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Welcome, everyone, to the next installment
of our look at how Indeed has been navigating
the global impact of COVID-19.
Today is April 6.
We're on day 34 of our global work-from-home.
But our involvement with this crisis
goes back to late January, and we
know that thousands of businesses around the world
are facing the same challenges that we've been through,
and thought it might be helpful to share
some of our experiences and what we've learned along the way.
So today we're speaking with Kellie Goolsby,
who is our program manager for risk at Indeed.
And let's just start off with a quick check
in of how are you doing today?
I'm doing well.
It's Monday, the sun is shining, and all is good.
That's great to hear.
Let's start with what does a program manager for risk
do at Indeed?
What were you doing right before things
started to unfold for us at the beginning of January?
So program manager of--
the program manage office that I'm in
is that we're building large cross-functional
enterprise-level initiatives for Indeed.
And so, specifically, I was looking at business resiliency.
Which includes crisis management,
business continuity, incident response.
And so that enables the business to quickly identify
risk and escalate them to the right channels
so that leadership can quickly respond.
And what were some of the kinds of things
that your team was working on responding
to before COVID-19 broke?
Instead of working on very specific plans
with tons and tons of checklists,
my approach is really to build a framework that can
help leadership resolve crises.
Everything from, perhaps, like technology issues, all the way
to maybe a natural disaster that would
impact some of our facilities.
And so that framework really relies
on having the right teams, like senior leadership teams, all
the way to regional crisis management teams
that can respond to an issue in their region timely,
and then having the right tools to do so.
So that's really what I was focused on,
and will continue to do so once we get through this.
So this issue started becoming international news
in late January with the outbreak
in Hubei province of China.
We had employees starting to ask questions.
Obviously we probably started thinking
about how this might impact us.
And then in the first week of February,
we had the first incident of a family member
of an employee of Indeed in our Singapore office
learning that they had been potentially exposed.
And so when did your team get involved in this,
and what was the first set of steps
that were taken immediately?
So I got involved quickly after the decision
was made to ask the Singapore office to work from home.
I think it was like a Friday morning.
And what we did after learning that,
was there were a lot of things to focus on.
So we had to focus on communications, making sure
that we were communicating with our employees,
with potential-- being prepared for external communications.
Another thing that we had to do was take a quick look
at what other employees had visited the Singapore
office during that time frame so that if we
needed to see if they perhaps had gone to another Indeed
office, that we were able to identify that and take
appropriate steps.
So those were some of the initial key actions
that we took.
Finally, I would say making sure that the crisis management
team was set up.
And so that had already organically formed.
But making sure you have the right people in the room
so it's not-- although this is a health
issue-- that it's not just, for example, HR in the room.
That you have communications in the room,
you have people from technology in the room,
and operations, that can make expedited decisions.
And was that particular piece part
of your playbook, that should something arise,
we were going to put together this team?
Because it seemed like one day we
were just talking about something,
and then the team was meeting three times a day the next day,
and it was just up and running.
Yes, and that's really thanks to Paul.
He got these people initially in the room.
But yes, that would be part of my playbook,
is that these people already know
that they would be in these roles before a crisis happens.
And receive training so that you're able to quickly form,
you know what to do, you know what tools you're going to use,
you know how you're going to communicate.
But yeah, that's part of the playbook.
So starting with that first potential exposure
in Singapore, can you just walk through what
did your team do to adapt to the speed of change?
Because we saw, looking at that Singapore
office, how many people had visited other offices.
And then, office by office, as things spread literally day
by day, there were new pieces of information coming up.
We had to react, we had to make decisions,
we had to share those decisions with the company.
How did you navigate through those first few weeks?
Well we, fortunately, do have a global company,
and we are able to rely on the partners in the Asia offices
to help us do that.
Whether it be HR business partners in Sydney, or even
our comms people as well that could
help take actions overnight.
So we would meet during the day and figure out what
our next steps needed to be.
And to the extent, we needed calls
to certain employees that were outside of that time zone,
we were able to deliver those tasks
to people on the other side of the world that
would able to complete those calls and get that information.
It was a 24-hour cycle of what we were able to do.
So we had approximately four weeks
of looking at the potential spread from office to office
and making individual decisions to close down
individual offices.
And then on March 4th, we made the decision
to just, overnight, move the entire company of 10,000 people
to work from home.
From your team's perspective, what
changed when we moved from talking
about travel restrictions and targeted office closures
to just saying, everyone is going
to work from home starting tonight?
Well you have to--
when that happens, so many decisions have to get made.
And so many things that we've never really practiced before.
So fortunately, when we did have to temporarily close
the Dublin and the Sydney and the Singapore offices,
we actually had a couple of days of data that we could look back
and see how those offices performed,
and what questions came up when they had to work from home.
So we were able to go ahead, during that time period leading
up to the decision for everyone to work from home,
we were able to really focus our efforts in understanding
what gaps did we have?
What gaps, how we were able to close those.
And start making plans to the extent,
other offices would have to close,
how we could work around that.
So it didn't really slow down for us.
In fact, we really did speed up the planning leading up
to everyone working from home.
So that we could try to do that as easily as possible.
Even so, there are always going to be things
that you didn't think about that you
have to spin up new processes, new ways of doing things,
pretty quickly.
So Paul Wolfe, who you mentioned before,
Indeed's SVP of HR, Paul and I had a conversation
about this on Friday.
And one of the things for both of us was that, to some degree,
that decision, and starting the next day when
everyone was home, there was actually
a collective sigh of relief.
Because we went from really worrying
about what were we going to do to protect the health
and safety of our employees and their families
and their communities to OK, we've actually
done everything we can now.
And while it introduced new complexities,
we actually felt like we had just eliminated
one of the big risks.
And so from the risk perspective,
one question is, what if any new risks
in moving to an environment where 10,000 people are working
from home, did your team have to then start
to think about and put together a playbook?
My guess is this wasn't on the list of things
that we had really planned for.
Which is probably why your planning to plan
was better than trying to anticipate
everything that might happen.
But what changes from a risk perspective
when suddenly everyone's working from home?
So there's a couple of things that you have to think about.
One is cybersecurity.
So if people are working from home,
are they doing that using safe tools?
Because we understand that when there are crises--
this is not just unique to Indeed-- when there are crises,
there is enhanced risk for that, for fraudulent actions,
for hacking and phishing.
So that's something that we had to make
sure the IT security team was on guard and ready to go.
There's also a risk of absenteeism.
Because if you have people at home,
either they might be having to care for someone else
once the schools were closed, and people
weren't able to actually- they're
now having to homeschool their children as well as work.
And so what does that do for the core work?
And answering those questions and getting ahead of it,
and working with leadership on creating guidelines
on how to do that.
So the risk did change.
It did change, but it was more of just
being sure that we could continue to work,
that our business could continue to operate.
So what has changed for you personally
in the working from home in terms of your day
to day, but also your interactions with your team,
and with all the people who you have
to partner with in this work?
Probably just like everybody else.
Lots of Zoom calls.
Lots of lawn mower--
lots of strange noises that are around all the time that you
can't control, and that's OK.
Yeah, it was actually a pretty easy transition.
I have been pleasantly surprised how resilient
I feel like people have become.
The culture, I think, really did--
that was the culture at Indeed while we were working together,
and it really did transcend to working from home.
I really experienced that collaborative effort, people
really rising to the challenge.
Whether it be creating guidelines
for parents at home, or fun games, or social media
channels, or show me pictures of your dogs.
It's a very resilient culture and I appreciate that.
What helped you prepare for something like this?
Because this is clearly something that's not-- not only
has Indeed not been through this,
but no one has been through something quite
like what's going on right now.
Well, I have had a lot of experience
working in dynamic, fast-paced situations
where you don't always have all the information that you want.
And for me what's worked is staying calm.
Understanding what's in front of us.
What decisions need to be made?
What kind of data do we need?
And just methodically helping the team
go through the decisions.
And not having tons of time to spend on decision
making and just moving us forward one step at a time.
And even then, this was, you're right,
this is something I've never experienced, never planned for,
no one else on the team had.
But we just knew that we had to get through it.
So now that we've, not that we've really
had a chance to breathe, but that we've
had a little bit of distance from some of the early stuff,
is there anything, looking back--
and I'm sure there will be hundreds of postmortems
that we're going to do through this process-- anything
that, if you, today, could talk to Kellie February 7, anything
that you would do differently?
Any advice, anything that you might have approached
with a different perspective?
Yes, like you said, there's going
to be tons of changes as a result of this.
We actually did pause early on and we
did a quick retrospective the second week of February
on the crisis team.
We took a moment, it was actually about two hours,
and sat down and methodically worked through, OK,
what didn't work, what did work?
As a result, we did some changes to communications.
We got a bit more organized with how
we were tracking information.
So we did do that.
I expect it will happen again.
Other than that, really the planning piece is so important.
Not-- Waiting until a decision is
obvious to make that decision is too late.
And so being able to plan when the sun is shining
and get data that you know you're
going to need in a certain situation,
and having reports ready to go so that you can make decisions
based on real data, is something that I would
love for us to get better at.
So at the start, we talked about the fact
that every business right now is having
to deal with, how do we operate in an environment like this.
And we were pretty early on in making some of these decisions.
So some companies now, there are still,
at least as of this weekend, eight states that don't have
official stay at home orders.
So there are companies that still
haven't made that transition that are going to.
What advice would you have for them,
that obviously they can't go back and do
a year of planning and preparing for this,
if you were just finding out today
that this is something that your company might be facing?
What are some of the practical things that you would advise?
I would give them three ideas.
One, develop your guidelines early.
What is your approach going to be?
For us, it was the health and safety
of our employees and our community.
That will help you make decisions
later on when they get tricky.
So you can always point back to that, whatever it may be.
Two, overly communicate.
The way and methods that you would communicate
when you are not in a crisis, they
don't work when you're in a crisis.
You need to up that, you need to provide more information,
understanding that you may not always
have all the information, but providing places
for your employees to go.
Whether that be FAQs, or enhanced Q&As with executives,
so that employees feel like they're getting the answers
to their questions, and that their leaders are thinking
about questions or topics that may come up.
And then finally, making sure you
have a cross-functional team that is ready to go.
That is also, I would say, at a certain seniority level
so that they can make decisions and execute
those decisions pretty quickly.
There's been a lot of talk about how changing the way that we
work as a result of this, and certainly
things that are completely out of the realm of what
you might expect cropping up.
What do you think will change coming out
of this, when we get to whatever the other side of this
looks like, when people start going back to work?
What do you think will change at Indeed,
and what do you think might change for other companies
in terms of what we've learned from this experience?
Well, I think the obvious one is that we
are able to work from home.
I think that is going to change the nature of work.
I think it's pretty exciting, given if we take this reality,
that we can work from home.
We have the tools to work from home.
That, as companies are making decisions about new hires,
for example, you might not be limited to a pool of candidates
just in your town.
You're able to open that up and actually get the expertise
that you really need.
And I realize that working from home is not for everyone.
But I think it was actually--
when everyone's on equal footing and we all
have to do this together, you really
do learn the other side of it.
So I also think, for people that are returning
to the office, that are not working from home,
hopefully will have a bit more empathy for people
that are working from home.
Great, thank you so much for your time, Kellie.
And one of the things about your role, there's
a lot of people who do jobs where,
when nothing is going wrong, you might not
appreciate what that role is.
And this is one of those things where
I think you were one of the folks
early on who came to me and Dave and said,
this is something that we need to be ready for.
We're not doing any of it.
And you put together a series of presentations and arguments
for what we should do, and the resources that were necessary,
and I can just say my most sincere thanks for having
led all that and helped.
Because I'm a hundred percent confident that we would not
have been able to navigate this with as much grace as
we have, and, honestly, with as little disruption.
It's really been amazing to me how every single team
has come together.
And a big part of it, you did mention the culture,
that the company as a whole has just come together around this.
But we wouldn't be sitting here having this conversation right
now if you had not done all the work that you've
done over the last year.
So I want to just thank you so much
for everything you've done to get us here today.
You're welcome.
And thanks for taking the time.
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