Running an SME during #CoronaVirus...

Thought I'd share the philosophy and set of short term decisions we came up with at forgood. Feel free to copy/paste/steal whatever you feel is relevant. Tough times - but that's when humans are usually at their best.

These were all crowdsourced and developed by the forgood team. Thanks to the team - we're only a few days in - but everyone is displaying emotional maturity, patience and humour. All that and more are critical to getting through this.

Hope this content helps in some way. Stay safe out there 👊

Our Philosophy

1. Don’t panic. Get a flu shot.

2. We’re a small team - if someone gets sick - we’ve got your back.

3. Help our ecosystem wherever we can, given our fortunate position and ability to ride this out. 

4. Keep moving forward! OKRs stay in place wherever possible - we just find new ways to get there and new ways to add value to clients.

5. Timescale. Plan in 2-4 week bursts. But understand this could last till October 2020 and beyond. 

6. On any outbound communications (public or private) - if it feels icky, don’t do it.

7. Don’t lose touch with each other. “Happy Hour on Hangouts” every Friday. Grab a drink and talk shit. 

8. If you’re bored, learn.

9. We understand kids will invade video calls from time to time!

Our first set of quick decisions...

1. Work from home 17 March 2020 to 14 April 2020. Re-evaluate as we go.  

2. Google Hangouts and Slack are our platforms of choice. 

3. All hiring paused for 1 month, then we’ll re-evaluate. It would be unfair to bring someone new into the team until we know how the CoronaVirus situation shapes up. 

4. Daily standups for Dev Team / Client Team, inviting management when required.

5. Team Standup every week. 

6. All visual boards we have at the office (Kanban, trackers etc.) move to Google Slides. Dev Team posts Kanban to Slack daily. 

7. Social Media continues, rotating between team members in 2 week bursts to keep it interesting... We amplify good stuff. For the moment, we’re no longer as worried about driving traffic to our site - we just amplify whoever is doing good stuff. Don’t share any CoronaVirus material at all. If we have to, it should only be from an official government channel.