On March 13, the museum where I work made the announcement that it would be closing for the next two weeks due to COVID-19. This decision came after several weeks of mounting cases of the virus in the US. Commuting by public transit, I felt increasingly nervous during this time - apparently so too did many staff, as our leadership emailed the day prior to the announcement about our concerns expressed via the museum’s all staff email account. It became much more clear how real the situation was when word came that week of the Metropolitan Museum of Art opting to shutter temporarily. It felt like a matter of time before our museum did the same.
That Friday, we arrived at work with notice from our division head that we should begin creating a contingency plan for our department, just in case, that would cover: what equipment or resources we would need access to in order to work remotely; what work would need to be put on hold; and what projects we could turn our attention to while out of the office. Since our department was without a department head, the other manager and I turned our attention to building out a plan with our team. While there was no official word yet that the museum would be closing, it seemed best to prepare as if that were the case. Staff began gathering files onto external harddrives, requesting access for museum-owned laptops in order to get VPN access, and tending to any tasks they could only do while on site. Word finally came late in the afternoon that the museum would indeed be closing for two weeks.
Given the nature of our department’s work - photographing and managing the images that document the collections, exhibitions, people, and daily events at the museum - we knew that it would be difficult, if not impossible to translate much of this to remote working. The other manager and I had developed a list of items we could accomplish, namely working on documentation for various aspects of our work and boosting professional development. These two areas had repeatedly fallen by the wayside as a steady stream of high priority projects and a shrinking department kept the entire team busy. We broke these categories down with subtasks and proceeded to prioritize each to create a general plan.
We also started to generate some “norms” for communication and check-ins. Given the highly collaborative nature of much of our department’s work, we knew it would be a substantial adjustment needing to proactively reach out to communicate with colleagues. We opted to set a standard for daily “stand-up” meetings at the start, to allow a forum for folks to connect, and to help provide guidance on what to do or troubleshooting on technology issues. As a second part of these meetings, we also tagged on a reading and discussion group. These would be focused around an article, white paper, video, or some other media that related in some way to our work. One staff member would be the leader and facilitate the discussion, all other staff would participate in the conversation. This responsibility would rotate among all staff on the team.
The following Monday, we all began working remotely, most of us for the first time ever while employed at the museum. Our daily meetings took up an hour to two hours daily in the first couple of weeks. Folks started easing into the documentation work our department had long put off. As we got the news from our leadership that the shutdown would continue for at least the next month, we spread our meetings out and reduced the frequency of our reading and discussion groups. Our stand-up meetings took on a concrete agenda, with prompts for each staff member to respond to: what have you been working on, what are you planning on working on, and what’s been keeping you busy outside of work? The team then dove into any questions we might want to get clarity on from leadership, specific technology issues we were facing, and resources we could share with one another. We also gained some breathing room around the projects we wanted to focus on - instead of needing to get this work done in two short weeks, we had much more time to reflect, write, and revise.
Views from my home office.
As the weeks turned into months, we have continued to iterate on how we gather as a team, how often we do this, and the time we meet. We have also embraced flexibility as it relates to working on documentation. We have moved deadlines, shifted responsibilities, and allowed other unanticipated work to take the center stage when necessary. It has been challenging to juggle all this, especially in a completely new and largely unplanned for context. But it has been encouraging to see our department come together in ways we never previously had, to see staff more comfortable with expressing their opinions and asking for adjustments. It feels like we have all grown from this experience, difficult though it has been.