David Osborne | CEO and president, Virgin Pulse Inc.
Virgin Pulse provides a digital health and wellness platform for employers. How has the company responded to COVID-19? We were quick to respond to the COVID-19 public health guidelines and built it directly into our platform. We pulled forward a product called VP Passport, which is basically our own scenario of “is someone safe to come into the office” by answering 10 questions.
What challenges is the tech sector facing in this crisis? Hiring great engineers is still really hard. For example, an engineer gets a call from Silicon Valley in pre-pandemic times, and he’s not going to return the call because there’s no way he’s moving there. Fast forward to now and in post-pandemic times, that engineer is going to take the call because he just increased his salary [by taking a job with a Silicon Valley company], and he doesn’t have to move because he can work from home. It’s competitive.
What challenges have you faced at Virgin Pulse in downtown Providence? During non-pandemic times, the Providence office is typically full of happy, engaged people. It’s a collaborative culture. Everyone has a standing table, there are pool tables, shuffleboard, ping pong and group lunches. Because of the environment, we build products faster than anybody else in our space, we acquire companies faster than anybody in our space and then we celebrate those wins together. We’ve proven to ourselves more than anything that we can still be productive working from home.
Do you anticipate Virgin Pulse will reduce its downtown presence? I don’t anticipate it. As much as we say we will hire remote workers, we do have a large focus on hiring in Providence.
Are there any challenges you’re seeing with your own staff? People are working harder and are probably more stressed out. You can’t really go anywhere on vacation, so what do you do? You might as well work. I don’t think they’re taking breaks and we’re trying to encourage them to do that more. Everyone is responding differently, too. People have child care needs, they are homeschooling, they’re worrying about elderly parents. So, we’re trying to address ... how do you maintain a proper work-life balance.
How are you overcoming those challenges? We’re rolling out a flexible work-from-home program. It will have flexible [personal time off] so you don’t have to track hours and we’re going to have a more flexible schedule. We’re relooking at our benefits.
