Colorado is Opening Up. Foundry is not. Here’s our Thinking.
In mid-March, I wrote a post about how Foundry Group had joined a number of other businesses in the early adoption of work from home and other practices to stem the spread of COVID-19. We recognized that this would be an essential part of helping create social distance and by doing so, flattening the curve.
As Colorado and many other states are moving to a more relaxed set of policies (although Denver and Boulder are waiting a few more weeks until they follow the rest of the state), we’ve decided that for Foundry we’ll continue our work from home policy until at least the end of May (Brad’s post on that here). We’re doing this because we’re in the fortunate position where we can and we’re being public about it because we’re hoping other businesses that are in a position to do so will do the same. We’re fortunate at Foundry to operate the kind of business that works well remotely and although we miss seeing each other in the office and the natural collaboration that happens when we’re all there, our business functions pretty much normally even when we’re all remote. And, like other businesses, we’ve been very deliberate about trying to replicate our in-office dynamic online (for us that includes several weekly stand-ups, extended time together on Mondays as well as ad hoc “cocktail/mocktail hours”. We also recognize that there are many businesses that need to open up sooner and we feel that they should take priority over companies like Foundry that can continue working from home without big disruptions to our operations.
If you are running a company that is similarly situated, we hope that you will follow suit and wait a bit longer to open up. We’re going to reevaluate opening up at the end of May and decide if it’s appropriate for us to re-open the office in early June or if we should extend our work from home time even further. The more effort we put into mitigating this crisis, the more flexibility we will have later in the summer to get things back to normal.
Also published on Medium.