We could spend hours upon hours explaining all that we do – and our colleagues do – to make our workplace great, but we’ll cut right to the heart of the question in this moment: our pandemic response. We’ve recognized our colleagues need us more than ever. They’re stressed – about work, caring for their families, the virus, racial injustice, tense elections, and more – and we’ve used it as an opportunity to prove to our colleagues what they’ve suspected for more than a decade: we really do care about their wellbeing. From the beginning, we proceeded cautiously into March, encouraging all colleagues to work from home while promoting our equipment policy, which allows colleagues to claim two monitors, a docking station, keyboard and mouse for their home office for free. After the state lifted the stay-at-home order in June and allowed businesses to start re-opening, we re-opened our office cautiously – but only for those who needed to work in the office. We encouraged all colleagues to stay at home and made them a key promise: no matter what happens during this pandemic, no colleague will return to the office until they’re both capable and comfortable, no matter how long that takes. We granted colleagues the right to work from home – no questions asked – until Oct. 1. As that date grew closer and we started to hear rumblings of colleagues stressing out about potentially having to return, we quickly extended that until June 1, 2021. Through all this, we were conducting surveys and hosting focus groups to collect feedback from colleagues, particularly our working parents, to learn how else we could help.
We then rolled out the following:
• $1,000 in-home childcare credit through UrbanSitter
• Free virtual tutoring services through Tutor.com
• $500 to outfit colleagues’ home offices
• Flexibility and permission for working parents to ensure they can take care of their families, even if that means they need to step away from work