Coping with COVID-19: Bridge Technical Talent

NORTH KINGSTOWN – Bridge Technical Talent CEO James Wright says his technology-services company hasn’t missed a beat during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Five years ago, he said, “We had an [information technology] closet full of servers and phone equipment that ran services that were essential to our business.

“Over the past few years, we provisioned all of our employees with laptops and moved almost everything we do into SaaS/Cloud-based platforms,” said Wright. “Practically everything we do can be done remotely – we hardly even print any hard checks anymore.”

PBN is asking local business owners and CEOs five questions in a survey designed to understand how the new coronavirus has affected them and their businesses and what they have learned from the unprecedented challenges. Here are Wright’s responses:

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How are you coping amid the COVID-19 crisis?
We are fully remote. Our team is active and has adapted well to working from home: working well, understanding that we’re lucky to have this option and hungry. We’ve seen a slowdown in current work and in the pipeline, so we’re finding things to keep the team busy, but we’re evaluating things daily.

Have you found silver linings in these difficult times?
We’ve found some. We’re focusing on ways to make the most of the crisis: from a sales side there’s not much need in our industry, but people are picking up the phone more and so we’re building relationships. We’ve looked at a list of projects we’ve always wanted to do, but that have always been too far down the list to get started on and now that we have extra bandwidth, we’re undertaking a few of them.

How are you maintaining your company culture?
We’ve moved all of our meetings online and we’re all very collaborative. We’ve created a “social convergence,” not “distancing,” weekly meeting just for fun. The first one was a bit disjointed and hard to manage and it was hard to keep it moving through the full time we had allotted. For the second one we asked everyone to have pictures of themselves as kids/teens to share. The goal was the more awkward the better. We made it a happy hour too. Everyone had a great time and it went more than double the time we had budgeted.

The next one was a mini streaming review where everyone had to give a review of a movie or show they love/hate that they don’t think others have seen. Again, a big hit.

So, we’ve learned that everyone is really craving interaction and if it’s structured it works very well. We’re also maintaining our values in our meetings: being thankful that we can keep working, encouraging our teams to take time to do the personal things they need to do, stressing that there’s no stigma in taking PTO or stepping away from your desk.

Did your business continuity plan work or were there surprises?
It’s pretty much worked, though given the breadth of change there have been some surprises. Our move to SaaS for all our core processes has been critical. We didn’t anticipate such a long duration, with social distancing, etc., but we’ve been able to work without really missing a beat, it’s a matter of adapting to the changes in our industry.

Do you have advice for other local companies?
I think the best thing we’ve done is to encourage our employees to create boundaries for themselves: when you work from home it’s hard to separate work from home and it’s healthy to set times when you turn off your computer and leave work behind. We’ve heard from front-line managers that employees are concerned and want to show that they’re engaged and working hard, which can create undue stress. So, we’ve made a point of removing the stigma of taking mental health time throughout the day. I guess in other words, instead of worrying about tracking activity we’ve found the opposite: employees are stressed out, given the flood of bad economic news across the country, so they need to be reminded that it’s okay to take a breath and pace themselves.

Another thing would be the success of the structure of our social-convergence online meetings, it’s really helped break the ice and keep it with one person doing most of the talking. One of our mantras has been to remind our team to focus on things you can control and not worry about things you can’t. That’s helped our employees to readjust and break things down to the tasks at hand.

Cassius Shuman is a PBN staff writer and researcher. He can be reached at shuman@pbn.com.