Heather Kernahan is a global marketing expert and business leader who has been featured in Fast Company, Fortune, Biz Women, PR Week and Ad Week. She currently serves as the CEO of North America at Hotwire, an award-winning global communications agency.  Kernahan joined Hotwire in 2013. In her role as CEO, she leads offices in SF, NY, Minneapolis and Chicago and as a member of the Hotwire global leadership team, she has been the driving force behind Hotwire’s three-year business strategy to expand the business. Kernahan has challenged the status quo for Hotwire and has allowed the firm to think farther into the future.

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.

Questions: 

How has the COVID-19 crisis affected your business?
The COVID-19 crisis has impacted not only our teams internally and the day-to-day work supporting clients, but it’s also affecting how we look long term at the services we offer and how to serve our clients in new ways. Hotwire works with clients in a variety of different industries, so we’re really seeing a range of how our clients are being impacted and how we need to pivot to support their businesses.  

Are your employees working remotely? If so, what are some of the challenges you are facing while managing your remote workforce?
Making the shift to working from home was relatively seamless for Hotwire because of our Thoughtful Working philosophy we’ve had for a number of years. Thoughtful working revolves around empowering our staff to work how and where they get their best work done—whether that’s in the office or at home.  This has worked for us because the culture at Hotwire allows for a lot of autonomy while also making people highly accountable and we’ve been named the best place to work by PR Week, as a result. We’ve also used video platforms, Slack and cloud applications for years so that we can work anywhere.

The challenges we have aren’t related to a remote team – they are related to helping our team in the midst of a global pandemic. Working at home is easy. Living through a global pandemic and working and looking after kids and worrying about friends and family is an entirely different conversation and set of issues.

What policies do you have in place to deal with such a crisis?
There is no playbook that any company or government has had for this crisis and any policies have all had to be reworked. For Hotwire and our parent company, Enero, we put the health and safety of our employees at the forefront so all decisions are based on that view. Because of Thoughtful Working, we have to make sure our team is capable of doing 100% of their job remotely--which they are. We also update our Business Continuity plan for each office and maintain an Incident Response Team who tests and reviews our plans often.

What employee engagement challenges do you come across, especially in the current scenario, where everyone is working from home? What are you doing about it?
We are a global business and having staff working across different locations and timezones have made virtual employee engagement a norm at Hotwire. This is a different situation though and we know that such an extended work from home period has been challenging for some of our employees, especially those who live alone and those with children at home. 

We’ve continued to be really engaged with our teams globally, bringing people together virtually for everything from weekly meditation and yoga sessions, to happy hours with live musicians, to personal development courses, and games over video.  We’ve also been conscious to not schedule too many learning or happy hour sessions and made sure to listen to the team leads about what the right balance is.  

Are you providing or planning to provide any emotional and mental health programs for employees?
This type of support has always been something that we provide. For example, we have weekly meditation sessions that are open to anyone at the agency, now we have increased the number of sessions we provide and also opened them up for clients and partners to join.

We have an excellent employee assistance program in place as well and reminding our team regularly about it. 

What leadership lessons have this health crisis taught you?
I’ve had to go back to some of the fundamentals and assess how I’m communicating and is it what the team needs. I’ve had to look at how to be visible and available across multiple geographies and timezones. I’ve also had to work on making sure my mental health is good and that when I’m feeling tired or down that, I get more sleep and read things that inspire me. This crisis has reminded me that values are critically important to a company and that running the business based on values is even more important in tough times. 

What positive change has transpired that you would want to maintain?
Our team has always been a group of innovative thinkers but I have noticed over the past couple months now just how creative and talented the people at Hotwire are in the face of all of the changes. They are leaning into challenges and finding new ways to surprise and delight clients and ultimately helping them achieve their goals. This type of what we call at Hotwire, “limitless thinking,” is something I would love to see maintained throughout our work. 
 

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