On how Highlights for Children is operating during this pandemic: All things considered, we’re operating pretty well. We have great leadership from our governor here in Ohio. We jumped on the idea that we had to be fully remote pretty early in the process. We trusted our teams and empowered our IT and leaders to get us working remotely. I was just amazed at how fast they did it. After the initial adrenaline of the change, we’re now in the stage of trying to figure out how to get used to it, be productive and be well-balanced in this virtual office environment. I’m impressed with our team and happy that we’re adapting as well as we can. On whether the work-fromhome move was easy or hard for everyone: I would say that we were lucky and it varied by function. We made the decision on a Wednesday morning that we should do a dry run of work from home on Friday, but by Thursday night we decided we would just go fully to work-from-home. So, it took us about maybe 72 hours due to some of the tougher positions. And that
Samir Husni: With everything that’s going on today, how is Highlights for Children operating during this pandemic? Kent Johnson: All things considered, we’re operating pretty well. We have great leadership from our governor here in Ohio. We jumped on the idea that we had to be fully remote pretty early in the process. We trusted our teams and empowered our IT and leaders to get us working remotely. I was just amazed at how fast they did it. After the initial adrenaline of the change, we’re now in the stage of trying to figure out how to get used to it, be productive and be wellbalanced in this virtual office environment. I’m impressed with our team and happy that we’re adapting as well as we can. Samir Husni: Was the work-from-home move easy or hard for everyone? Kent Johnson: I would say that we were lucky and it varied by function. We made the decision on a Wednesday morning that we should do a dry run of work from home on Friday, but by Thursday night we decided we would just go fully to work-from-home. So, it took us about maybe 72 hours due to some of the tougher positions. And that includes getting customer service, our contact centers, getting those people who deal with customers to be able to work from home too. So, there was a technology piece to that as well. Samir Husni: With the pandemic, are you considering changing any frequencies or any of your publishing schedules or is everything status quo for now? Kent Johnson: For our magazine business, we’re keeping our print publishing schedule the same as always. And I will say, there was a technology task to get our editorial for our magazine product development to work remotely, because the designers work with such big files and important technology systems. So, that was also a transition that I’m happy to say we’re on the other side of.
128 | samir “mr. magazinetm” husni