How Different Personality Types Cope with an Always-On Culture

by John Hackston - June 25, 2020

Even before Covid-19 brought many people’s work into their homes, we were in the middle of a revolution. Technology has radically changed how we manage our work and lives. Services and information are available 24/7, and we can easily connect with anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world.

All that convenience, however, comes at a price. When our smartphones are always on and within reach, we can find it difficult to “switch off.” We may have inadvertently become part of an “always-on culture,” with largely negative effects on our health and well-being. Research has demonstrated, for example, that being always on increases conflict and interference between our work lives and our home lives, that sending and receiving emails outside of conventional working hours contributes significantly to stress, and that compulsive internet use is linked to workaholism.

And now that so many of us are working from home, communicating with our colleagues exclusively via electronic media, the boundaries between home and work can become increasingly blurred, making it even more difficult to switch off.

How can we take advantage of the conveniences of modern technology while minimizing the disadvantages of an always-on culture? My organization, the Myers-Briggs Company, carried out a research study to find some answers. In 2018 and 2019 we surveyed more than 1,000 people, asking about their personality type, behavior, and views about the always-on culture. We also examined their levels of job satisfaction and work/home conflict along with many other factors.

The results were revealing. Not all aspects of the always-on culture were viewed in a negative light; more than 10% of respondents said that being always on helped them stay in the loop and get quick responses, and it provided flexibility as to where and when they worked. And those able to access work emails or calls outside of the office reported greater engagement with their work and greater job satisfaction.

But overall, the advantages were outweighed by the disadvantages. Nearly a third of respondents said they could not switch off, more than a quarter said that the always-on culture interfered with their personal or family life, and a fifth indicated that it could lead to mental exhaustion. Some expressed highly negative views; for example, one respondent said, “You burn out, no private life, no time for children, regrets at the end of your life, many tense situations, losing friends or close relationships.” Being part of the always-on culture often led to higher stress levels, greater work/home conflict, more distractions at work and at home, and increased difficulty focusing.

We also looked at how people coped with the stress of being always on. Most drew on four overarching strategies - but different personality types reacted to them differently, so we’ll look at them through that lens. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator model assesses four aspects of personality according to whether individuals prefer to:

• Focus their attention on the outside world of people and things (extraversion) or on their inner world of thoughts and feelings (introversion)
• Trust and use information on the basis of experience and the evidence of their five senses (sensing) or consider the future and how things connect to form a big picture (intuition)
• Make decisions on the basis of objective logic (thinking) or on the basis of their values and how the decision will affect people (feeling)
• Live in a more structured, organized way (judging) or in a more flexible, spontaneous way (perceiving)

Looking at the four strategies in light of personality type can help you identify how to use them most effectively to reduce the negative effects of being always on.

1. Create time and space to switch off.

If you have extraversion preferences, recharge by doing something active, perhaps with others (even if that happens virtually while you’re social distancing). If working from home, make sure to take breaks. Go for a walk or a run if you can, or do something new and different. Some extraverts find it helpful to leave their devices in another room when they’re de-stressing. Keep in contact with others, and use video, not just voice.

If you have introversion preferences, recharge by doing something that allows you time to reflect or that you can become absorbed in. Establish a quiet area of your home where you can work and/or retreat to. Try to limit online meetings, but ensure that you have some contact with other people.

2. Beware of information overload.

If you have sensing preferences, stop and take a step back. Focus on the big picture; what’s important? To avoid getting lost in the details, keep in touch with other people and ask for their take on the situation. Don’t obsess with getting every little thing right or having a perfect home working environment.

If you have intuition preferences, stop going through all the possibilities. Ground yourself in the moment. Try one thing at a time, and stick to it; if you are working at home, it can be easy to skip from one idea to another.

3. Create boundaries.

If you have thinking preferences, consider your impact on others. For example, read through messages before you send them. The written communications of “thinking” individuals can be very direct and task-focused and may appear terse and impersonal to others. Without the benefit of face-to-face contact, they may be misunderstood.

If you have feeling preferences, find a balance between supporting others and looking after your own needs. That can be difficult when you are worrying about the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on others, especially if your close friends and family are not around to help. Identify the supports you need and take conscious actions to attain them.

4. Find a work/life balance that suits you.

If you have judging preferences, set boundaries with yourself and others regarding when you will and won’t use technology at home - but be flexible when things are urgent. Turning off your devices when you are not working will most likely lower your stress levels, so make it clear to others when you will and won’t be available. If the Covid-19 crisis meant that you suddenly had to change your routines, establish new ones. If you are working at home, keep “work” and “home” separate by having a designated work area and staying away from it outside of working hours.

If you have perceiving preferences, you might be enjoying some aspects of working from home, such as the freedom to be flexible with your hours. But don’t expect others to necessarily feel the same. Avoid sending emails or requesting chats outside of normal working hours. And allow some time for other activities so that your workdays don’t become overly routine. Timeboxing, or converting your to-do list into blocks of time on your calendar, might help.

Technology can empower people, but it can also make them feel enslaved. By thinking carefully about how and when to use it, you can find your own sweet spot. Amid the current crisis, that’s more important than ever.

John Hackston is head of thought leadership at The Myers-Briggs Company and a chartered psychologist with more than 30 years of experience in helping clients to use psychometric tests and questionnaires in a wide range of contexts including selection, leadership development, performance management, and team building. John is passionate about objective assessment and has the mission to empower executives and managers with better data and research insights that allow them to more successfully and effectively run their organizations. He and his team carry out original research on business concerns including cyber-security, “always-on” work culture, well-being, and the gig economy.

Lessons from a Working Mom on “Doing It All”

by Francesca Gino - June 25, 2020

“I don’t know how you do it.” Whether it comes at the start of a videoconference or a call, this is one of the most frequent comments I hear from clients, colleagues, and even friends these days as we’re doing our usual pre-meeting check ins.

The statement always surprises me. I’m a professor who teaches and a consultant who advises various organizations, now virtually. I am a researcher, engaged with colleagues on several projects. I am a partner, married to a committed working spouse, trying to be creative about having fun dates during lockdown. I am the mom of four children: the oldest is seven; the youngest is just over six months old. When I hear “I don’t know how you do it,” my answer is “I don’t!” - at least not perfectly and sometimes not even well.

Like me, many working adults across the globe have been juggling a lot since the Covid-19 crisis started. I’ve heard many people complain about their difficult realities and bad experiences, and certainly many - including frontline workers, those infected by the virus, and now those traumatized by recent racist incidents - are facing extreme challenges. But, for those of us managing more minor struggles, I’ve come to believe that the difference between going to bed feeling content or disappointed at the end of the day has a lot to do with the expectations we set for ourselves. Let’s lower our standards. Better yet: Let’s use this moment to shift them to something more reasonable.

Here is how I’ve done it, by focusing on four simple principles.

Go for happy, not perfect.

A lot of us can identify with - and have benefited from - the desire to be perfect. But we often take it too far. Even before the pandemic, research by personality psychologists Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill found that growing numbers of people were struggling to match unreachable ideals. The two psychologists studied more than 40,0000 American, British, and Canadian college students between 1989 and 2016 and  found that perfectionism has increased dramatically over the last few decades - 33% since 1989. We seem to be internalizing a contemporary myth that life should be perfect, when, in fact, that is an impossible outcome and can contribute to serious anxiety and depression. Those who become preoccupied with perfection set themselves up for failure and psychological turmoil.

Instead of aiming for perfection, we need to aim for happiness. I remind myself that this is the goal every single day. I’m patient if it takes me longer than expected to get work done. And, at the dinner table every evening, I ask my little ones to talk about what made them happy and what they feel grateful for that day.

Accept mistakes with curiosity.

In the middle of a busy night at the celebrated restaurant Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy, one of the sous chefs, Taka, jumped in to make desserts after the pastry chef’s abrupt departure. As he assembled some lemon tarts, one accidentally fell to the ground. Taka froze as the restaurant’s chef and owner, Massimo Bottura, saw the mess. But instead of getting upset, Bottura was inspired. Today, one of the most popular deserts on the restaurant’s menu is called “Oops! I dropped the lemon tart.” It is carefully constructed to look like a mess: A light and foamy zabaglione is splashed over lemon cubes, bergamot jelly, spiced apple, a few drops of chili and lemon oil, and honeyed capers from an island off the coast of Sicily, and it’s topped by a lemongrass sorbet and a broken biscuit.

These days, I take solace in this story. Rarely do my days go as planned. One of my four children may unexpectedly interrupt a work Zoom call, or some emergency requires me to drop a paper in the middle of a sentence - even when it turns out the yelling across the floors was simply prompted by me preparing a different lunch than I had promised. I am striving to be more like Bottura, looking at mistakes and accidents with a curious mind.

Focus on what makes sense for you.

Another impressive person I met while working on my latest book, Rebel Talent, is Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who managed to land a commercial aircraft safely in the Hudson River on a cold January day in 2009 when both engines failed. Sully looked beyond the most obvious option (landing at the nearest airport) to come up with a more creative and promising solution.

Especially when we’re under pressure, we narrow in on what immediately seems like the best course of action. But a better approach is to contemplate a wide range of options and perspectives. Take all the advice we hear about the importance of getting a good night’s sleep to our health and well-being. Well, I can’t remember the last time I slept for more than a few uninterrupted hours or beyond 6 AM, due to nightmares, trips to the bathroom with one of my oldest three, or my four-year old strangely announcing she can’t find her bed at 3 AM. And that’s ok: I now laugh at the recommendations on sleep, since they clearly don’t apply to me right now. I have colleagues who, they tell me, have never been more productive than now. I have friends who have never been in better shape or better rested. That has not been my experience in lockdown, and that’s okay. I smile at their accomplishments and laugh at the fact that exercise, these days, is often running around the house after my kids. That brings me to my last principle.

Find time for laughter.

Everyone enjoys a good laugh, but who actually makes time for it, especially when the news is so horrifying? We all may agree that listening to a funny joke, talking to people with a good sense of humor, and watching comedies are all pleasant activities, but do we block out space in our calendar for them? Especially during crises we should do just that because amusement has lots of benefits. According to a 2015 study, the act of laughing makes us more open to new people and helps us build relationships. It can also help us regulate our emotions in the face of challenge, according to a study led by Yale psychologist Erica J. Boothby. Laughter can improve our health and make us better learners. And what’s more: laughter is contagious.

Despite all the negativity in the today’s news, it shouldn’t take much to find something to laugh at. When, this morning, I repeatedly asked my three-year-old to please put her underwear on before going outside and then found my four-year-old painting herself instead of a canvas, I let myself laugh rather than getting upset. After a couple of weeks in lockdown, my husband and I noticed that we would sometimes find ourselves on a short fuse, snapping with criticism that didn’t really need to be aired. Our solution? We decided that if one of us wanted to criticize the other (e.g., “You could have put the dishes in the dishwasher rather than leaving them in the sink”), we would do so while dancing in a goofy manner, turning a stressful moment into a light-hearted one.

So many situations are out of our control. But we do have choices about how we approach each day and the expectations we set for ourselves. Now is the time to follow these principles and find a little more peace.

Francesca Gino is a behavioral scientist and the Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. She is the author of the books Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life and Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan. Twitter: @francescagino.

Help Your Employees Manage Their Reentry Anxiety

by Sarah Clayton and Anthea Hoyle - June 24, 2020

As many states are giving the green light to reopen, employers are developing plans to bring employees back to work safely, giving careful thought to schedules, seating configurations, visitor policies, elevator usage, food delivery, and much more.

While workforce reentry certainly includes logistical and operational planning, it is not just physical well-being that employers must take into account. Equally important is how organizations will respond to employees’ emotional and psychological health - a topic that, regrettably, is discussed far less frequently.

Anxiety is near-universal right now - a natural reaction to unnatural circumstances and an uncertain future. Nearly half of employees are concerned that their employers will bring them back to work before it’s safe, according to a national survey by Weber Shandwick and KRC Research. More than half worry about the future of the company they work for - and their job specifically.

If employers don’t address these sources of anxiety and assist employees in managing their mental health, bringing people back to work will do little to help companies return to pre-Covid productivity and engagement levels.

Many companies will need to enhance current practices, supplementing external or third-party mental health programs with a greater capacity to deal with stress, anxiety, and uncertainty “in house.” This does not mean attempting to take the place of trained mental health practitioners but rather building greater internal awareness of, sensitivity toward, and ability to address employee concerns.

Drawing on our many years of experience as people, culture, and change consultants, we’ve identified five things employers must do to help reduce employee reentry anxiety. The five indicators can serve both as a framework to help employers build their reentry plans and as measures by which to assess progress.

1. Make employees’ well-being your top priority.

Employees want reassurance that their companies will put their people first whenever possible, especially in difficult times.  Costco’s decision to institute hazard pay for frontline workers, Apple’s move to offer paid sick days, and Delta CEO Ed Bastian’s choice to forgo his salary for six months are early examples of corporate values in action that helped relieve employee concerns.

Most employers receive good marks from their people for the way they’ve responded to the pandemic thus far. Large majorities in our survey said that their employer is putting safety above profits (72%) and taking care of employees as best they can (74%) and that their employers’ response is “exactly what it should be” (72%).

Companies must continue demonstrating commitment to their values during the reentry phase. They would do well to take a cue from Jane Fraser, president of Citi & CEO of Global Consumer Banking, who made Citi’s reentry priority abundantly clear when she wrote on LinkedIn:

“As #Citi plans for the future - re-opening our offices and determining what our new workplace needs will be - one thing is very clear to us. We will continue to prioritize the safety of our employees, customers and communities. That may mean being more cautious than the guidance of a city, state or country. We have a senior and seasoned team working on our return to the office to ensure that when we do so, it is done intelligently and with the health and well-being of our people at the center of our decision making.”

2. Share accurate, timely, and transparent information.

A consistent cadence of communications from your CEO or other trusted leaders is key to managing employee anxiety. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has become one of the most trusted sources in the country for Covid-19 guidance because of his transparent and regular briefings.

Not surprisingly, our research shows that employees who regularly receive updates from their companies are more likely to have positive views of their employers. They are more likely to be proud to work for their companies (by 55%) and to look forward to going back to work (by 43%).

A pattern of open two-way communication is especially critical as employers take actions to deal with the pandemic’s economic impact. Organizations that have kept employees abreast of business performance and engaged in ongoing dialogue with their people will be better prepared for difficult conversations.

3. Take swift action to implement recommended public health measures.

Our research found that employees trust top public health experts, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Dr. Anthony Fauci, on reentry timelines. Fewer than one in 10 would feel safe returning to the office when only their employer says it’s safe.

Employees’ top five safety requests closely match CDC and others’ recommendations. Employees want their employers to:

• Extensively clean and sanitize work areas (55%)
• Encourage sick employees to stay home and institute flexible sick leave policies (52%)
• Promote ongoing personal hygiene (40%)
• Provide personal protective equipment (33%)
• Screen all employees before they return to the workplace (31%)

Employees need to know how these measures are being implemented, what the timeline is, and how the measures will be monitored and enforced. They also need assurance that steps are being taken to update protocols and processes as the situation evolves.

4. Train leaders, managers, and colleagues on how to support employees.

Leaders and managers will shoulder much of the responsibility for ensuring a smooth return to the workplace. Some of our clients are considering holding mandatory virtual “reentry boot camps” for them, focused on topics such as dealing with ambiguity, building personal resilience, developing emotional intelligence, and leading hybrid teams. Armed with insights into these areas, managers can model needed behaviors and share them with their teams to support new ways of working.

People managers will need to take greater responsibility for employees’ well-being. This includes familiarizing themselves with the warning signs of emotional distress, factoring more time into their days for checking in with staff, helping team members understand what is and isn’t within their control, and learning how to triage real-time issues while other resources are called upon to help.

Anxiety will be further reduced as employees reengage with their colleagues through informal and formal support networks.  Quarantining and social distancing have meant that people have lost the very support systems and coping mechanisms that would otherwise have helped them weather the storm. All employees can initiate forums for reconnecting with one another (virtually or physically, from six feet away) with empathy and compassion as they adapt to their new normal.

5. Offer flexibility.

Our large-scale work-from-home experiment has shown that at least for some industries, it is possible to get work done not only remotely but on a variety of schedules that best accommodate people’s preferred working hours and personal commitments. As workplaces reopen, employers can expect pressure to maintain this flexibility, particularly from team members caring for children or sick loved ones. Many may wonder, “If I can’t return to a pre-Covid work situation, will I be viewed as not fully committed or, worse, lose my job?”

Employers who wish to reduce anxiety can discuss and align on how to handle these issues now. They should consider the following questions:

• Do we follow the example of Twitter, Facebook, Nationwide, and others and move to a largely remote model?
• If not, to what extent will we allow different employee groups to choose when to come back to the office?
• Is a wholesale reevaluation of our work-from-home policy in order?
• What accommodations do we need to make to enable a truly hybrid (including work-from-home and remote employees) workforce?
• How can we ensure a continuing priority on diversity, equity, and inclusion while managing a remote or hybrid workforce - and that there won’t be unintended consequences for those who remain offsite?
• How will we protect older workers, employees with medical conditions, parents, and populations disproportionately impacted by the virus from being discriminated against?

In all the planning to keep employees physically safe, let’s not forget the impact of Covid-19 on their psychological health. The anxiety generated by these circumstances can produce fatigue, concentration problems, increased use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs, and worsening of existing health conditions, all of which have the potential to negatively impact work performance.  Taking these five actions is the right thing to do, but that’s not the only reason to get behind them. Employers’ attention or inattention to all aspects of their employees’ well-being during this chapter will have reputational consequences for many years to come.

Sarah Clayton is executive vice president of United Minds, where she helps CEOs and other senior leaders design and execute transformation strategies that improve organizational performance. She specializes in driving culture change in support of business objectives, and led the development of the firm’s culture offerings. With more than 15 years of experience leading end-to-end change management programs, Sarah has advised clients through M&As, corporate restructurings, leadership transitions and enterprise-wide technology adoption.

Anthea Hoyle is executive vice president of United Minds, where she helps CEOs and senior leaders find meaningful and effective ways to deliver on their business ambition in partnership with their own people. She specializes in shaping a better employee experience through purpose and positive cultural shifts. Throughout her career, Anthea has partnered with leading brands, advising them through culture change, business transformation and leadership transitions.

Delivering Grim News to Covid-19 Patients’ Families

by Jessica L. Israel - June 24, 2020

I am a palliative care physician and lead the geriatrics and palliative care service line at RWJBarnabas Health in New Jersey, one of the states hit the hardest by Covid-19 pandemic. Several weeks ago, at the beginning of the surge of cases in our state, an ICU attending physician at one of our system’s hospitals - Newark Beth Israel Medical Center - requested help. He asked me to call the family of a patient with the disease who was in dire condition to discuss his prognosis. I phoned the patient’s wife of 25 years.

Like so many health care systems, our system’s policy prohibited people from visiting patients in our hospitals with Covid-19. There was a good public safety reason for this, but it meant that there were no family members at the bedside. And it meant that loved ones at home felt horribly disconnected, anxiously waiting for the phone to ring.

His wife was grateful for my call, but the news I had to deliver was grim. I told her that her husband had Covid-19 and pneumonia. I also explained that he had had a massive stroke in the hospital and that both a neurologist and neurosurgeon had been to see him in the intensive-care unit (ICU). Both had said there was nothing further they could do. Her husband would never fully recover; he would never be himself again. I told her I thought he was going to die.

Given my job, I have been the bearer of bad news many times before. This time I couldn’t hold the family member’s hand or offer her some water or tissues. It was hard, and it made me appreciate what the frontline medical team had been doing. I had no way to know how she had processed what I said. I wasn’t ready for what she said next, “Thank you, Doctor. I knew things were bad, I wanted to know more. I have been watching the news. I knew we might need to make decisions. I’m glad you called.”

RWJBarnabas Health is the largest, most comprehensive health care system in New Jersey; it serves nine counties and five million people and includes 11 acute care hospitals. When patients are admitted to the ICU, our on-site palliative care teams - like those at most major hospitals or health systems - assist the ICU’s attending physicians in finding out the patients’ wishes for the use or non-use of life-sustaining treatments. We continued to do this during the pandemic, albeit on a much larger scale.

Early in the outbreak, we established a 24-hour palliative care system-wide hotline, which we advertised as an added tool offering guidance to frontline care teams for complicated symptom management or communication needs. It became clear very quickly that doctors didn’t necessarily want advice as much as they needed hands-on help - or virtual hands-on help in this case - especially when it came to the task of communicating with families. The tremendous demands of the pandemic gave frontline doctors little time to conduct these difficult conversations. This led us to form a team to assist in making the calls to patients’ families to discuss their loved ones’ serious conditions and their wishes for how we should treat them - or, as they are known in my field, their “goals of care.”

Honest discussion about serious illness is the hallmark of exceptional medical care. We should all be doing this, every day, but even in the best of circumstances there are barriers. No one wants to talk about death or unpleasant things. No one wants to be seen as taking away hope. It’s not uncommon for a doctor to tell me, “My patient is not ready to hear this yet,” even when all the clinicians involved in the case are clear about a bleak outcome. We need to give our patients and their families more credit, especially in the context of the pandemic. (Watching the news had made the patient’s wife I mentioned ready for my call.) Holding back honest discussions about serious illness holds back a family from processing a goodbye.

We piloted a “Goals of Care Conversation Team” to conduct conversations with families of critically ill Covid-19 patients at Jersey City Medical Center and eventually created other teams at four additional hospitals in our system that were also hit hard by cases of the novel coronavirus. Each team at a facility had six to 10 physicians on it who worked remotely. The teams worked from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., and each member manned the phone for two to three hours at a time; a back-up was available in case the need for assistance was high. Every week, the emergency operations center at each hospital shared with its emergency departments and medical floors the team’s schedule, including the phone numbers of the members who were on call.

We staffed the goals-of-care-conversation teams with primary palliative care providers: mainly, psychiatrists, geriatricians, and primary care internists; but even an interested surgeon became involved. It was not hard to find these doctors. We reached out to MDs who were employed in our system’s medical group and part of our primary care system. The volume of patients visiting many of their outpatient care offices had slowed considerably, so they had the time and they wanted to help - to do something.

Team members were trained with a scripted conversation tool based on some of the wonderful communication resources available online, including Vital Talk’s COVID Ready Communication Playbook  and the Center to Advance Palliative Care’s COVID-19 Response Resources. Additional training included how to handle emotional reactions that required an off-script response.

The urgent need we have to discover our patients’ wishes during a public health emergency underscores the importance of knowing our patients’ goals as a critical component of everyday high-quality health care. Our telephone service made it possible to spend more time discussing those goals with families than overwhelmed frontline physicians could have.

When our Covid-19 case numbers started to improve, we disbanded the service, but we took from the experience an important lesson: We need to expand our efforts to ensure we know all of our patients’ goals of care. To that end, we’re now looking to establish goals-of-care conversations as a best practice in our primary care settings.

Jessica L. Israel, MD, is senior vice president of geriatrics and palliative care at RWJBarnabas Health, New Jersey’s largest integrated health care delivery system.

Wolfgang Puck on Leading His Restaurants Through the Pandemic

by Boris Groysberg - June 24, 2020

Wolfgang Puck, the celebrity chef, has been facing many of the same challenges that restaurateurs all over the world are dealing with: How do you preserve and even grow your business during a lockdown? And how do you begin to reopen safely?

In a conversation on May 11 with Boris Groysberg, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, Puck shared how he is steering his businesses - Wolfgang Puck Fine Dining Group, Wolfgang Puck Catering, and Wolfgang Puck Worldwide, Inc. - through the Covid-19 crisis. (Note: The conversation has been edited.)

In what ways have you chosen to pivot to new opportunities? What role does experimentation play in that process? 

When we shut down the restaurants, we decided to do takeout. At the beginning, we didn’t really know how to do it that well. After three weeks I said, “We are not growing our business.” My question is always: How are we going to grow the business we are in?

My idea was to think about takeout more broadly. I said, “Let’s give people an experience.” For example, at my restaurant Chinois on Main in Santa Monica, I said let’s not focus on selling customers one lobster for $65.00. Instead, let’s bring them the adventure of having a meal with us. For $39, they get a Chinese chicken soup with wontons in it, pot stickers with spicy sauce, vegetable spring rolls with dipping sauce, the Chinois chicken salad, the choice of half a lobster or a portion of short ribs with candied ginger sweet potato puree, and finally cookies. Obviously, we didn’t make real money with that. But we started to attract a lot of customers. That, for me, is the most important thing. I love to see a business grow, and we have to figure out how we’re going to grow in every restaurant.

We also tried something new at Spago in Beverly Hills. We started with discounts to move the food we already had and then increased the prices to where they’d been. That’s also when we started to sell wine and cocktails. People really seemed to like that. You can get a Negroni all made up; all you have to do is pour it over ice and put an orange peel in it. Then we noticed that on Wednesday and Thursday our pickup business was a little slower. So, we started to make fried chicken. Who would have known that that would become the best seller by far?

Some ideas didn’t work out so well. We tried burgers on Thursdays, but there wasn’t as much demand for them. So, we tried, and if you don’t try, you don’t know. Now I’m going to do barbecue. And if barbecue isn’t successful, we’ll make fried fish or something else. We’ll see.

We try to adapt and do things in order to get another customer to buy our product. We are trying to use the Covid-19 crisis as an opportunity. Maybe one day we’ll build a ghost kitchen where we’ll just do takeout. We could actually develop a whole new business with that.

How have you managed your team through this crisis? What role does your management team play in keeping your businesses successful?

The crisis really forced me to decentralize my business more than I ever had. I love working with people who I don’t have to push, who are self-sufficient. I don’t want to have bureaucratic structures in place. Every chef and every manager at my restaurants is responsible for their business. They don’t have to call up a manager if they go to the market and find a fresh ingredient or they find the best meat and ask, “Okay, can we make a change and put that on the menu?” I say, “You just do it. I trust you.” That really gives them a lot of confidence, and they feel liberated and happy because of it.

Have you pivoted in other ways beyond your restaurants to find additional sources of revenue?

I’m giving home shopping a try and it’s going well. We’ve sold over 11,000 of our air fryers and $360,000 worth of steaks. I do that once every two months. I could do it more often, but we don’t have the inventory. It takes some time to set it up because we basically transform our catering kitchen into a studio. I have my catering chefs and everybody working with me. That’s what made it possible to recently do $2.5 million worth of business on a weekend.

We had another amazing opportunity a couple weeks ago - a virtual cooking class. It cost $175.00, and we had 150 people sign up. Again, it sounds expensive, but you get two cocktails, a bottle of Chianti, as well as three courses, and a dessert packed up in a bag. Some components were already assembled by us, and other components were up to the people at home. I showed them on video what to do. People gave feedback like, “Oh, my God. I didn’t know I could make a risotto!” It was an experience for them.

As a vocal advocate for the restaurant industry, what steps do you think should be taken to help restaurants survive through this crisis?

Because of the pandemic, we had to shut down our restaurants. It was very difficult to know what to do. Two months ago, a couple colleagues and I talked to President Trump on the phone. I told him about the insurance companies who don’t want to pay for business interruption insurance. We are trying to get the government to help.

I also told the President that we need a stimulus for the restaurant industry. Let people deduct their business meals just like they used to do. I reiterated that this idea wasn’t just about me. For example, I have 150 employees at Spago. Where do they get their food from? From the farmers. Where do they get their fish from? From the fisherman. How do we get all this food? Somebody has to deliver it. It’s a trickle-down effect. It’s really important because the restaurant business directly and indirectly employees so many people. This kind of stimulus would be an important way to help the restaurant and catering industries get back on their feet.

How do you envision the re-opening process at your restaurants? What will be the challenges?

In the short run, there will be big changes for customers. Obviously, we’re going to have waiters wearing facemasks. We’re going to have a doorman, so customers don’t have to touch a handle. I think we’re still going to have somebody park cars, but customers may want to park their own cars. We’ll find out. Hopefully, by the wintertime we’ll have a vaccine, and then people will feel more comfortable. Our primary concern is how we’re going to make our employees and customers safe.

Another concern as we reopen is how we determine how many people and which people are going to get their jobs back right away. It’s really a tough decision to make. It comes back to how are we going to make our employees and the customers feel safe, so that we actually have a viable business. I cannot hire 100 percent of the employees and do 50 percent of the business, because then the company will go bankrupt in no time. We will have a lot of people still unemployed, or on furlough. For me, the most difficult part is deciding who is going to be working and who is not going to be working. A lot of our people are going to have to wait until business comes all the way back, if it comes all the way back. How many months are they going to be on unemployment? It’s really a very difficult thing.

Once we get a vaccine and people feel comfortable, I think we’re finally going to get back to the new normal. Now, are we going to get physically close to one another again? We’ll adapt to the changing attitudes and behaviors of our customers because we have to make them feel comfortable. We have to make them feel safe so that they trust us and come back to the restaurant. In the short term, we’ll do the best we can to keep employees and customers safe. Our challenge in the long term is: how can we make our business as close as possible to what it used to be?

Boris Groysberg is the Richard P. Chapman Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, Faculty Affiliate at the HBS Gender Initiative, and the coauthor, with Michael Slind, of Talk, Inc. (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). Twitter: @bgroysberg.

How to Convince Your Sales Team to Adopt a Subscription Model

by Scott Edinger - June 23, 2020

If there is a lesson in the current unpredictable economic environment, it’s the importance of recurring revenue streams for businesses of all kinds. Having a subscription product or service that customers will reload, renew, or reorder repeatedly can smooth intermittent cashflow and keep a business alive. The Subscription Impact Report: Covid-19 Edition indicates that nearly 90% of subscription businesses are flat or growing membership during this time.

Evolving a business from order or project-based income to a subscription-based revenue model requires more than just a pricing or product change, however. Robbie Kellman Baxter, author of the recent book, The Forever Transaction, explains: “A subscription is a pricing tactic. By itself, it’s not a strategy. To build a recurring-revenue business, an organization needs to change how the product is designed, move from customer support to customer success, and keep the customer’s long-term well-being in mind across every functional area. Most of all, the sales team needs to be invested not just in the initial transaction but the ongoing relationship with each customer.”

It’s clear to me as I watch organizations wrestle with this challenge that creating a successful XaaS (anything as a service) model won’t happen just by selling different things. It will require your organization to sell differently. Moving to this type of integrated, long-term oriented model is complex. One of the most overlooked challenges is cultural. And often one of the biggest sources of pushback comes from the people most responsible for revenue: sales. Here’s what frequently occurs and what you, as a leader, can do about it.

1. The sales organization lacks confidence in the new solutions.

If your sales team doesn’t believe the new solutions are superior to your existing products and services, or if they think the new offerings aren’t quite ready for prime time, they will be slow to embrace them. This can spell disaster for new offerings. During my first year in sales, my company invested millions of dollars in a new suite of offerings. But the scuttlebutt among the sales team was that the new solutions were complex, difficult to implement, and a few new customers had complained that they weren’t fantastic. The message I took from this was clear: make your quota by selling tried and true solutions that work well for customers and don’t risk the time-sucking black hole of trying to make the new offerings work.

To get your sales team onboard with new recurring revenue models, leaders need to be curious and listen non-defensively. Invite dissenting opinions. If your salespeople aren’t selling the new XaaS products, try to understand why. Salespeople are among the most customer-minded groups in the business. If they believe they can sell something that customers value, they will do it. If they have doubts, they will try to sell something else. If they’re not selling your new stuff, there’s usually a legitimate reason based on reality in the field. Find out the cause of the skepticism and be willing to openly address it.

2. The sales organization doesn’t fully understand the go-to-market strategy for the new offerings.

Even if your sales team believes this is a good direction for the company, a new strategy may require sellers to develop new approaches and skills. This can be incredibly hard, and the difficulty is often underestimated by leaders. I worked with an organization last year that was moving from selling a range of technology products to selling a full suite of IT management services. This required a fundamental shift in the go-to-market strategy for the sales team. That included changing the level of customer contact from a purchasing manager to the Chief Technology Officer, engaging in sales conversations about data center issues instead of profiling the details of specific hardware, and having a deep understanding of long-term business outcomes, not just a stated technology need. When salespeople don’t understand how to make this transition or can’t execute on the new strategy, only a fraction of the expected revenue will be realized.

Communicate with your sales organization about their changing role in the execution of your strategy. Provide ongoing development experiences supported by management in the field. Review your current metrics for measuring success and create new measures of progress for your subscription offering. When it comes to incentives, you’ll need to rethink commission for both signing and for retaining business. You might utilize a few key salespeople who have already gravitated to the new model and caught the vision to help lead their peers through this transformation.

3. The sales organization is concerned that your strategy shift is the wrong direction for the company.

It’s understandable that salespeople used to selling a particular product might have concerns when the company decides to pivot and solve a range of different issues or move from selling hardware to providing services. Salespeople may be fearful about the future of the company.

To put your strategy shift into context, help your sales organization understand that you’re sacrificing short-term revenue for long-term growth in the same way that Satya Nadella did during Microsoft’s digital transformation efforts. When Microsoft moved from primarily providing hardware to a subscription cloud-based model, there was an initial period of low revenues and high investment costs. Author Geoffery Moore references the financial concept of the J-Curve to illustrate how investing heavily in a new strategy can take time to yield results. As a company sinks money into developing a new business model, there is a sharp drop profits, which eventually becomes a steep upward trajectory as the new offering successfully comes online. One of the main obstacles in transformation efforts is not being able to, as Moore writes, “stomach the J-Curve.” A big risk is bailing out too soon on a strategy that takes time to implement and losing out on both the investment and any substantive future return.

As a leader, you need to convey both your commitment to this new direction as well as your willingness to ride out the J-Curve. Show sales that they’re not alone, and that businesses in nearly every industry are moving in the same direction. Microsoft’s Office team instituted a “Subscription 101” development program to help their team members understand how subscription models work, why they’re so popular, and what it means for each functional area in the organization. When salespeople understand that the changes you’re making are both inevitable and highly profitable in the long-term, they’ll get on board to ride the J-Curve with you.

Building a relationship with an enterprise customer requires engagement across nearly every functional area. It can’t be accomplished by a single “Lone Ranger” sales rep, no matter how good they are. The entire organization needs to be optimized around building a long-term relationship with the customer. The most successful sales teams today include SMEs and technical specialists, project managers, and others, to design and deliver a compelling sales experience. Getting your sales team on board early in the process is critical to the success of any recurring revenue transformation.

Scott Edinger is the founder of Edinger Consulting Group. He is a coauthor of the HBR article Making Yourself Indispensable. His latest book is The Hidden Leader: Discover and Develop Greatness Within Your Company. Connect with Scott at Twitter.com/ScottKEdinger.

Building Resilient Supply Chains Won’t Be Easy

by David Simchi-Levi and Edith Simchi-Levi - June 23, 2020

The pandemic has exposed one of the major weaknesses of many supply chains: the inability to react to sudden, large-scale disruptions. This lack of resiliency has been especially notable in the supply chains of the life sciences, health care, and food industries. The resulting turmoil has generated calls for companies that had offshored production to Asia (and China, in particular) to bring it back home. But this approach is no panacea. For one thing, given the huge size of the Chinese market, most global companies will need to keep a presence there to serve it. For another, since China is now a dominant, if not sole, source, for thousands of items, reducing dependence on it in many cases will take considerable investment and time.

The best way to make supply chains more resilient is by mapping the layers of suppliers, manufacturing plants, distributors, and other elements of the logistics network and applying a stress test to evaluate the ability to recover from the disruption of these sites. Once there is an understanding of where bottlenecks are located, various mitigation strategies can be considered, including adding manufacturing capabilities or suppliers or creating buffer stocks.

Reshoring alone does not necessarily create resiliency. Consider the recent meat shortage in the United States. This industry’s supply chain is entirely domestic. In order to reduce cost, many companies focused on consolidating manufacturing activities. The result: A relatively small number of slaughter plants now process much of the beef and pork consumed in the United States. Shutting down one plant, even for a few weeks, has a major impact throughout the country: It crushes the prices paid to farmers and leads to months of meat shortages.

Mapping and stress testing are a much more effective approach. Our experience is that companies using this approach often find that risk is hidden in unexpected places. Work that one of us (David) did with the Ford Motor Company found unexpected high risk associated with small suppliers, including many local suppliers. One part it identified that fell into this category was a low-cost sensor widely used in its vehicles: If the supply of it were disrupted, the carmaker would need to shut down its manufacturing operations. Because of the total amount spent on this item was low, Ford’s procurement group had not paid much attention to it.

For industries that are essential to the country, such as pharmaceuticals and health care, there needs to be government involvement to ensure that supply chains are resilient. There is a precedent: In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. government and European Union instituted a stress test for banks to guarantee that major institutions whose failure could cause the entire financial system to collapse had the wherewithal to survive a future crisis. Based on our experience in supply chain risk, we suggest that similarly critical supply chains should be required to pass stress tests.

Increasing supply chain resiliency for essential products and services may indeed require local manufacturing capabilities. But this is not necessarily a cheap or simple matter. In the pharmaceutical industry, for example, more than 80% of chemicals used to make drugs sold in Europe now originate from China and India. The chemical production is environmentally damaging, so increasing resiliency of drug supply chains requires the development of clean technology, which may take up to 10 years and would require a significant financial investment.

But without understanding the vulnerabilities that currently exist, such decisions can’t be made. Companies need to act now to uncover the weaknesses that exist in their supply networks, and governments must decide which industries are essential to their countries. Only then can they begin to take steps that will ensure that the turmoil generated by the pandemic doesn’t happen again.

David Simchi-Levi is a professor of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He co-founded LogicTools, a provider of software for optimizing supply chains that is now part of IBM; OPS Rules, an operations consulting company; and Opalytics, a cloud analytics platform company. His latest book is Operations Rules: Delivering Customer Value through Flexible Operations.

Edith Simchi-Levi is startup adviser and investor in New York City. She was the cofounder and vice president of operations of LogicTools, a provider of supply-chain-optimization software now owned by Llamasoft, and Opalytics which was acquired by Accenture.  

We Need to Relocate ICU Patients Out of Covid-19 Hotspots

by Rodolfo Catena and Matthias Holweg - June 23, 2020

The stark national differences in the death rates of Covid-19 patients is much discussed and politicized. Germany and Italy, for example, have similar infection rates but dramatically different mortality rates; through June 20, in Germany, 4.7% of patients have died versus 14.5% of patients in Italy. Attempts to explain these disparate death rates generally point to differences in the effectiveness of testing regimes, the timing of social distancing measures, demographics, and the number of beds in intensive care units (known as ICU capacity).

Certainly each of these plays a role, not the least of which is ICU capacity; it makes intuitive sense that if a hospital runs out of ICU beds, more patients will die. But our research finds that this oversimplifies the situation. Simply increasing the number of available ICU beds in local hotspots - a common response to rising caseloads - may paradoxically result in increased mortality. The better response is to relocate patients early out of emerging hotspots in order to keep ICU loads well below the maximum capacity.

The health care system workload at the local county level - or even at the level of individual hospitals - can have a direct impact on Covid-19 mortality rates, which is often overlooked. The dramatically different mortality rates in Germany and Italy are a case in point: while both countries have had major outbreaks, Germany had not only more ICU beds per capita at the outset (48.7 versus 8.6 beds per 100,000 inhabitants), but it also managed to avoid any local overload of its health care system. In part, that’s because it had substantially more ICU capacity than Italy. But Germany’s national county-level ICU-bed registry tracking the availability of beds and ventilators also allowed it to prevent local overloading by allowing doctors to relocate patients swiftly in order to distribute the demand on ICU beds.

The impact of overload is vividly illustrated by the patterns of Covid-19 outbreaks in two regions in Italy: Lombardy, the worst affected region, which to date accounts for 48% of the country’s Covid-19 deaths, and Veneto, a neighboring region with similar demographics but far lower mortality rates. Both are wealthy regions with a similar health care system capacity (346.2 vs. 326.6 hospital beds per 100,000 residents respectively in 2018), and in both, the outbreaks started at virtually the same time.

Mortality rates of Covid-19 patients in both regions increased as the load on ICU capacity grew, as one would expect. But, strikingly, these rates began to increase long before ICUs were near full capacity, starting to uptick at about 40% and then, in Lombardy, launching into a dramatic increase when loads reached about 50% - just half capacity - and reaching nearly 5.5 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. In Veneto, meanwhile, ICU loads remained below 50% and mortality rates remained nearly flat at less than 1.3 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants.

Our findings suggest that ICU overload is indeed a major factor driving Covid-19 mortality rates. COVID-19 patients can be complex and labor-intensive. Rising infection levels of medical personnel, ensuing shortages of qualified staff, and the resulting overwork and fatigue are all factors contributing to higher mortality.

This finding suggests that increasing the number of local ICU beds without commensurate increases in personnel and other resources - a common response in epidemic hotspots - may not be an effective way to decrease mortality, and may, in fact, increase it.

Instead of approaching Covid-19 as a local ICU management problem, health care leaders should think of it as a pan-regional (or pan-state) management problem from the start. It makes little sense to overload local ICUs while those in neighboring areas with much lower Covid-19 prevalence are underutilized. Given our data, distributing stable patients to even out ICU loads across affected regions (while avoiding sending patients to unaffected areas) seems an obvious remedy.

According to Fausto Catena, Head of Emergency and Trauma Surgery at Ospedale Maggiore in Parma, Italy, transferring stable Covid patients is both feasible and sensible. In Italy, a small number of patients were eventually transferred from the badly hit North to less affected regions in the South although these transfers were unfortunately too few and late to stem the loss of life in the Northern epicenters.

Jeffrey Lazar, Vice Chair of Emergency Medicine at New York’s St. Barnabas Hospital, told us that while ICU utilization within the city was not systemically collected, anecdotal information suggests that ICUs across the city all treated two to five times more patients than usual during the Covid-19 peak. Lazar likewise agreed that more evenly distributing ICU loads to reduce overutilization in individual hospitals would be sensible.

Clearly, obstacles must be overcome to accomplish this. In the U.S., the lack of integration of health care systems across regions and the required communication and coordination mechanisms will pose challenges. Further, unrelated or competing health systems may be reluctant to take on cases from elsewhere. And of course the logistics of safely transporting Covid-19 patients so as to prevent unduly spreading the infection must be addressed.

Yet as the experience in Germany shows, where there is the political will, it is possible to track the availability of ICU beds in a national system to facilitate a reduction in local overloads. The system was only created in mid-March in response to the Covid pandemic, and all hospitals are required by law to submit their ICU load every day. When local ICU constraints develop, doctors can request transfers from the state Emergency Medical Services command and control center. Even Bavaria, the most severely affected region in Germany (with a total case load of 39,395 cases, or 301 per 100,000 inhabitants) saw a maximum ICU utilization of only 61%. Germany in fact airlifted more than 120 patients out of the worst affected areas in Italy and France despite the equally significant number of cases within Germany itself.

Studies of early Covid-19 hotspots and simulation models all indicate we should expect recurring waves in the future that are very likely to manifest as local concentrations of infection, like those seen in Wuhan, Lombardy, and New York City. Health care leaders must look beyond their local outbreak and address rapidly rising ICU demand in hotspots before the ensuing workload leads to potentially preventable increased mortality. Digital technologies allow for close monitoring of cases as well as for the creation of online registers that can track ICU capacity across regions. Such data platforms can help enable the quick response needed when local capacity bottlenecks emerge. We continue to learn how to effectively treat and manage this pandemic, and the early transfer of Covid-19 patients out of hotspot areas may be the most effective measure to curbing excess Covid-19 mortality yet.

Rodolfo Catena is an Associate Lecturer in Healthcare Management at Arden University, UK. He can be reached at rodolfo.catena@gmail.com.

Matthias Holweg is the American Standard Companies Professor of Operations Management at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, UK. He can be reached at matthias.holweg@sbs.ox.ac.uk.

If You Have Free Time Right Now, Spend It Helping Others

by Ken Banta and Orlan Boston - June 23, 2020

How can consultants, coaches, and other gig workers with time on their hands during the pandemic and economic downturn stay productive?

As client work has slowed or even stopped, tens of thousands of business advisors have unexpectedly open calendars. Getting back to busy will take months. Many of these professionals are filling the void by catching up on work reading, exercising, and spending time with their families.

There’s nothing wrong with any of those activities. But why not also turn outward and apply your knowledge and skills to needs directly or indirectly created by the Covid-19 crisis?

We are both consultants ourselves. Orlan is a senior partner in the health and life sciences practice of a global management consulting firm. Ken is founder and principal of The Vanguard Group for Leadership, working with C-Suite executives to build leadership capabilities. Many of the ideas and recommendations we set out here come from our own experience.

Support the pandemic response.

Whether it’s a local hospital trying to source more supplies, or a community seeking to orchestrate meal deliveries to seniors, consultants can give advice on how to do the work better and faster. One consultant in New York City is helping local businesses band together to plan a coordinated effort on recovery. Logistics, organizational effectiveness, communications, and leadership coaching are just some of the consulting capabilities that can help affected businesses. Italian artist Alberto Canova is providing his artwork free of charge to organizations to support their communications during the pandemic. This pro bono work is also good for Canova: he builds his repertoire, stays active, and generates goodwill with future potential clients.

Assist small businesses and nonprofits.

These organizations have been hit the hardest and need help to weather the storm. Local chambers of commerce and business associations can help identify pragmatic ways to assist local organizations, such as filing for available financial support. CPAs can make a big contribution. CPA Mackey McNeill, of Mackey Advisors in Bellevue, Kentuckey, used her firm’s own cash-forecasting tool to help small businesses in the area plan how to manage through the crisis. This kind of work is especially valuable to small businesses, which lack the in-house accounting resources available to larger organizations. Nonprofits that you or your company already support can be a smart place to start. Ken and Orlan have both increased the work they are doing as nonprofit board members, with a new focus on pandemic survival and recovery.

Help individuals and organizations manage the human impact of the crisis.

Leadership advisor Annie Perrin saw how stressful the pandemic has been for people in healthcare support functions. She launched free webinar sessions on how to manage stress and anxiety for IT professionals in a hospital system in Indiana.  Participants say the sessions make them feel better and help them to operate more efficiently.

Offer coaching and mentoring.

The pandemic is causing many people to reflect on their sense of purpose, while others are suffering from stress and anxiety. Jim Mendelsohn, a New York City writing consultant, has pivoted from his usual work, coaching a range of professionals and students from middle school to doctoral candidates, to seeing far more students with pandemic anxieties - steeply discounting and doing pro-bono work as part of that pivot.

These kinds of side-gig ventures are valuable in themselves, helping those who take them on to make a significant contribution to the pandemic relief-and-response effort. In the process, you can expand your professional capabilities. And the ventures can help you develop fresh relationships that blossom into new business when recovery begins.

Ken Banta is the founder of the Vanguard Network, a leadership-development and networking membership program for high-potential senior leaders. He is also the principal of the Vanguard Group for Leadership, which advises CEOs and other top executives on leadership and organizational transformation. He was a member of the management teams that turned around Pharmacia, Schering-Plough, and Bausch + Lomb.

Orlan Boston is a partner in the Ernst & Young LLP Global Health Sciences practice. He has spent the past two decades serving in a variety of senior leadership roles in business, media, public service, nonprofits, and philanthropy as a senior partner at EY and Deloitte, entrepreneur, venture capital investor, film producer, author, presidential appointee, philanthropist, and member of several boards.

How to Network When There Are No Networking Events

by Alisa Cohn and Dorie Clark - June 23, 2020

We all know the typical ways to network: by attending industry mixers, business dinners, and conferences. But of course none of those have been possible over the past few months, with so much of the world in quarantine. And even as various regions start to open up, large gatherings will be slow to come back, and long-distance travel will be limited. How should you be making new professional connections during this time? And how can you strengthen relationships inside your company when many people are still working remotely?

As executive coaches who work with leaders across the globe, we’ve spent years helping clients learn to build relationships virtually. As in the past, it’s still useful to deepen existing relationships and cultivate new ones by engaging on LinkedIn or other social media platforms. But in this unique time, we’ve identified several other strategies you can use to create connections. Here are three to consider.

Turn canceled conferences into private networking opportunities.

Since the pandemic began, many conferences and other large gatherings have been canceled, but even in their absence, you can use them as a way to meet people. Take a look at the conferences scheduled for earlier in the year along with those that would have been coming up. Identify participants who were supposed to attend or speak or who came in prior years. (If you don’t have the list, you can often email conference organizers and ask for it.)

Choose five to 10 people you’d like to connect with, and find something you have in common that might make them interested in meeting you (for instance, you’re both involved in robotics research, or you’re alumni of the same university). You can email them or send a message on LinkedIn saying something like, “We were both planning to attend [conference] this year. I had been hoping to meet you there, because I saw that we’re both involved in robotics research and I thought it might be interesting to chat. Since the event was canceled and we’re all grounded for the moment, I thought I’d reach out virtually instead. Let me know if you’d like to meet for a coffee over Zoom.”

One of Alisa’s clients, the CEO of a media company, employed this strategy. After a major conference he was planning to attend got canceled, he reached out to some of the people he had wanted to meet there and convened a virtual cocktail party. He developed relationships with interesting new contacts and was invited to speak at a future event.

Rethink geographic boundaries.

Before the world went remote, most professionals’ standard networking impulse was to focus on the people around them. We experienced this ourselves as hosts of regular dinner gatherings in New York City. When creating guest lists, we’d think about local colleagues and would tell out-of-town contacts to “let us know when you’re going to be in New York.” Now those boundaries have receded, and as we’ve shifted to virtual cocktail gatherings, we’ve realized that we’re free to invite people from around the world with whom we wouldn’t have previously been able to connect. During one recent Zoom networking event we brought together colleagues from Boston, New York, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Austin.

We’ve noticed that our corporate coaching clients are applying the same principles and similarly taking a more expansive view. In the past, they might not have invited colleagues from different geographic regions to participate in a meeting if everyone else attending was in the same office. Now that so many of us are remote, they’re more comfortable inviting colleagues regardless of where they’re located.

Invite senior leaders to your online working group meetings.

The current crisis has raised a host of new issues for business leaders to consider, whether it’s the future of your industry, how your company is responding to particular challenges (from supply chain to marketing to employee engagement), or the future of global work. This presents a unique opportunity for you to proactively convene an informal working group to discuss these issues. In some corporate cultures, you can simply invite a few people and have it grow from there. In others, it may be important to check in with your manager first.

After gathering a group of peers a few times and establishing that the conversations are valuable, you can, where appropriate in your corporate culture, reach out to senior leaders and invite them to join a session, as either a participant or a guest speaker. A drop-by from a high-level leader may have been difficult, if not impossible, under normal circumstances - but with everyone working virtually (and the leader not traveling), a 15-minute appearance is often surprisingly easy to facilitate.

One of Alisa’s clients is the CHRO of the U.S. division of a Fortune 500 company. In the early days of the pandemic, she took the initiative to convene a regular call with her peers in other geographies. As the crisis has played out, she has invited multiple company leaders, including the global CEO, to take part. That got her onto his radar, and he now calls her personally to discuss how the various regions are doing.

Even though networking events have been canceled, there are many ways for you to build professional relationships. By employing these three strategies, you’ll emerge even stronger once in-person events start up again.

Alisa Cohn is an executive coach who specializes in work with Fortune 500 companies and prominent startups, including Google, Microsoft, Foursquare, Venmo, and Etsy. You can download her free list of questions to start conversation here. Learn more at alisacohn.com.

Dorie Clark is a marketing strategist and professional speaker who teaches at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She is the author of Entrepreneurial You, Reinventing You, and Stand Out. You can receive her free Recognized Expert self-assessment.  

Retailers Face a Data Deficit in the Wake of the Pandemic

by Angel Evan and Amber Rivera - June 22, 2020

When stay-at-home orders took hold this past March, retail sales dropped dramatically - as everybody knows. But that change in customer behavior has resulted in a phenomenon that hasn’t been talked about much: the flow of sales information to retailers’ data repositories has dried up. That’s a significant problem, because a healthy flow of that information is the lifeblood of customer loyalty programs, AI-driven product recommendations, and a wide array of critical business decisions.

What this change means is that many retailers – independent or chain, brick-and-mortar or e-commerce, startup or legacy – are now facing an information deficit. That’s what happens when the data and intelligence derived from customer transactions becomes scarce or unusable due to a sudden change in buyer behavior. Today the problem is widespread: Even businesses that had amassed great volumes of customer data before Covid-19 are finding themselves in the same cold-start position as businesses venturing into unknown markets or reaching out to new audiences.

The effects of this disruption could be massive in the mid- to long term, because it obviously makes customer behavior more challenging to interpret, to predict, and to pattern. In the current context, this much is clear: Businesses should not take for granted that the data they gathered before Covid-19 will accurately predict buyer behavior in the socially distant economy.

Instead, retailers must take careful stock of the data inputs and analytical assumptions that now drive their products and business decision-making. They must identify the risks of carrying on with the status quo, and they must respond to the challenges of the moment with creativity and innovation. This recalibration exercise will help retailers quickly figure out how to stay relevant as American consumers change.

Risks and Opportunities of an Information Deficit

In our post-stay-at-home reality, companies need to recognize that their existing predictive models, forecasts, and dashboards may all be unreliable, or even obsolete, and that their analytic tools need recalibrating. Although the objectives of a specific automated system or predictive model may not have changed, the input data and the users certainly have, which should cause companies to re-evaluate how outputs are interpreted and relied upon.

Companies also need to avoid making shortsighted decisions about data infrastructure and human resources. Although staff reductions can help to offset immediate profit loss, eliminating the people who know how to organize, clean, mine, and model customer data can create intractable technical debt. When making resource decisions, leaders must truly understand which systems will suffer as a result of losing a specific role, then quantify and weigh the longer-term cost of any fallout.

The changes we’ve recently witnessed in customer behavior have left some companies feeling as though they’ve been dropped in the middle of the woods without a compass. The classic “Who is our customer?” question has suddenly become harder than ever to answer. Are current online shoppers repeat customers who migrated from brick-and-mortar stores, or are they net new customers? Retail businesses have always had a blind spot in this area, but until now they haven’t had much reason to prioritize it. Those who make the most of the current stay-at-home moment to gain clarity here could make transformative discoveries that will serve them well beyond 2020.

Which brings us to some good news: This situation represents an opportunity for companies that have not ever fully harnessed data to make evidence-based business decisions. Before the pandemic struck, these companies lagged behind data-mature companies, but as data-mature companies are now struggling to contend with a sudden information deficit, the less data-mature companies have a one-time opportunity to build their data-gathering capabilities and enhance their data-driven decision-making. For a brief period, at least, they’ve got a chance to catch up.

In this moment, it’s important for all companies, no matter how data-mature, to remember that “customer data” is not limited to point-of-sale transactions. Retailers should consider data to be any information that is relevant to their customers’ behavior that can be ethically collected, organized, and studied for insights that decision-makers can rely on. As restrictions on public life continue to ease and shopping resumes, retailers must get creative about where and how to collect this information.

They should, for example, broaden their understanding of shopper behavior to include anything that signals the way a customer relates to a company and its products. There’s lots more companies should do: They should study which messages resonate with different customer segments. They should measure their expectations for fulfillment. They should characterize the nuanced ways customers’ purchasing patterns have been transformed. Companies must not let a temporary reduction in transactions or three months of distorted data impact their ability to make informed decisions. Using the analytical methods of data science, they have to weave many threads together to fashion business resilience in the face of uncertainty.

Data-Science Countermeasures

To defend against an information deficit, it’s essential to understand what relevant data are available and how those data can be reengineered to answer contemporary questions. Companies can examine their own existing data within a smaller timeframe or even design a survey to get a fresh pulse on customers’ needs and plans. Moreover, refreshing machine-learning models and analytic tools will help companies get back on track and begin competing anew.

Here are some ideas available to retailers to get in front of the information deficit problem.

1. Stand up new channels of communication and data collection with the guiding question, “What are we building with our customers while we can’t build revenue?” With thoughtful communication, companies can gain customer respect for their resilience and generate useful data. Learn which messages resonate, what products customers still consider essential, and how much appetite they have for socially distant shopping. Business opportunities lie in the nuances of these data points from individual to individual.
2. Even if stores are closed, or sales are depressed, leverage “Covid-19–aware” data sources that are capturing consumer behavior indicators. This will help you begin characterizing new preferences and purchasing patterns. For instance, there is valuable information to be gained from analyzing email interactions, customer-care call logs, website sessions, and social-media data. As a proxy, study sales data from 2008 and 2009 to understand how customer behavior changes during times of economic hardship.
3. Revisit revenue projections to account for the new constraints imposed on shopping due to Covid-19. Incorporating this information into analyses will support updates to purchasing, staffing, and other important cash-flow decisions. Some variables to consider include historic data about customer traffic, the size of a store in square feet, and adjustment factors to account for a depressed economy.
4. If stores are located in multiple states, use spatial analysis in conjunction with relevant Covid-19 health ordinances and regulations to analyze where it makes the most sense to focus attention upon reopening. Not all state and local economies will reopen to the same degree, and those constraints need to be considered along with more-traditional inputs such as customer demographics, human mobility, and historic store performance.
5. Take this opportunity to give attention to the infrastructure supporting key data assets. This might involve the following: redesigning approaches to data collection and storage such that newly relevant data can be quickly mined for insights; creating or reengineering predictive models using more-focused data sets; fixing glitches in website analytics and tagging practices that hinder the ability to draw accurate conclusions from website data; and revisiting key performance indicators and scrutinizing each formula’s variables. This will ensure that prior assumptions are still applicable and not artificially skewing KPIs.

Covid-19 will eventually fade away, but that does not mean business decision-making should resume its prior incarnation. Data and quality analysis will remain essential instruments for making wise decisions about customers. Retailers that can harness data quickly and smartly will maintain their business and a competitive advantage in the long run.

Angel Evan is the President of Particle Inc. and an instructor in the Continuing Studies program at Stanford University.

Amber Rivera is a Data Scientist at Particle Inc. From start-ups to multinationals, she leads executives to better decision-making through data.

How to Nail a Job Interview - Remotely

by Amy Gallo - June 22, 2020

If you’re facing a job search right now, you’re not alone. There are record numbers of people filing for unemployment benefits in the U.S. and half of the global workforce is at risk of losing their livelihoods. Whether you were recently laid off, were unemployed before the global pandemic hit, or are choosing to make a change, looking for a job now - amidst hiring freezes and layoffs - will be different than it was a few months ago. But how different? How has the crisis affected how you approach a job search - from finding open positions to writing a cover letter and resume to (ideally) interviewing? Does the usual advice still apply?

To answer these questions, I spoke with Art Markman, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Bring Your Brain to Work: Using Cognitive Science to Get a Job, Do it Well, and Advance Your Career and Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, an executive fellow at Harvard Business School and the author of It’s Not the How or the What but the Who. Here’s their advice for facing what feels like a daunting challenge at this time.

Tap your network

Fernández-Aráoz and Markman agree that, more than ever, getting a job in this climate will be about who you know, especially for more senior positions. “When hiring managers are faced with a stack of resumes or portfolios, they’re going to be looking for some kind of familiarity,” says Markman. So actively engage with your network. You might post on social media that you’re looking for your next opportunity and describe what talents you’d bring to a future employer.

You can also reach out directly to former colleagues who you’ve lost touch with. You could send them an invitation on LinkedIn or an email asking how they’re doing, explain your situation, and ask if they have any advice as you’re looking for your next position. This isn’t easy, of course. It can be tough when you’re out of work and don’t have good news to share - and people might be more overwhelmed than usual at the moment - but remember that people want to help when they can. I recently reconnected with a former colleague who is looking for work and it felt great to be able to offer her advice and even a few job leads.

Brush up your resume and cover letter

Fernández-Aráoz says you should “go out of your way to find a mutual acquaintance” to mention in your cover letter to grab the reader’s attention. You might also want to highlight that you’ve worked in high-pressure environments before, since most companies’ priority right now will be weathering the crisis and will be looking for people who can contribute to that effort. Of course, it’s good practice to keep your resume updated at any time, but is especially important when you’ve just lost your job or expect you might soon. And the classic advice on how to draft a cover letter and resume still holds true.

Prepare for a remote interview

Given that most people are working from home, there’s a good chance that if you’re lucky enough to get an interview, you’ll be doing it remotely. All of the standard advice about how to prepare for and perform during an interview still applies but you’ll also need to think about others aspects as well:

Technology. When the interview is scheduled, ask what video platform they’ll be using and then spend time familiarizing yourself with how it works, especially if you’ll need to use any features like screen sharing. Test out the link ahead of time. Be sure you have a way to reach the interviewer in case the technology fails. “The last thing you want is to be disfluent in a high-pressure situation,” advises Markman. “People are going to be as forgiving as possible, but if you can demonstrate that you’ve thought through the contingencies, it’ll convey competence.” And set up the best possible circumstances for the technology to work. For example, Markman suggests asking others in your household to not stream TV while you’re doing the interview.

Appearance. Your goal is to look professional. You don’t need to wear a suit jacket - that would look awkward under the circumstances - but you don’t want to wear a sweatshirt either. Choose a neutral background for your interview (it probably goes without saying to avoid one of those virtual beach backgrounds). Fernández-Aráoz says that if you have a professional-looking space you can show in the background, it can help to humanize you, and it’s better than being right up against a wall. However, a blank wall can be less risky when it comes to interruptions or accidentally displaying a messy room. You might also consider standing during the interview. “It’s more dynamic and your vocal chords warm up faster and it’s easier to project,” he says.

Company’s crisis response. In addition to the usual research you’d do on the company, Markman advises looking into what the firm is doing in response to the Covid-19 crisis. Try to get the latest information. “Things have changed so rapidly and you may have applied for the job a few months ago,” he says. “Make sure you’re as conversant as possible. Check their website, any newsletters, and social media feeds - up to and including the day of the interview.”

Rehearse ahead of time

Experiment with how you might answer common questions. “When we get nervous, we tend to start monitoring ourselves. Since you’ll be able to see your own image as you’re talking during the interview, you’re likely to get distracted. Staring at a face - especially your own - will make you lose your train of thought,” says Markman. Be sure to rehearse in the spot where you plan to do the interview so you can see how you look. If you can’t stop looking at yourself when you practice, you might want to close the window with your image in it. You don’t want to be self-conscious to the point of distraction. “But it can be useful to occasionally look at yourself during the interview,” says Markman, “to make sure you don’t have a tag sticking out or something.”

Go into the interview with a positive mindset

Remember that during the interview, you won’t be getting the same level of non-verbal information from the interviewer. And as Fernández-Aráoz points out, there’s lots of research that shows when we don’t have feedback, we tend toward a negativity bias. We think “this isn’t going well.” So experiment ahead of time with staying positive and assuming the best is happening. You might have a mantra you tell yourself when you start to doubt your performance. Or you might sit quietly for five minutes before the interview starts and mentally review all the reasons the interview is likely to go well.

Exaggerate your emotions a bit on screen

For the same reason, you want to practice being emotive during the interview. “Unless you have a sophisticated set of earphones, the audio gets compressed and you lose many of the undertones, which convey emotions,” he explains. “So you need to exaggerate those a bit.” He suggests practicing with a friend on video to “get some feedback about the setting, your tone, and your body language.” Your goal is to appear natural and at ease. You might record yourself answering a few sample questions and watch how you appear. But don’t do this if you’ll just focus on everything you’re doing wrong. Again, you don’t want to make yourself so self-conscious that it hinders your performance.

Convey warmth during the interview

The crisis has made people more eager to connect with colleagues on an emotional level and your interviewer may have a higher expectation about how much warmth you convey during the interview. Markman recommends that you follow the lead of the interviewer on small talk, but it may be appropriate to ask the interviewer how they and their loved ones are doing right now. And you should have a good response prepared for the same question should it come back to you. He suggests something like, “Thanks for asking. I’m doing as well as possible under the circumstances.” You don’t need to go into unnecessary detail.

Ask pertinent questions

When given the chance to ask questions during the interview, Fernández-Aráoz says you should ask all “the usual questions” such as What are your expectations for this role? How will you measure success for the position? What am I not asking you that I should? Markman suggests also asking about their onboarding process in the virtual environment. How will they be helping new hires get acclimated?

Looking for a job is never easy. But it’s going to be particularly hard right now, so try to be easy on yourself during the process. Chances are that you aren’t out of work because of anything you did and many, many people are in the same boat. The economy will come back and, until it does, remember that you’re doing the best you can.

Amy Gallo is a contributing editor at Harvard Business Review and the author of the HBR Guide to Dealing with Conflict. She writes and speaks about workplace dynamics. Watch her TEDx talk on conflict and follow her on Twitter at @amyegallo.

5 Lessons from Penn Medicine’s Crisis Response

by Katherine Choi , Srinath Adusumalli , Kathleen Lee , Roy Rosin and David A. Asch - June 22, 2020

Almost overnight, traditional hospital or office-based care became inadequate for serving the community in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. By using an iterative sprint process, we were able to quickly design, validate, and scale much-needed services during our health system’s early response to the crisis. We illustrate what we learned using two of those new care delivery innovations: satellite drive-thru care sites and a platform for virtual health care visits.

Use Makeshift Approaches Designed to Flex

In a Friday in early March, as the dangers of a novel infection were dawning on the nation, the urgent request came in: establish a site to test the public by Monday. Our health system’s pre-Covid testing locations were not built to minimize the exposure risk or accommodate the high patient volumes the outbreak brought. We drew on health fair and drive-thru concepts as inspiration, and in under 24 hours converted a vacant parking lot into a testing site using simple rope, tape, traffic cones, and large A-frame whiteboard signs as directional guideposts. To minimize physical contact, cars became makeshift exam rooms, and duct-tape sidewalk indicators kept our walk-ins socially distanced. We registered patients using photographs of their IDs, and developed a text-based contactless discharge and test result follow-up process.

We were scrappy. The public lot’s WiFi hotspots, an unexpected blessing, became essential for placing on-site orders for walk-ins. Redeployed healthcare staff and campus security workers helped us direct flow. Self-proclaimed “delight rabbits,” colleagues who volunteered to run errands, delivered just-in-time coffee, donuts, hand warmers, ponchos, and paper towels that boosted morale and made support visible to the front-lines. The bare-bones site brought out the creativity and dedication of the team behind it.

Make Teams into Squads

Our small squad - three of us leading just under 10 clinical staff - was empowered to make quick changes and make things work. We added more patient privacy for our walk-in assessments by simply moving five cones to a more secluded spot. When walk-ins declined in the afternoons, medical assistants shifted roles to manage the drive-in queue. We used erasable whiteboard drawings instead of printouts of protocols because our script and screening questions had to evolve alongside the changing testing criteria.

We also found ways to stay in sync and adapt as quickly as the plans changed. We kept a rolling count and burn rate of test inventory as useful indicators for planning and setting expectations for the day. Ad-hoc check-ins helped the team resolve safety concerns or inefficiencies like redundant symptom screens that led to avoidable delays and frustrated patients. Great ideas were shared and praised at “kudos” rounds, and these changes - from creating float staff roles to writing on windshields with dry erase markers to communicate down the line - became the way we ran the next day.

This drive-walk-thru model was low-cost and reproducible. It was adapted a week later to organize care tents to manage a projected surge of Covid-19 infected patients. It was repurposed again two months later as physical clinics began to reopen but needed a text-based check-in process for patients as they waited in parking garages. Later iterations eventually moved into covered brick-and-mortar locations to withstand variable weather, but the low-contact workflows and ability to triage patients quickly “at-or-before-the-door” will be as relevant and valuable for the post-Covid era as it is useful today.

Go the Extra Mile for Your Early Adopters

As our clinicians converted in-person patient visits to telemedicine, the bandwidth of our legacy video platform could no longer meet the demand. The decision to switch enterprise vendors was made within two days.

Acknowledging limitations of the new software during town halls allowed concerned clinicians to define the needs to be met, particularly the worry that multiple patients might join the same virtual “exam room,” and that errors could be introduced by manually sending patients links. What we needed was an automated “switchboard” that generated and sent unique links to patients, and created a meeting schedule for providers to conduct their clinic days. Leveraging existing custom data feeds from our electronic medical record and the vendor’s meeting software expedited our first working prototype, a solution developed over the weekend that embedded the video service within the context of key patient data from the chart, and soon after, automatically sent patients appointment reminders, links, and setup instructions by text and email.

Addressing the most pressing need - ensuring patient privacy - attracted our earliest clinician adopters. But it was the features that delighted them and kept them engaged: Live status indicators to show when a patient had joined their virtual exam room, auto-calculated meeting lengths for easier documentation, daily schedule download into email calendars, and rotating public messages of gratitude sent in from the community. Our immediate and personal response to feedback took the form of visible, daily improvements to the platform (or thoughtful explanations of what couldn’t be done) which invited further engagement. These early physicians’ praise won over their more skeptical colleagues, and ultimately drove adoption across the health system.

Embed into the Front-line Experience

Our app development squad of four gathered insights by immersing itself into the patient and clinician experience. Not only did we conduct clinic visits through our platform, we attended our own virtual visits as patients and helped family members attend theirs. We personally helped call over 300 patients to set them up for their virtual visits. Downloading the vendor’s app to join the meeting was the single biggest point of failure. Keeping track of the appointment meeting link was close behind. Knowing where patients got stuck helped us build an effective text message-based bot that, if started, got over 95% of patients to a successful setup on their own.

Our texting system auto-replied to patient questions but also forwarded inbound texts to us. We saw caregivers wanting to share instructions on how best to reach their family members, and patients simply venting: “App is not working. Totally frustrated. Please call my cell.” In response, we built two-way texting so physicians and patients could pivot how they contacted each other in real-time. Because we faced so many language barriers, we enabled a live text translate feature across more than 65 languages.

Solving these technical hurdles returned everyone’s focus back to health care. One expression of success came when one of our physicians noted to her patient “we are going to get through this together” - and she was referring to the patient’s health concern, and not the frustrations of a virtual visit.

Change Favors the Prepared

Thousands of patients were swabbed the first week in a single parking lot, and soon more sites opened. In less than a month, zero virtual visits grew to over 24,000 visits a week being conducted through our new platform.

The crisis added unprecedented urgency and alignment of priorities, but we also owed our speed to our preparedness. In the years before, we had been investing in innovation infrastructure, including both technical and design capacity. In-house Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and human-centered designers experienced with the clinical enterprise enabled rapid implementation. Text-based platforms were already in place that automated and protocolized communication with patients and escalated to human backup when needed. All this decreased our time to deployment from months to hours or days.

It’s impossible to outsource change and innovation. We could not have met our needs in time looking externally for a vendor or prebuilt solution. Change leaders are found within an organization and defined by the mindset that standing up a new service overnight is often the best way to test it. That kind of bias towards action, paired with an enabling infrastructure, is essential for responding to a crisis, but also in leading organizations through change in any era.

The authors would like to thank Lauren Hahn, Christina O’Malley, Nida Al-Ramahi, Damien Leri, Yevgeniy Gitelman, Erik Lang, Aaron Leitner, Liz Deleener, Catherine Shi, Neha Patel, Jake Moore, Timothy Jones, Mohan Balachandran, Christianne Sevinc, and Stephanie Brown for their contributions to these efforts.

Katherine Choi, MD, is the Director of Practice Transformation at the Department of Medicine and the Center for Health Care Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania.

Srinath Adusumalli, MD, MSHP, is Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine and a Clinical Innovation Manager at the Center for Health Care Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania

Kathleen Lee, MD, is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Emergency Medicine and the Director of Clinical Implementation at the Center for Health Care Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania.

Roy Rosin, MBA, is the Chief Innovation Officer of Penn Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

David A. Asch, MD, MBA is the John Morgan Professor at the Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School and Director of the Center for Health Care Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania.