Navigating COVID-19: Staying Connected with Your Team
With many cities across the country practicing Shelter in Place, many of us have spent the last few weeks working from home. And with the current COVID-19 environment being so fluid and at times uncertain, working from home is something that we will be doing for the duration of the quarantine.
Working from home is not easy. It’s hard to stay motivated and you start to feel isolated when you don’t see your team face to face every day. Over the last few weeks, our team has discovered a few ways to stay connected and spark creativity remotely.
Daily Coffee Hangouts: Every morning, our team has been connecting over coffee via Google Hangouts to chat about life, work, and ways we can be proactive both personally and professionally during this strange time. This daily face time is a great way to start the work day to make sure you are aligned on current projects and company updates.
Daily Happy Hours: Every afternoon, we’ve done a Google Hangouts happy hour. While we do briefly recap the day, we’ve tried to make these happy hours about creative projects – scripts, ideas for scripts, characters we could develop – anything and everything our team wants to chat about to keep the creative juices flowing.
Virtual Table Reads: While the commercial world is what we currently focus on as a company, making movies is something we are all passionate about so we’ve used this time to hop on Google Hangouts and workshop scripts we are developing.
Slack: Slack is a great tool in general, especially for project-specific work. Over the last few weeks, we’ve started using it more frequently for our day-to-day communications. We’ve also created a “WFH” channel where we’ve been posting funny memes and other content to keep the days entertaining.
Netflix’s Tiger King: Enough said.
Whether you are in the creative industry or just trying to maintain a sense of routine with your team during this time of social distancing, we hope these tips are helpful.
Stay healthy, friends! We will get through this together.