The Surprising Way to Stay Connected with Your Employees During the Crisis

When the coronavirus pandemic made its way to the New York City area in early March, like most tech companies, BrainPOP, the 200-employee EdTech company where I serve as chief culture officer, already had a policy in place to accommodate specific team members who work remotely periodically, but we had never before operated on a fully remote basis.

Here’s what I learned about the importance of surveying your employees during times of crisis and how it has become a game changer for us as far as giving support to our team members.

I wanted to share with you how we did it in hopes that it could be useful for you as well.

On Monday March 9th, 2020 we announced to the entire company that we would do a work-from-home drill that Thursday and Friday. To ensure that employees would take the drill seriously and really commit to the possibility of going fully remote, we let them know that we would ask them to respond to a work-from-home survey with an honest evaluation of how the first day went.

That weekend, we got word that NYC was urging businesses to remain closed starting the next week. It turned out that the timing of this exercise and the survey that followed proved to be an incredibly effective way to take a quick pulse and react with concrete next steps to help employees ease into the dramatic change we were about to undergo. We ended up administering a survey again at the two week mark and at the four weeks mark. Here are the surveys we used for day 1, week 2 and week 4.

If you are thinking of administering a survey to get a gauge of your employees during this time, keep the following points in mind.

Find the right cadence. It’s important to find the balance between surveying your employees too often - causing fatigue - and not often enough (which leads to a disconnect). In this case, every two weeks seemed like a good cadence at a time where every day felt like a week. Plus, it enabled our department enough time to go through responses, create a deck to share out with leadership, to address the needs of individuals or brainstorm next steps - and finally to report out on it at our bi-weekly all-hands meeting.

Be prepared to act quickly to address needs. The greatest benefit of these surveys was creating a strong feedback loop between employees and our People team. We made sure to communicate with individual employees about specific requests, needs, and concerns, and address remaining concerns via company-wide emails and meetings.

Follow up with people. The survey was intentionally not anonymous, which set a mutual expectation that we would follow up individually with employees as needed. Although we expected that certain concerns and challenges would be universal, we knew that every situation would be unique and require sensitivity and awareness of personal context. It was extremely important to us that each employee felt heard.

Don’t jump to solutions. You might be asking yourself, if I can’t do anything to alleviate the situation, why should I survey my employees? However, the act of asking itself creates empathy. And that awareness building can also help. Even though you can’t answer every need, trying to understand the pain point more deeply is perceived as acting toward a solution. Empathy goes a long way.

Modify the survey as the needs of your people change.

Initially, we focused primarily on technology setup, workstation functionality, and schedules. We included an open-ended question for additional feedback. We continued to use a modified version of the survey over the coming weeks. With the basics in place, we shifted our focus to helping employees navigate the social-emotional aspects of working remotely. Questions evolved to match the quickly changing needs and attitudes we discovered during prior weeks, and they built on the progress we made with each subsequent survey.

Key Takeaways

Participation in the survey was stable from week to week. This led us to conclude that a significant number of employees found the survey to be an effective means of communication. Whether they found our responsiveness to their needs timely and helpful, or they simply needed a place to vent, we were pleased with the results.

We learned that some of us enjoy not having to commute, while others cannot wait to be back in the office. We don’t always remember to eat (or eat healthfully). The parents among us are facing childcare challenges. Our Slack channels keep us in the loop but also serve up an overwhelming supply of information. This quarter, we will be working on addressing many of these challenges, including placing additional emphasis on mental and physical wellness; creating a Slack task force to implement best practices that work well for our team; and finding the right balance of virtual events and company meetings.

Although we offered multiple opportunities for employees to offer input -- via email, all-hands meetings, and through direct managers -- the survey mechanism was among the most effective. It gave the people team and the executive management team real time insights into how everyone was adjusting. On an employee relations level, it allowed us to ensure that everyone felt supported. We are still in the early stages of adjusting to this crisis as a team. We plan to continue with periodic surveys that enable us to be agile and responsive to the needs of our team.