How a virus infected the work team I was responsible for — and what I learned from it.
When I welcomed a team of 20 outstanding professionals on a Monday for a week of intense work, I didn’t imagine almost all the group would be infected with Covid-19 by Friday. Myself included. Here’s how it felt and what I learned about work in a new era.
By Denise Panisset
This story starts in a different era: it was March 9, 2020, a couple of days before Covid-19 was declared a pandemic by WHO and isolation measures kicked in across the globe. I was in Brooklyn, New York, standing at the head of a long table, surrounded by an impressive team of executives, creators and specialists in many fields. No one was wearing a mask. Seated next to me was the CEO of the company that had hired the whole group to solve a crucial challenge.
As an Experience Leader at Mesa, my job was to support teams like these so that they have the perfect conditions to work at their best. As always, the morning started with a speech by the two Experience Leaders who were sharing the responsibility, to set the expectations for what would happen until the Mesa ended, on Friday night.
The company is called Mesa because this is the Portuguese word for “table”–I told them. Which was the single most decisive technology in our work experiences: a platform around which bright people come together. “We expect total commitment from you,” I said, with a smile designed to hide the unreasonableness of the request. “We need you to be present: 100% present right here for five days. We know this is not an easy task. I will help you.”
Then I directed the group to a couple of dozen little cloth bags that hung from a wall, below a sign reading “leave me alone”. Each bag was marked with the name of one of the participants. They were supposed to leave their phones there to ensure they would only be connected to the problem they gathered there to solve.
Before the end of the speech, I included an extra line that wasn’t usually part of my script: “One last thing: Coronavirus. We want to have a healthy virus-free environment. That’s why everyone has an individual hand sanitizer and we will constantly be reminding you to wash your hands and to be safe. Let’s have a great week.”
At Mesa, we believe in presence. This is one of the main reasons why we fly people in to problem-solve with us. Being together has always been really important to us. For that morning in Brooklyn, for example, we had flown in professionals and decision-makers from different countries and five cities in the US.
My work at Mesa was centered around creating the perfect conditions for all the participants to be fully present to achieve a state of optimal performance. After hundreds of times doing this, we’ve developed a method. We know the triggers that lead to bonding and enthusiasm when it comes to work, to counter-acting frustration and to alleviating exhaustion. We’ve become pretty good at eliminating unnecessary distractions, so people can get to their best selves. So, I knew that that week, my job included making the insecurities around Covid-19 disappear.
I checked with the Center for Disease Control. They were not recommending gatherings of more than 100 people. With a quarter of that, we should be fine. CNN’s Town Hall special on Coronavirus, on Saturday night, had one general message: be smart, but not overly concerned.
“Be smart, but not overly concerned” was the general feeling in NY five days before WHO declared a pandemic.
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The most significant change we made to our general protocol was that we promised everyone they’d be greeted with an individual container of hand sanitizer. Then we almost didn’t honor this single promise, because we just couldn’t find hand sanitizer in New York City. In one drugstore, the attendant actually laughed at our request. It took an exploration around the city until my colleague found just the right amount of the precious thing in a store in Queens.
And we used a lot of sanitizers that week. We chased people and cleaned after them when they moved. On Wednesday, a traditionally tough day in every Mesa experience — this is when participants have to make a decision, and making a decision is always tough — WHO declared Covid-19 a pandemic because of its global spread.
The following day, one of the participants was discussing the project with a designer on a corner table. It was a typical March day in New York, chill outside, but pleasant inside. So when this person began to cover themselves with their scarf, the designer noticed that something was wrong. “Do you have a fever?” the designer asked.
Yes, the person did have a fever, and a sore throat as well. Ironically, this participant had been especially careful from the beginning, sanitizing everything they touched. As a measure to ensure the safety of all, we had that participant leave at once, which is something we never do at Mesa.
The following day, as participants began to worry and needed to contact people, we also made an exception to the no-phone rule. Many started changing their travel plans, in response to rumors about air travel restrictions.
But by then all we had was one participant with fairly common cold symptoms. Anyway, we decided to end the workweek earlier that Friday, with our mission accomplished.
One great thing about the way we work is that it’s very intense, but it ends. After the Friday of every Mesa, the mission is always accomplished, the prototype is built, the work is done, and there is nothing more to worry about. When I flew back to Los Angeles, both airports were full and most people on the flight didn’t wear a mask.
With little worry weighing on me, when I got home I greeted my husband with the slight precaution of avoiding a kiss. We enjoyed our Sunday together and Monday was my day-off, as is the Mesa tradition. That afternoon I felt something I had never experienced before: a kind of heartburn, but too high in the chest. I became worried but then blamed it on the amount of sparkling water I had been drinking.
During the Mesa, we’d created a Whatsapp group so that people could stay in touch. On Tuesday morning, when I woke up, I checked my Whatsapp and suddenly the pandemic became much more real. Another participant — not the one who had to leave earlier — got tested in their hometown, and the result was positive. “I am isolated since Saturday and would encourage you guys to do the same and to also get tested”, the participant wrote.
The first participant that had presented symptoms still had them but couldn’t get tested in New York. Immediately it all became clear: the event I was responsible for was a focus of the disease. And I was probably infected too.
By then, everyone was really anxious. I realized that this time, my duty as an Experience Leader hadn’t ended when we accomplished the mission, on Friday. I would now have to be an information hub for the group to ensure no one felt abandoned. I also couldn’t shake off the feeling that I was responsible for their recovery, even though every doctor I spoke to told me the only instruction was for people to stay at home, away from hospitals, unless they had considerable breathing problems.
We reached out to each person. Three people had a fever. Another ten had milder symptoms, including coughing, a sore throat and body aches. Ten people had no symptoms. I couldn’t believe this was happening before I even knew about it.
I created a spreadsheet with a line for each one of the 25 people that had been in the space with us (the 20 participants as well as the people who were working on catering services, cleaning and documentation) and started shading it: blue for no symptoms, yellow for mild symptoms, orange for worse symptoms, and red for the ones that were infected. In the following days the spreadsheet slowly gained warmer colors. On Friday, we got our second positive — by then, only eight lines of the spreadsheet were blue. My co-leader was sick too and couldn’t be at the frontline anymore, but luckily I had mild symptoms, so I was able to continue monitoring and informing.
I would text all the people every morning to know how they were doing and then send a report to the whole group by the end of the day. In the beginning, I thought these conversations were going to be formal. I wanted people to share what they knew, in order to make the whole group feel safer. But soon, most of these conversations became very personal:
I was a sick and scared person sharing information with sick and scared people.
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I was also doing research with doctors and the CDC to learn how to proceed. We soon understood that transparency was key in this moment of anxiety — people needed to know they were being taken care of, and information had to flow fast because if it didn’t, it would have also easily seamed like we were withholding it. At the same time, we learned that we needed to protect people’s privacy. With the stigma of the virus, it’s not up to us to decide what to tell people about individual cases. Our reports didn’t identify the sick people (and this text does not either).
Fortunately, my own symptoms weren’t too severe. My body did ache, and food lost its flavor, but I had no fever, my mind was working well and I wanted to be around those people (even though we were physically distant). There were moments I stopped and rested, but most of the time I felt like going ahead with my monitoring system — it helped me deal with my own anxiety about the situation.
Two of the participants had a very tough time. One of them, quite young, had a fever that wouldn’t drop below 40oC (104oF) for four days. The other one, who was part of the risk group, had trouble breathing for days and had an especially bad moment on Saturday, March 21, a week after we left New York. Mesa’s team was tormented by the possibility that someone could die because of an experience we had put together.
But they recovered. Everyone did. In the following week, I started coloring the boxes of the spreadsheet green, signifying the cases that were closed. On April 10, I made the last call: everyone was cleared. I believe twenty people had been infected, though only seven tested positive (the others never got tested). No one had to be hospitalized.
I am not an Experience Leader anymore, at least not for now. We reinvented ourselves and now we don’t have this role anymore. The day we understood we had been the site of a fatal dangerous infection, we knew we wouldn’t go back to work like we used to and anytime soon. We made a complete move online, aiming intent at creating the same level of presence, commitment and delivery invested into every Mesa prior. In this new product, the Experience Leader is replaced by two people: a Collective Intelligence Leader and a Presence Leader. The Collective Intelligence Leader is in charge of making information flow naturally as it would if we were together, and the Presence Leader ensures that everyone is truly there, even though we are all separated.
A Presence Leader takes part in the process, not only listening to what is said but by looking a lot at peoples’ eyes. When someone is having trouble holding their attention, I send a private message, with a smiley face and a suggestion for them to put their phone away. They know it’s my job, so they thank me — we all need help to hold our attention in these times.
Our routine has changed a lot, of course. But my favorite thing at the job — the thrill of solving problems — hasn’t changed a bit. Some aspects of the work even got better. Because we needed it, we developed a safe platform that transcribes everything that is said into a searchable database. Being able to access any single idea that is expressed in those five days had always been a dream of ours, but we would never have built it if we hadn’t been forced to change the way we work.
Some of our clients are now requesting that we get back to business as usual, organizing face-to-face experiences. Our answer has been “no” and will continue to be so, for as long as necessary. The risk of bringing people together for such intense interaction while there is no adequate treatment for the disease exists — and if it exists, it is just too big. We don’t want to be in the position of having someone dying because of an encounter we promoted, not even letting someone get sick.
Solving problems is our passion and we’ve learned there is no need to negotiate life in order to do it.
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It’s possible to achieve deep presence, real commitment and excellence — even with physical distance. Of course doing so will demand learning. I feel like this learning was crucial not only for myself and Mesa but for everyone, all over the world. Maybe as crucial as anything else, including the search for a vaccine.
