Thank God it’s FRIMO
Every Friday our studio has a team meeting called FRIMO (Friday Morning). During this meeting we go over Business Development, Project Status, and Operations.
On April 24th, roughly 1,5 months into our current state of distributed working, and days after it was announced we would see another month of this — until at least May 20th. I opened the meeting with the comments below
I share this, as I believe most companies, teams, and individuals are going about their day, forgetting that for many, these days can be jarring, numbing, anxious, lonely, and simply sometimes boring. Take a moment to connect with your team, listen, and provide overviews of what is happening. Not only do times of crisis or change require extra communication, but even more so when those times are in a distributed workplace.
This is transcribed verbatim. Only sentences on clients, internal information, or specific names were removed.
Ah! Excellent. I think all of us are aware of the May 20th date, and that we obviously don’t see ourselves back in the studio, probably until about June. And even at June — we know there may be some sort of rotation aspect that we need to look at.
The really good news is we have work now for the next several months. We are full up on work, and for those of you who have been here for a number of years, you know that we’ll always say, “If we don’t sell summer by May, we essentially aren’t selling summer”. So the really good news is we’ve almost sold the complete summer.
I will say I continue to be really amazed how everybody’s adapting. I think — [to a comment earlier] I don’t know if we’re in week 6, 5, 7? I’m not sure anymore but we’re coming up on 2 months and it just continues to amaze me how we’ve all adapted to the situation.
For us I think we’ve been just extremely lucky. But in talking to many individuals one-on-one I also want to make sure that despite saying, “Hey, look we’re great at adapting, we’re being efficient, we’re very lucky” — all these positive things… it doesn’t negate anxiety, it doesn’t negate concern or fear or anything like that. So I just want to make sure that we’re acknowledging that, and it’s… you know …. I know everybody doesn’t always feel great and excited, and that’s perfectly ok.
Where I want to go with this, is as we continue our programs, as this keeps going — just everybody in programs take care of each other. Check-in with each other, you know. I will always espouse the idea of efficiency, you guys know I love that more than anything else, but also remember to check-in on the human side of things which sometimes I can forget. And thank you, Amelie, for setting up the games night yesterday which was awesome, and thank you for letting me invade that and be loud and obnoxious.
So in this sense of taking care of everybody, we have a 3 day weekend this weekend, what we wanted to say is if you can, at 2 o’clock close your computers get out of here. Get out early. Start the 3 day weekend early. Take a walk outside, binge on Netflix, whatever that is. It gets numb sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours a day so take a little bit of time and just have your personal time, have some time to relax.
So that’s where I’ll leave things, that’s where I’ll wrap things up and I’m curious to hear from anyone on their thoughts or comments.
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