Week 1

This week the CBC sent most of its employees who could reasonably work remotely home. It came fairly suddenly on Monday shortly after the federal government announced it’s formal recommendation, formalizing something that was starting to happen organically in various parts of the organization late last week.

The Data Centres team routinely is required to connect to systems remotely to deal with support requests and other operational needs off hours, so for us this is a lot less disruptive than it might be for a journalist or somebody whose primary job function requires a lot of face-to-face meetings. It’s still a strange experience. I’ve had jobs in the past where I often chose to work from home, but since I’ve been a member of the Data Centres team, I’ve generally only been working remotely when I’ve been sick or had an appointment or delivery that I needed to be at home for. This is a big adjustment. Not only is it less than ideal to not have my primary workstation setup, I’ve also been thrust into coordinating team meetings and other collaborative activities via telework tools that we don’t have a lot of experience with as a team, and with almost no warning.

The positive side of things is that everybody’s been pretty helpful and seems to be doing their best to adjust to the new circumstances, under the conditions there’s not much more I could ask for in this respect. We’re all in this together, and it could be a long haul depending on how things go and how seriously Canadians decide to take our guidance with respect to social distancing — a term we didn’t know a few weeks ago.

I’m going to make an effort to log the experience here. Even if this has been a very busy week that has left little time to dwell on the situation, I’m sure that once things settle in I’m going to have a lot of time to think about things, so this is as good an outlet as any. Might as well make lemonade out of this and try to do some non-work related writing, something that I’ve been doing much less of in the past several years.

It’s my birthday tomorrow, this is likely one that I won’t forget!

Social Distancing HOWTO

Toronto is now is an early stage of a pretty strange situation that none of us have probably ever faced before. I’ve been working from home for the past two days now and I’ve been trying to figure out just what the rules are.

The good news is that it turns out that not only are you allowed to go outdoors, at least for the time being, the official medical advice is to do so for your own health. Just try to avoid close contact with other people. So with that in mind I thought I’d share this useful guide that the City of Toronto has put together for people trying to navigate the current confusion.

COVID-19: Practicing Social Distancing

COVID-19 Information and Resources

A few people who know I like to read have asked me questions related to the current coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19), but I’m just some dude on the Internet and I’m not qualified to give any kind of advice. Here are some of the reputable online information sources I’m aware of on the topic.

If you believe you may have come in contact with the 2019 novel coronavirus and are feeling ill, the Ontario Ministry of Health has published an online self-assessment page to help you determine what to do while reducing the stress on the health care system.

I will update this page from time to time if I come across additional useful information.

Most recently updated on March 18, 2020.

Public Health Agency of Canada

Canadian Regional Information

International Public Health Agencies

Leadership

I was listening to Neal Katyal talk about the law and ethics as it relates to governmental leadership and something he said helped me clarify my own thoughts on leadership. I’m generally somewhat averse to the culture of management in North America for a range of reasons, but I’ve never been able to articulate it, except in rants about bad managers and the like.

His point (paraphrased and layered with my own opinion) was this: leadership is a position of trust and not a position of personal gain; when your actions as a leader become about what is in your own personal best interest and not about what is in the best interest of the group you lead or the organization you are part of, then you need to step down.

You should see your reward for being a good leader as the success of your organization and your burnished reputation as a leader. This might (and perhaps should) lead to things like promotions or pay increases, but those should not be your primary goals.