Our job now is to flatten the curve

Photo by Pixabay.

We're breaking our format this week. It wouldn't help to tell you what Melissa's reading and what Johnathan's reading. We're all reading the same thing. The COVID-19 coverage feels like it's everywhere and it's overwhelming. If it feels that way for us, it probably feels that way for many of you, and for the people in your organizations. It's a lot. And as bosses, we have to do some really important work, starting right now.

First, a bit about where we are. Neither of us are doctors (or epidemiologists!), but the American Hospital Association is just crawling with those types of folk. When they had an expert on a few weeks ago to give a "best guess epidemiology" for the US in the next little while, they got this.

What is hard to grasp though, even from Big Scary Numbers like that, is what it means in lived experience. Yesterday a doctor from Bergamo, Italy wrote about how things have changed for his city over the last week. It's harrowing. And leaves no ambiguity about the lived experience.

Scary things that we can't control are the worst scary things. The anxiety they cause can feed on itself. And it's always fair to ask ourselves if we're getting too worked up about it. We don't have answers for you, there. We're onside with Jurgen Klopp when he says we should listen to the smart minds close to the problem. But when we look around at the smartest minds in the room, closest to the problem, they sure do seem unanimous. Some bad stuff is coming.

And so we've been thinking a lot about flattening the curve.

Since the economist published a version of it 3 weeks ago, it's been the best advice we've found for bosses who ask us what they should be doing. We can't cure the virus (we're not doctors! or microbiologists!) but we can control how quickly it spreads. That matters. Because every system has a breaking point, and we should want our health care systems to stay on the happy side of it. As bosses there isn't much we can do to shrink the curve. But there is a lot we can do to flatten it.

Some of this is easy, like making sure your office has soap and sanitizer available. Suspending family-style lunches is probably smart, too. We recommend cancelling the apple-bobbing contest altogether. Anything you can do to minimize obvious opportunities for spread will flatten the curve.

Some of this is harder. Telling people to work from home when they're sick is great, but please think carefully about what support they need. Some of your people may feel like they ought to stay home. But if they're hourly and that means lost wages, you put them in a difficult situation. If leadership tells them to work from home but their own boss penalizes them for it or pressures them to stay, you're not going to succeed in flattening the curve.

There are people doing this right. Microsoft does not have a great history of treating their employees well, particularly women, but their leadership on this point is worth following. Klick Health has made their phased coronavirus response guide public and it's a good template if you need one. The later phases of their guide include some scary questions. What happens if schools close? What happens when an employee is infected? However unwelcome that thought is, we would so much rather you think about it now, than wait to react in the moment when it happens.

Some curve flattening is going to be pretty painful. We run events. And you may have noticed that event people are having a hard time. In the days leading up to Betterboss, we were keeping very close tabs on public health recommendations. We wanted to know whether we would have to cancel. We didn't, thankfully, but had we been a month further into this we think we might have. That kind of cancellation would hit us hard. And every day we're seeing another SXSW, GDC, or Mobile World Congress announce a cancellation that hits their communities just as hard or harder.

As bosses, you're going to get a lot of questions from your people. Resist the urge to pretend it will all be fine. Even if you believe that, they don't. Resist the urge to play therapist, too. Now's not a time for bluffing, it's a time for getting the right supports in place.

We talk with bosses a lot about what a privilege it is to do this work. Sometimes they look at us funny. Amidst the vacation approvals and work assignments and promotion battles it doesn't feel that way to them. But in moments like this, you have budget. You have influence over workload. You are invited to the management meetings. You have the ability to exercise discretion. You have privilege and sway and impact that your people don't. It's time to use it.

- Melissa and Johnathan