Dream Team

I would imagine though that in a virtual environment, there are probably special challenges for team effectiveness, for example, for team communication. What are some of the special challenges that your team has faced and how have you dealt with them?

Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. Communication is probably the hardest piece. All of the sidebar conversations that would happen after a meeting don't happen, we don't have a forum for them necessarily. Those things are much harder, obviously, in a virtual environment. I think we're very lucky from a team perspective at Out Leadership, I really focused over the last 10 years in building a team that works hard, that's passionate but also feels a bit like a family. We do two team offsites each year, we were lucky enough to do one in December and one in January just before the pandemic really hit, so we had already sort of done our business plans and our strategy but also our team building and we have a murder mystery dinner night one night, and my team all really loves each other, we have a great, if you look at our Slack which is really how we communicate as a team, half of our Slack messages are work-related and half of them are advocacy-related on articles which then spin us into all these conversations about Lady Gaga and all kinds of fun and silly things, and I really encourage that because I find it's a great outlet for the team. I think a team that can laugh together and can not take everything too seriously is really, really important. It allows us to really get through some challenging times. If something screws up, we're much less likely to be upset at each other and more likely to say, "Alright, well, how do we fix it?" And then we can laugh about it later, and so I think that approach has served as well. It is definitely challenging and I think the other thing that I've been very focused on, as I mentioned before around mental health is just making sure that people feel safe to talk about that when they're having a tough time. We've done a little bit of a mini buddy system on the team so that everybody has a team buddy that's not their manager just to chat. I'd encourage people to take Zoom-free days where we have, if you have any meetings, they are not happening on Zoom, they can only be audio so people get a chance to sort of shift. We also instituted the idea of Summer Fridays, we do each year, and I carried that into the fall and I said that people could do a "Summer Friday" into the fall just because people really were working hard and they really Ð

What's a Summer Friday? They get a Friday off? What is that?

So, in non-pandemic times, a Summer Friday is if you normally would start at nine, you start at eight and you end at noon so you have the entire afternoon of that Friday off.

I like that.

Well, so we do this and we have a free half day, and everybody's got three Summer Fridays over the course of the summer, so kind of one a month, and we had to sort of stagger them so we didn't have too many people who have them at the same time, but I instituted that into the fall as well because I really felt like people needed that opportunity in addition to obviously vacation time. Just having little team respites make a really big difference so people can recharge.