FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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This New York CEO put his company in a simulated coronavirus lockdown

This New York CEO put his company in a simulated coronavirus lockdown

NEW YORK - Marc Cenedella is close with his 60 employees, but he's never managed them from his kitchen table.

The executive runs Ladders, a job-search site he founded after the first digital boom, in 2003. On a typical day, he's guiding his staffers - about two-thirds engineers - at the company's headquarters 50 stories above New York's financial district. 

On Thursday, the 49-year-old found himself helming a more forward-minded experiment. He told employees to schedule as much face-to-face work and meetings as possible - and then do it all from their homes. Cenedella would run Ladders from the apartment he shares with his wife and three kids in Nolita, the boutique-dotted downtown neighborhood.

As the novel coronavirus has started to spread in the United States, some chief executives have begun considering how remote work would be conducted in the case of a lockdown, following the trend in Asia. Cenedella, though, decided to attempt this one-day trial 10 days earlier, before any New York cases had been reported, and put it into place even as its mayor, Bill de Blasio, urges residents to commute to work as usual. Cenedella hoped to learn both the adjustments a lockdown would require and the toll it could take.

"We're normally a very in-person company," Cenedella said Thursday morning. He wore a casual button-down shirt, jeans and white socks as he sat in front of two monitors he'd set up on the large wooden table in his dining area, opposite children's drawings and other signs of its normal inhabitants. "But I wanted everyone to start to feel more comfortable in case there's a long lockdown - to feel reassured there's a plan in place and know how to execute it."

He paused. "Of course, the question isn't Day 1 but Day 20. It will be harder to keep people from feeling lonely."

Managers can be reluctant to trot out emergency protocols too soon out of fear of rattling employees. But Cenedella thought a lack of preparation would lead to more anxiety. He called the process a "rehearsal," not a "drill."

First order of business: a welcome call.

"Good morning and welcome to our coronavirus rehearsal," he said to the staffers brought together on Google Hangouts from basements and bedrooms across the New York metropolitan area. "We want to do everything possible to make this a full, productive workday for everyone."

He continued offering encouragement and guidance. "It's really important we stick with regular meetings and not push them off or blow them off. We want to experience this in case we're in a work-from-home scenario. We want to feel the full burden."

After another moment of speaking he realized he wasn't getting much feedback. "Am I muted? " Someone responded on the accompanying chat that he was. "The whole time?" Also affirmative.

"I guess the first lesson of lockdown rehearsal is to turn off the mute," he said self-deprecatingly and started the spiel again.

The meeting ended and the names vanished from the screen. Cenedella went into a virtual meeting with sales executives. 

After a moment of getting the glitches out from among the trio ("Can you share your camera?" "We want to see you." "I don't see you." "I see me." "I see you." "Oh, there you are."), they dived in and started discussing employer clients.

A few minutes in, a nonhuman sound could be heard.

"Sorry, I think my dog wants to join the conversation," one of the sales executives said.

Ladders bills itself as a site for higher-paying jobs, in contrast to competitors like Indeed, LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter. To attract subscribers (the site charges both employers and job-seekers), it is constantly adding content and features. Normally employees work in one-week "sprints" - getting a new set of innovations going Wednesday and passing them to other teams the following Tuesday. A lockdown of a few days would be one thing; an entire cycle without in-person meetings to pitch, plan and polish is another.

"We've never had a problem doing one snow day - people do 'personal' work that doesn't require a lot of interaction," Cenedella said. "But once it interrupts a full sprint or several sprints, I don't know how that will go."

When he's done personal work, Cenedella said, it was from a desk set up in his bedroom. But he wasn't getting on video calls then. "You don't want employees to see the CEOs' bed," he said.

One of the executive's tasks is staying on top of tickets - essentially high-end versions of what the rest of us send to the IT department when we can't log in. He spent some time dealing with that. Ladders also has a content team, which works on a parallel product offering Web posts about the job market.

Cenedella held a call with some of the editors who run that department.

"With social, every 12 months something's new so we have to stay on top of it, "Cenedella said. "It was Facebook, now it's Instagram - "

"TikTok," a millennial editor said.

"But what's the upper age limit of TikTok?" Cenedella asked.

"Honestly it's kind of all over the place. Parents do it to see what their kids are up to. I've seen people in their 80s doing it. I personally didn't download it because I think it would take over my life," the editor responded.

Cenedella's three children are all under the age of 8. The youngest, 3, came scampering into the room as he was responding to an email about a client.

"Do you want to help Daddy type?" he asked his daughter.

She said yes, then plunged into a description of a character she liked, pointing out they should be on the screen before running off. It was like a hardware check from a tech staffer but with more "My Little Pony" talk.

An all-staff Slack channel was active; Cenedella had encouraged employees to weigh in on how their day was going. He clicked over to it.

One had written. "I feel like I've been grounded and sent to my room." Cenedella clicked off. "They're one of the more extroverted people we have here," he explained.

A ticket came through on an engineering issue. He studied it for a moment. "There are too many opinions to solve it in Slack," he concluded. "Normally I'd just say let's huddle for five minutes and we'll solve it. We can't do that now."

He decided to punt it to Friday when everyone would be back in the office. That luxury wouldn't be available in a real lockdown, but he felt he had no choice; he couldn't just message everyone to get on a conference call.

"Popping by an engineer's desk - when they have their head down and headphones on - is easy. But Slacking them to stop what they're doing will make it seem like a much bigger deal that it is."

Couldn't he just preface that it wasn't a big deal? "Whenever a CEO says that you know it's a big deal," he noted.

It was nearly 6 p.m., time for an end-of-day wrap call on the rehearsal.

"Hopefully this has been a helpful experiment for everyone in case things begin to really go poorly," he said as everyone gathered virtually. He asked what they missed being out of the office. A few said they missed the more efficient hardware; another said the lack of distractions.

"None of you missed me?" Cenedella asked, prompting a raft of employees to say they did.

After the call, Cenedella said he thought the experiment mostly ran smoothly. But a number of incidents - especially the engineering ticket - convinced him there would be hurdles. "What I realize now is that to make this work we need to pull in as much work that's independent and push out as much that's collaborative, which I don't know if we can do for several weeks."

Asked if it felt strange for his offices to sit empty on a workday, he said, "But it's not really empty. Everyone's here." He gestured to a screen. "Are they here? Where is here?"

"I may have been away from people for too long," he said.

 

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