was this sense of, we want to get back to what we had and that changed over the last year. And now there's more and more of the sense of, we like having the flexibility of being able to work from home and the expectation. People realize that some of the reasons they were coming into the office—because we always had kind of like an open policy—was they had fear of missing out. They fear of not being part of things. And now that's been removed. They like the flexibility. Now that's not everybody, of course, but we are definitely looking for ways to make those connections again.
We have made the decision that there will not be an in-person retreat this year, vaccinations are happening and speeding up. But with some of the considerations about people's families and their kids not being able to be vaccinated requiring travel this year felt like a step too far. But we are definitely looking for opportunities if you're located near other Sparkboxers, for ways for people to get together and to be in person again some. But trying to do that in an equitable way and a way that serves everyone well is really tricky.
Traci:
Yeah. So do you envision in the future, really post-, post-, post-pandemic having times where you come together? Frequent times where you come together or just more like really planned out times and being a truly kind of remote company?
Rob:
So we plan on post-, post-, post-pandemic, whatever that means, getting together twice a year, that's kind of what we've talked about. Getting 50 or 60 people together twice a year will require a lot of planning. Yes. But we still need that. Humans still need that face time for that emotional intelligence and that reading people and building bonds. But I think that there's still a lot that can be done in a remote way if we're intentional about it.
Traci:
Absolutely. I think that's one of the biggest learnings I've taken away. I mean, as you know, we do team workshops. When we're in person, which is all we had done in the past, we have these deep moments and people open up and you get far fast with a team just in a day when it comes to having breakthroughs and connection. And I think one of the most surprising things we realized as a team was that we actually could do that via Zoom. We were seeing breakthroughs and seeing emotion and seeing connection and seeing progress on teams. The key was getting them together and how you facilitate those things and creating an environment that works online.
So there are companies that are having these aha moments. And what I've seen with our clients are we're seeing this mix of what you have described, where people are going completely remote and never thought they would in the past, can hardly believe that they're saying it, can hardly believe they're giving up their leases or whatever, but they've made this decision.
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Traci:
I think one of the key things you said was that you launched an employee survey. I think that's so important to gauge your employees as you're making these decisions, because then they feel like they've had a voice in it, that you've heard that you've weighed up every viewpoint, as opposed to just making this decision in a vacuum or just between you and your partner. I think that it's great for teams to do that.
So I've seen teams going completely remote. I've seen teams that have decided to go hybrid and this is happening a lot where they're keeping maybe just a portion of their space. I have several that have subleased, parts of their space or gotten rid of the leases on bigger spaces. And they're getting together for enhanced collaboration or innovation. A lot of software companies are doing this or times to just ensure alignment or foster community. They're coming together. So they're deciding now, what do we want? What in when and how will it look like? Do we want to require a physical presence?
So a lot of owners and leaders are wrestling with this right now because you're dealing with a lot of different personalities. And especially when you have a couple of owners together that are very different, introverts, extroverts, people that need to be in the office that misc and getting out of the house. So this is a big, big decision, and it's going to be really interesting to see how it plays out in the future. But I think figuring out what works for your team and understanding and accepting that you're not going to get it right at first.
We all have to have a lot of grace for ourselves and for our teams and treat this next year as a continuous experiment and know what works you're going to try to scale it. What doesn't work, you're going to try to change it. But I think it's important for teams to hear from their leaders like, “Look just like the pandemic year was the first year we experienced it, the post-pandemic first year is going to be the first experience. So we're going to get some things right, we're going to get some things wrong. But we are going to continue to do pulse checks, and we're going to treat this as an experiment and we're going to land somewhere good for us as a team.”
Rob:
And I think that with that, one of the most important parts of all of that is making sure that you're setting expectations really clear because ambiguity during one of these times will kill trust, it'll kill culture, it'll kill all the things that we're trying to build. Even getting it wrong, but being clear about what we're doing and why will at least give you something to iterate on.
Because one of the things that I see, some of the people that I get to talk to on a regular basis, they're like, "Oh, we're just waiting to see." Well, your staff doesn't know that. Your staff is writing a story in their head. We've talked about that so many times in the past, right? We get permission as leaders to get some things wrong when we're really clear about why we're doing it and what we're doing because then we can make intentional changes to it to try to do better.
Traci:
Right. Absolutely. And in a time when you are trying to hire, not just hire, but you're trying to keep retention super high, right? That's key. How clear you are, how open you are, inviting them on this journey of this next year and telling them to speak up and speak into this great new experiment is going to be key to keeping your employees happy, connected.
The ultimate goal is that you are creating and keeping a productive yet energized environment. And whether you're remote, whether you're hybrid, whether you're all going back to the office and done with remote, whatever your decision is, that's your goal. And to keep a productive and energized environment, you have to stay connected to your employees. You have to be addressing kind of this mental health burnout that you're dealing with. Getting these people to a good place and showing a lot of grace to each other with the hiccups along the way, because there are going to be some.
I mean, I think this summer is going to be interesting for leaders to navigate as everybody re-emerges and restrictions are lifted and people want to go. I mean, it's going to be interesting yet the work is still happening and we still need to meet the demands of what's going on in the world around us and with our clients as well.
Rob:
And I think that, for me, that's an opportunity to just be transparent with people and to clearly set those expectations. We've been talking about expectations for 2021 vacation since December like, “Hey, there's realities in the business that we all need to consider.” We told everybody in December, we expect sometime mid-2021, that there'll be an opportunity to have pinup demand to want to go someplace, but we all can't do that the same week. And by talking about it, we demystify it.
And it doesn't become something that we're reacting to, but it's something we're preparing and setting expectations, being transparent, teaching, and enabling our staff to make good decisions so that we can collectively get to where we're going together. We can change a trust destroying process of saying, “no” to a trust-building process of saying, “we want to partner with you to be able to say yes, so let's do it this way. Let's have a structured approach to these things.” And I think that's just an example of what we should be doing as leaders when we have those moments to take a step back, look at the field and see the problems coming up before we have to just react to them.
Traci:
Yeah. And on these conversations, is there anything else that we haven't talked about that you're anticipating? You're having conversations with your business partner on that you're wrestling with or you see as a hurdle or a learning kind of going forward?
Rob:
I think the big thing that we're wrestling with is, what do we do when people want to start getting together again? Is that something that the company encourages and sponsors? Is that something that we stay away from knowing it's going to happen?
There is some good side effects of having gone through this is we've probably removed some of the recency bias, right? Like if I have two people that work directly for me, one I get to see every day and one of them's remote the relationships were different and we've level set that again. Are we okay, stepping back into that? And I don't know the answer yet. It's hard to say no to a tighter relationship or a better relationship with one person because I can't have it with somebody else, but I need to be aware of the side effects that has in the culture in general.
Traci:
I think that's interesting. I think too, one of the maybe things I'll toss out there for you guys to think about—and again, this is all timing because I think comfort level is going to evolve with some of these things. And today comfort level is still low as it should be, but as we go forward when comfort level gets higher and it feels less risky and we're looking for ways to come together, maybe in productive ways.
I think one thing that I'm seeing companies and I'm admiring them for is to start to think about the roles we play in the world post-pandemic, given that some industries benefited, some people benefited from the pandemic, some just wrote it out the best they could and came out the other side okay. And certain groups didn't do well. Some companies went under, some industries are not doing well. Some communities certain minority groups and disenfranchised communities are not doing well.
And so I'm seeing that some companies are planning on volunteer opportunities when those are safe and they're able to do as being a way to bring teams together, maybe we're going to go into a community and help a food shelter, or we're going to help in some places or in coming together, even remote teams that are scattered, kind of bringing them together for those opportunities, I think are clever. And I think impactful.
And I think given this past year, more companies are going to be looking for ways to have a positive impact in the world around them. And so, I think that we can get clever as leaders in the way that we re-introduce our teams to each other and we make connections. And we also hear from our employees what's meaningful to them and what could be great ideas to help them build connections as well.
Rob:
And I think there's some unique opportunities that are presenting themselves because of the new acceptance of remoteness. We've been working with a local high school here in Dayton for years running workshops or being a part of their STEM program. And this year we were able to do that, but we were actually able to include some of our remote people for the first time ever and give them an opportunity to invest in that team and invest in those individuals.
And I think that it looks different than it used to because our communities sometimes have changed. But like you said, if we get creative, we can even serve the bigger community differently by taking advantage of some of the inherent strengths of being remote and the acceptance of some of the tooling and the ability to do that.
Traci:
Yeah. And I think, if we were to kind of sum up this last year, I think that is a big part of it is we've learned how to be nimble. We've learned how to have positive impact in different ways. We've learned how to stay connected despite hurdles. We've learned what's really important and what to truly value.
And we've learned some great things about work-life balance about allowing our employees to be home, being more flexible. And yet the great revelation that we can be just as productive, which I think was an aha moment for so many leaders, but one that is been so necessary to learn. So I think I always try to be the glass half full kind of gal. And I know that there are so many hardships and heartbreaks that happened over the last year. And I experienced some of those as well, but I'm super thankful that we can come out the other side as leaders and know that we've been stretched and tried, but it's made us stronger and better hopefully.
And this coming year, I don't think it will be as hard, but it will still be a challenge. This is a transition that we've never experienced before. And I think we need to keep our leadership skills high and engaged and we can't slack off just because we're starting to feel freedom and we're starting to come out the other side. I just encourage all the leaders that are listening that enter into this next year like we said, as this continuous experiment and keep your goals set and keep your team focused. But like you said, keep clarity high. I think that's such a great takeaway.
Rob:
Yeah. And I think that, as we talk about what's next, the word ‘normal’ gets thrown around a lot. And one of the things that I keep reminding myself and other people is there's a new normal on the other side. It's probably not what it was. And that's not a bad thing because if we go back to where we were, that means that we have not learned anything from the last year and there's no good takeaways. And I fundamentally believe that's not true.
I believe there is something on the other side of all this that we can embrace, that will be different than what it was because we are complex creatures that we learn and adapt, and there is good lessons to be taken forward. So just falling back into old habits is actually moving backwards, not forward. And I think that's just how we have to kind of approach what's next, whatever new normal is.
And I think the last thing is as we're dealing with our humans on our teams is for the next period and probably for the next 12 months, we can't ever become disconnect the humans from the trauma and the experience we've all been through together because there will be some lasting effects that will creep up in ways that we can not even see coming yet that people will need extra grace. And we often can get through things by not being silent about them. The things we don't talk about and don't acknowledge, we get power to, we got to be careful about that with the experience we're just coming out of.
Traci:
Yeah. Wow. Good conversation. I'm glad we had it.
Rob:
Yeah, me too.
Traci:
I'm interested to see what the next year brings and maybe we'll have to do this again next March.
Rob:
I was just thinking this might not be the last one of these conversations.
Traci:
Well, I love learning from you. Thanks for sharing. It was a good one.
Rob:
Yeah. Thanks, Traci. Appreciate you.
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The Overly Human podcast is brought to you by Navigate the Journey and Sparkbox. For more information on this podcast, or to get in touch with Traci or Rob, go to overlyhuman.com. If you like what you've heard, subscribe and tell your friends to listen. Thanks.
