Take care of yourselves TB Crew

[ejvc]

Hoping the corona virus skips you all. Please take care and wishing you the best.

[Rei]

Take care of yourselves TB Crew

Take care of yourselves TB fellow bihnions too

be careful and don't let the virus paranoia gets you

[TKS]

Yes..take care dear TB crew...stay safe..

[KatrinkaWinkle]

I've been thinking of all of you and your families as well.

[GrussGott]

Not sure if this helps, but this thread, including the contributors, is helpful to me to see what the WA progression is and where it's coming from (i.e., many vectors or fewer)

https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1235676811356332032

[Darcy]

Thank you, everyone, for thinking of us. You guys and your friends and family are in our thoughts too.

We are grateful that we are not directly impacted and at the same time our thoughts our with our community, our city, this country and the world; we are doing everything we can think of to do our part to stay healthy.

Our focus in the past two weeks has been on various preventative measures:

• Multiple hand washing demonstrations (20 seconds! Hum Happy Birthday twice! Scrub thoroughly all over the hands!)
• Additional precautions (pressing buttons with knuckles, not touching our faces, etc.) + additional guidance from the CDC, translated into each of the languages we speak.
• Purchase of additional IQ Air filtration units.
• Modifications made to our doors so they can be opened with feet, or at least without needing to use hands.
• Lots of hand sanitizer everywhere for all of us to use.
• We converted our bathroom and kitchen faucets to be the touchless variety.
• Multiple daily disinfecting wipe-downs of commonly touched surfaces.
• Next week, we hope our new additional hand washing sink/station will be installed.

And so on...

Last Friday, we issued three additional days of PTO to each employee, and any employee who wants to stay home for any reason can. Our policy is that anyone who feels even the slightest bit ill must stay home.

Recommendations and guidelines are evolving; we are following King County (Seattle) recommendations, as well as those of the CDC, and following the news of course. We're thinking about this a lot: we want to be prepared and we want to do our part. It's important for us to take responsibility, to do what we can, to try our best to think "If I imagine it's next week, what do I wish I would have thought of this week?" and when we need to take a break, we read the Forums... reading about packing bags, making clever zipper pulls, talking about boots and nicely made stuff and answering questions, that's the fun stuff. Thanks for being here and being this community.

Editing to add, I really appreciated this:

"Even if you’re not in a vulnerable group, following all of these guidelines, known as non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), helps to protect those who are. According to Baseman, evidence from prior outbreaks suggests that “any one community-level mitigation strategy can’t work 100% by itself, but … the more layers of those NPIs that you institute, the more likely you are to have a successful community mitigation response.”

She likens the strategy to a stack of Swiss cheese slices. “If you have an individual piece of Swiss cheese it has holes in it,” she said, “but if you have a stack of Swiss cheese pieces on top of each other, then you’ve got a pretty good barrier.”

When people take precautions to limit their own exposure to COVID-19, she said, “they’re protecting everybody else that they may be exposed to later, in addition to themselves.” - Katie Ross of Seattle's Public Health, excerpted from this Seattle Times article

[Denises]

It's great that you are being proactive with multiple preventative measures. It all helps keep people safe. With the hand-washing, if people get bored with singing Happy Birthday, or they belong to a religious group that doesn't mark birthdays, there are other songs. The ABC (sung twice), God Save the Queen, and a whole lot of other suggestions here:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8069509/Twitter-user-devises-list-new-coronavirus-hand-washing-songs.html

Or you can play the part of Lady Macbeth where she says "Out damned spot..."

[GrussGott]

With the hand-washing, if people get bored with singing Happy Birthday...

This one is pretty nerdy and only for fans of Dune, but I found it amusing ...:

[Rocks]

"Our policy is that anyone who feels even the slightest bit ill must stay home. "

That humane policy makes me appreciate your business even more! I work in theater, where the adage "the show must go on" takes a great toll on every body. Today, one performed with the flu (actual flu, not just a cold), the stage manager called the show with a cold, and one actor performed with strep throat.

[Darcy]

"Our policy is that anyone who feels even the slightest bit ill must stay home. "

That humane policy makes me appreciate your business even more! I work in theater, where the adage "the show must go on" takes a great toll on every body. Today, one performed with the flu (actual flu, not just a cold), the stage manager called the show with a cold, and one actor performed with strep throat.

Man, that's rough! This is one of the reasons we try to cross-train whenever it makes sense: if one of us is sick even with just regular stuff, goes on vacation, needs to help a family member, etc. another or several of us can step in to share their work. We're lucky/perhaps unusual in that way, though, that it makes sense/we're able to cross-train for so many positions and I think it's kind of built-in to small businesses to a degree, esp. when you start out small and doing so many things yourself.

[GrussGott]

Man, that's rough! This is one of the reasons we try to cross-train whenever it makes sense: if one of us is sick even with just regular stuff, goes on vacation, needs to help a family member, etc. another or several of us can step in to share their work. We're lucky/perhaps unusual in that way, though, that it makes sense/we're able to cross-train for so many positions and I think it's kind of built-in to small businesses to a degree, esp. when you start out small and doing so many things yourself.

That's awesome! And should be the standard ...

FWIW, I can say in France, at Airbus, at least in the 2000s they did this and it worked great. They had people part-time shadowing their key folks who were client facing and support - that way if the key person took their summer holiday, were sick, etc, the shadow would step in and there was zero disruption. I really appreciated that.

So, based on that, I'd say it can work at big companies too!

[Darcy]

That's awesome! And should be the standard ...

FWIW, I can say in France, at Airbus, at least in the 2000s they did this and it worked great. They had people part-time shadowing their key folks who were client facing and support - that way if the key person took their summer holiday, were sick, etc, the shadow would step in and there was zero disruption. I really appreciated that.

So, based on that, I'd say it can work at big companies too!

Interesting and awesome in so many ways: the folks out sick/on holiday can rest assured their work will be done well and thus rest easier or have more fun, the people stepping into their roles are better equipped to do so which allows them to fully contribute and make a difference, and the customer would (ideally) never guess any of that's been happening because the service is the same caliber as usual.

Something else that's helped us: documentation. Part of our documentation standard is to test the documentation we've authored by asking first for the feedback of someone who knows the procedure/task and make any necessary changes based on that, and then to ask someone who doesn't know the procedure/task to try to complete it using only the documentation. There's three parts to our documentation requirements: checklist, detailed instructions, and philosophy (why we're doing the thing and why it's important, for context). We're currently working on defining and documenting our own take and experience around "continual improvement". OK, bags and materials aren't the only things we get really into

[GrussGott]

Something else that's helped us: documentation.

As a former engineer, I can say with absolute sincerity, what's "documentation"??

[kathryn]

Something else that's helped us: documentation. Part of our documentation standard is to test the documentation we've authored by asking first for the feedback of someone who knows the procedure/task and make any necessary changes based on that, and then to ask someone who doesn't know the procedure/task to try to complete it using only the documentation. There's three parts to our documentation requirements: checklist, detailed instructions, and philosophy (why we're doing the thing and why it's important, for context). We're currently working on defining and documenting our own take and experience around "continual improvement". OK, bags and materials aren't the only things we get really into

I'm shamelessly stealing some of this for my team's documentation process at work--thanks!

[Darcy]

I'm shamelessly stealing some of this for my team's documentation process at work--thanks!

PM me and if you'd like I can send you our documentation on documentation

And if your team does try some it out, let us know how it works or doesn't, or how you tweaked it. Outside perspective/ideas can help us make our procedures and systems more robust.