In this interview, the CEO of Instant Teams explains how the company, which already operated fully remotely with over 90 employees, adapted its leadership and HR practices when the COVID‑19 pandemic forced everyone to work from home under unprecedented personal pressures. The discussion covers the pre‑existing remote culture and a childcare‑inclusive work policy that was released just before the pandemic, the rapid shift to more flexible arrangements such as job‑sharing, variable core hours by time zone, and individualized schedules (including night or early‑morning shifts). The CEO describes concrete measures to curb after‑hours expectations, such as instructing staff not to answer messages at midnight, adding automated email signatures that state each employee’s working hours, and encouraging people to set boundaries. Overall, the leadership’s goal was to maintain full operational capacity while actively reducing stress and anxiety for employees dealing with homeschooling, caregiving, and other home‑based challenges.
Chapters
Just to kind of chime in a little bit on leadership on the Ensign team side. So we have over 90 people that work for us day in and day out, all remotely. We have really paid a lot of attention to building remote culture prior to this starting so that people feel connected and engaged. And we have all kinds of programs that are surrounded that. But one thing that was really interesting is we had just formalized our remote work policy that included childcare so that people would have childcare during certain hours. We instituted what we called core hours for each time zone so that everyone in a certain time zone had coverage, childcare during these hours, which were core working hours. Well, we released that like 3 weeks before COVID So obviously, once COVID hit, we're like, okay, throw that policy out the window. Now we got to figure out how do we support everyone who has their spouses, their children, like everything at home with them working now because that's a totally new environment. So We started creating job sharing opportunities. So if workers needed to say, okay, now I can really only work 3 to 4 hours a day with all the other load that I have now with the homeschooling or with whatever is going on, we gave them that opportunity. You don't lose your job if you need to scale back, just tell us, we'll work with it. We instituted like different working hours. So if you need to now work at at night or early morning or midday, like whatever works, like come to us, tell us your schedule, let us work with you and figure out what makes the most sense so that the stress, we don't continue to add stress into your life because what we've seen from our workers is they are so dedicated and such hard workers, we have to tell them to stop working. Like please put the phone down, don't answer my Slack message, don't answer my email at midnight or whatever, this is when I'm able to work. We even put like an automated message on all of our emails saying, I'm working in the time that works for me, please reply and respond in a time that works for you, so that people don't feel the pressure to be responding 24 hours a day and doing that kind of stuff. So as leadership, those are the things we kind of looked at, how we can best support, how we can continue to operate fully as the company, but also how can we support and not put an additional burden of stress and anxiety on people that are already stressed and have, you know, all of these situations going on.
