How The Works is Keeping up with COVID-19

We live in a world with faster, broader and better access to information than ever before in human history. One of the unforeseen consequences of what should be an unalloyed good is the challenge caused by a lack of curation. The internet doesn’t differentiate, and it provides an excellent platform for misinformation, misinterpretation, uninformed or hasty speculation and a host of underqualified “experts” speaking out of their depth. There’s a lot of dodgy detours and inadequate signage along the information superhighway, and now is one of those times when you need a good map – facts from people and institutions you can depend upon.

So, at The Works, every morning, two members of our senior team do a quick but comprehensive review of the latest information and updates from a range of sources, including the World Health Organization, Public Health Canada, Public Health Ontario and Toronto Public Health. We also look at trusted news providers like the CBC and the Globe and Mail.

After the review, members of our C19 Action Team (usually it’s just Eric and Lorie, but “C19 Action Team” sounds a lot cooler) touch base to look at how the latest news could impact our people and our company. When there’s news everyone should know, we send out a company-wide email that includes some thoughts about how it may affect the way we’re working. Even when there aren’t major developments to communicate, we still hold weekly all-staff check-ins. We talk about how the ongoing change is affecting our people and impacting our processes, and then we troubleshoot our new reality on the fly. (Go, C19 Action Team!)

One of the most rewarding parts of the daily search is finding genuinely helpful resources, like the Province of Ontario’s daily scan of news and updates from select public health organizations and the World Health Organization’s informative (and actually kind of fun) COVID-19 Myth Busters page.

The way we see it, there are two clear benefits to our daily COVID deep dive. It allows us to keep in touch with developments in a rapidly evolving world, which has assisted us in making some tough decisions. And it also provides a useful service for our colleagues. They know that people they can trust have “got it covered”: monitoring relevant sources, aggregating vital information and doing their best to share what impacts our business and our team.