Welcome to The Bureau Briefing, our community podcast. Be sure to find us on iTunes or Google Play!
Carl Smith
Bureau of Digital
Wherever you are and whatever you’re going through, remember that you aren’t alone. You are part of a community that cares about you and wants to help you overcome every obstacle. I’ve never felt that compassion as strongly as I did this past week. Nearly 300 of you reached out with ideas, resources, encouraging messages of gratitude and thoughtful questions asking how the Bureau team was doing.
Last night I sorted through all of the emails and direct messages and I found one common theme: support. A genuine desire to help the community, the industry, our clients, our teams and beyond through this time of change. An eagerness to provide better information on working from home, leading remotely, surviving financially, protecting our companies legally and maintaining our team’s health and wellness.
Many of you have already created great resources based on your personal experiences. Others are working on new content right now. Some have been recommending resources they believe in. And so many of us still have questions keeping us up at night. Listen to this episode to find out more about what we’re going to do.
Also, please send us the best resources and your questions for the Bureau Experts AMA. As always, we appreciate your support.
Hey everyone, and welcome to this episode of the Bureau Briefing. It is Friday, the 13th of March. It has been a very interesting week. Interesting couple of weeks as we now are starting to realizing COVID-19 is something that is going to impact all of us. I don't care where you're listening to this around the world. You have something going on in your life that is COVID-19 related. It could be something with your family, it could be something with friends, it could be something with the people you work with. It could be you, and that's what I want to focus on today, is how we get through this together.
The Bureau started in 2012, and it was people getting together to help each other to solve problems we couldn't solve on our own. Just to feel like we weren't alone when there were problems we all shared, and we didn't see a path forward. So, that's where we are right now. People are having to prepare for kids coming home as schools all over the world are closing, people are having to figure out how to work from home as their offices are closing. In our industry, in digital, we've been doing this for a long time. A lot of us. We probably led the charge in many ways on what it is to work remotely, what it is to work from home. So, we have so much knowledge and so much good information.
When I got back this week from Charleston, I had close to 300 direct messages across all social and Slack and emails, and first of all, I want to say thank you to everybody, and I'm sorry that it took me so long to get back to you. It felt like it took a long time, but what people want is good information. Right now, we're seeing so much new content flood the web around working from home, and around force majeure policies. If you have work that you're not going to be able to complete. There are so many threads that are impacted, both personal and work are coming together quickly, and we have so many things to figure out. So, we are going to help put together the list of curated resources, and articles, and blogs, and podcasts, and all of those things that are going to give you good information as our community, as the Bureau community sees it.
We have over 8,000 people leading digital, and they are going to help us with the information that they find to be the most reliable because here's what we have to realize. Next week, there are going to be 50 new podcasts on working from home that spin up, and there's going to be 200 articles on, how do you lead remotely? All these types of things and heaven help us, how many coaches that are out there on LinkedIn are suddenly going to change their shingle to say that they're a work from home and remote specialists? If you don't know the source, you don't know if the content is any good, and that's the beauty of us in digital is we've been doing this for a long time. We know what's working, we know what's not. It's going to be different, but we at least come from that background of knowledge. So, that's really important and we're working on that right now.
If you look in the notes, you will see that we have a link to a survey where we're asking you to share with us. What are the services, what are the resources, what are the podcasts, what are the articles, who are the individuals? What have you found that is a great resource to help get you through this time? It could be, again, about work from home. It could be about legal. It could be about team dynamics. It could be about your personal health and wellness. Whatever it's about, what did you find? Share it so that we can get it out there. So, those that find it will know that experienced people who have done this before saw value in this content. Saw answers for you. Saw opportunities for you. Saw ways for you to get to a better place while we're all going through this, because let's face it, when you're just going out on Google and you're trying to find stuff, the stuff you find is just not going to be that good. It's going to be spammy.
Something that somebody just whipped up and put out there to get a lot of traction in a time of need, which is shitty, but hey. That's our world. So, let's take care of each other and let's cut out the spam and get to the good stuff. Even with that, we are going to get to a point where each of us has unique situations. We all have different context of what it is we're going to be challenged with, so one of the things that we're doing is putting together an expert panel, an ask me anything, AMA panel of people in the Bureau community who will be able to help us answer those questions. So in the same survey where we're asking you to send us the resources that you found valuable, we're also going to ask you questions that we should ask this panel. We're going to do this next week. It's going to be the week of Monday, March 16th. Some time in that week we're going to find that we can get everybody together.
This will be an opportunity. We'll record it. It'll be live. There's no cost for it, and we're going to get great people spin up a Zoom room and get some great people in there, and answer some questions, and package that up and send it out, because that's what we have to do right now. We have to make sure that we're creating opportunities for great content to get to people. It's interesting because there's such an instinct right now to create content, but when we look at it, there's great content being created. So, let's let others do that and then we're going to take on the role of figuring out what should be shared and how it should be shared. Not just us, the Bureau team. We'll definitely play a role, but the community itself. We have so many smart people. We have so many leaders that are part of the Bureau, and we're going to lean on them, and they're going to give us the good stuff, and then we're going to get it out to you.
Also, we're going to do what we're calling pulse surveys, and this is just going to be checking in every other week and saying, "How is work? How is the team? How are you? What are you seeing? Are you seeing a slow down? Are you suddenly seeing that response times on agreements are taking longer? Are things getting put on hold?" Because if you know that you're not alone when something like that happens, you know it's part of a bigger situation, then you can take a little bit of solace in that. It may not solve the problem, but you may know at least that you're not causing the problem where something with your company or your team is not necessarily wrong. It's just the way the situation is. It's just the new real, the new new. What do we call that? Oh, the new normal. This is not the new normal. We'll get through this. It could last for a little while, but while it's happening let's stay in touch. Let's do these pulse surveys and just kind of get a feel for, where are we? How are we?
So, that's the big shift that we're doing right now in terms of that content, but we also need to be thinking about how we get together. That's just as important as it ever was, only now it's going to be remote. For those of us that have been remote and those of us that have put on in person events, I think there's this exciting opportunity to bring more to the online events. There's so much more we can do. For example, we have this idea around the Bureau Box, which is if you're attending an online event, you actually get in the mail a box that has stuff for you during the event, because we want to have that same kind of tactile experience. We want you to get those things, right? If it's snacks, or if it's your lanyard, or if it's some special treat. We need to make sure that it feels different every time, that it feels special. Not that you're watching a TV show, but that you're part of a connection.
Even beyond that, doing highly curated small groups that we're calling Bureau Circles where people with similar situations, similar backgrounds, similar context, similar challenges can get together at a good frequency and help each other out, but without having to worry about the logistics of it. Not having to set up the meeting, set up the agenda, take care of the notes, do all that kind of stuff but the biggest key to our collective success is going to be working together. Everyone in the community, people outside of the community, everyone just bringing what they found that's working and bringing great conversations. We'll provide the platform. We'll help put the information together. You share with us what's going on, what are the challenges, what are the questions you can't get answered? Together, we're going to come out of this thing so much stronger.
So, thank you so much for listening to today's Bureau Briefing, and please stay in touch and let us know how you're doing. If you have time, fill out the resources and AMA survey that's linked in the show notes. We really want to hear from you. We want to know what you've found that's working for you, so that we can share it with everybody else and give them more of the support that they need. So, that's it for today. Be good, have a weekend, take some deep breaths and realize we're going to get through this together. All the best.