Coronavirus Q&A Series: Interview with Adam Froman, Founder and CEO, Delvinia

The COVID-19 crisis has impacted various aspects of our lives - especially work. With remote working becoming the norm, employees and employers alike, especially the first-timers, are experiencing the ups and downs related to the situation.

On one hand, employees are worried about job security and the challenges of working as a team, on the other, employers are facing issues such as engagement and productivity drop, among others. It now falls upon the leadership to keep the team up and running.

How are the leaders handling the situation? HR.com interviewed senior-level executives from various organizations and asked them to share their lessons and insights.

Adam: That’s an interesting question. There have been challenges and opportunities every step of the way.  Like many businesses, we have had projects postponed or cancelled because of COVID-19. We have also gained new business because of COVID-19. Our efforts to transform the market research sector by increasing the adoption of digital technologies for the purpose of data collection has been accelerated because of the pandemic. Our diversified service offerings combined with a distribution of revenues over many clients provides us with the stability to manage the economic downturn caused by the pandemic.  We have also gone from 95% of our staff in our head office to working completely remote. Finally, because of our preparedness with our business continuity plan, we were able to make the transition to working remotely while maintaining 100% productivity and ensuring everyone’s safety. While we manage the economic uncertainty being caused by COVID-19, we remain profitable in spite of the changes created by it.  

 Adam: Yes. On March 16, we initiated our business continuity plan and our entire staff began working remotely. We gave them 24 hours to get what they needed from the office in order to work from home. Having 90% of our technology “In the cloud” already, the majority of our staff were able to work remotely only having to access our main data servers through our virtual private network (VPN). However, some of our development and financial management teams still needed to log into their office desktop computers through the VPN, so the initial challenge was just ensuring that when we moved remote, that the bandwidth of our virtual access would support the load of 100 people accessing our VPN concurrently. The next challenge revolved around communications. We quickly commenced video conferencing for meetings among our managers with their teams, and our executive team decided to meet virtually daily to discuss any issues that arose. I continue to send two emails a day to the entire staff, one in the morning to share a story to start their day, and after our executive meeting to give them a daily end-of-day update. Managing the mental wellness of our team and anxiety associated with the constant news about COVID-19, combined with self-isolation, became a challenge that we had to stay on top of. Through discussions with our team, we chose to not communicate about anything that was in the news and focus our communications to work and topics that would allow our team to share and communicate. Through this effort, we have maintained our productivity and our communication has never been better. Our current challenges revolve around the concerns about returning to the office as we hear news about restrictions being lifted.
 
Also, trying to recruit, interview and onboard during the pandemic has been a challenge. We had a number of new hires literally start on the day that we went remote, and that required troubleshooting. We had someone come back from maternity leave, which created a challenge with the fact that not only did they have to remain at home, they lost their childcare that was going to allow them to return to work. We have also needed to hire a number of technical development resources, even getting new computers set up when the office was closed, coupled with not being able to receive shipments of new computers to the office which created an additional challenge. 

Adam: Since our company is ISO certified for data and security, an integral part of maintaining our ISO certification is to have a business continuity plan. This plan provides many of the processes that we used to move and maintain our systems during the pandemic. Ensuring we maintain diligence about our security policies around the creation and sharing of data become even more important during the pandemic.  While many of our staff requested to cancel their vacation during the pandemic, we initially suspended any existing vacation requests to make sure we had the support needed to manage through the crisis.  We are now balancing vacation and personal day requests on a case by case basis to help manage the mental wellness of our team. Every morning we require our staff to log into our HR management system and log their status by 8:30am so their managers can report to the Executive team about the status of their team.  Working remotely, this daily routine has been something that allows us to stay in constant contact with our staff and help them remain engaged. We have had to adapt some of our financial management policies such as payment of supplier invoices and following up on accounts receivables. We have chosen not to delay our payment of supplier invoices to ensure that we are positively contributing to helping others through the pandemic, and we are actively calling our clients to manage their ability to pay their bills.  This active communications has helped not only keep our employees engaged, but knowing that our clients are at home and feeling the same anxiety as our staff, it has fostered more supportive relationships between our staff and our clients. 

Adam: I think we got ahead of many of the potential challenges that could have occurred. The week before we moved to working remotely, a number of managers were independently dealing with the mounting anxiety within their teams and decided to allow their teams to work from home without upward communication with the Executive team. Our concern was less of one of the decisions by the managers, rather it was the lack of communications by the managers to understand whether our VPN and systems could support the team working from home while we were still in testing mode. We quickly realized that active communications both from the Executive to the staff, and from the staff back to the Executive was key in terms of managing remotely. As well as, requiring the team to check in daily also ensured that communication was working. Part of our Executive Meeting each day is to review the metrics we maintain to ensure stability and productivity in the business. These have been key to monitoring the capacity of our team during the pandemic.  The only employment engagement challenge has been the efficiency of team communications in a remote setting. Situations that could normally take five minutes to solve by walking over to someone’s desk can take at approximately half a day between scheduling a call and dealing with it head-on. This is particularly challenging for those staff that have young children at home. The ability to balance the attention demands of their children combined with the continued work load have caused a usual work day to go by the wayside in some cases. Many of our staff are forced to work around their children’s sleep schedules or having to play tag team with their partners.  This has created some stress regarding our staff working into the evening to catch up. 

Adam: We have been actively managing the mental health of our team by having our HR team routinely calling and checking in on all staff members. This, combined with our daily emails, daily Executive meetings, and managers having regular meetings with their individual team, have invariably helped in identifying any mental health issues. What’s more, our benefits plan provides access to mental health professionals and we are continuously encouraging our staff to communicate or seek support wherever needed. We are also about to commence a “give back” project where we are collecting data on mental wellness of people working from home, and sharing that data for no cost to mental health professionals. This initiative has created a pride amongst all of our staff that we do take the mental health of our staff as a priority. Finally, in our “return to office” planning, we are addressing with our staff any mental health concerns associated with our efforts to get back into the office.

Adam: I have grown significantly as a leader through this crisis. Having managed through the “Dot Com Crash” and “9-11” in 2001, along with the subprime mortgage and financial crisis in 2008/2009, I feel that I was very prepared to emotionally lead through this crisis. In fact, when we need to decide to work remotely, I had no hesitation to make decisions and support our Executive team to manage through it. I have used this experience to attempt to bring a calm and comfort to our staff as they go through the crisis. The first lesson was that we had to recognize that the issues affecting our staff went beyond just worrying about our business and their security of their jobs, but many of them were extremely affected by seeing friends, family being affected by the pandemic either losing their jobs or being affected COVID-19, having children at home without any school or daycare, or worrying about elderly parents. My desire to actively communicate twice a day, and provide transparency through our executive meeting updates has had an incredibly positive influence.  I realized that I had not been communicating sufficiently with my staff and I will carry many of the communication lessons I have learned beyond the pandemic. 

Adam: Clear communications combined with having strong performance metrics to monitor our productivity and performance are two changes that we will continue to implement beyond the pandemic. But the greatest change has come from an understanding that since our company was in a growth phase prior to the pandemic, while we have had to step back like most organizations, once we do get back into the office and the anxiety subsides in the market so that we can get back to our growth strategy, where office space had become a concern, a WFH strategy will be a key element to our future growth and managing overhead costs. Also, I have never felt more connected to my staff, and I would never want to lose that connection.

Adam: I feel very fortunate that our business has been able to successfully weather this pandemic and maintain our productivity, while allowing us to choose to not make any layoffs. This has had a huge impact on the well-being of my staff, but through all of our efforts to build effective communications with staff, provide calming leadership through the crisis, and having a well-developed business continuity plan that has ensured we were able transition efficiently, has built a new level of respect between both staff and management and amongst our team. The pandemic has brought everyone closer together, allowed them to see me, as their CEO, in a less intimidating light with all of my communications and I have seen incredible acts of support and kindness by all of my staff. While being a CEO of a growing technology company, you are constantly driving forward and not always having the time to appreciate what you and your team have built so far. But this crisis has allowed me to step back, reconnect with my staff, our clients and our partners, and appreciate while a health crisis like COVID-19 has brought the world to its knees, our company has been able to remain stable and we have not only been able to take care of our business, but more importantly, we have been a pillar of strength and leadership for family, friends and our industry.