PowerDMS: REFLECTIONS ON OUR PANDEMIC RESPONSE
Reflections on Our Pandemic Response And how we are preparing for whatever’s to come. By: Heather Sorensen, Director of Human Resources at PowerDMS
Leading through COVID-19 has been one of the most difficult challenges in my 20-year career as an HR professional. As an essential service for over 3,000 public safety agencies, we have spent a lot of time and resources as a company to ensure our software, IT infrastructure, and internal tools are all secure, cloudbased, and have fail-safes in place. As an Orlando, Florida-based company, we already had crisis plans for hurricanes and 100% remote work capabilities. In some ways, we had been preparing for a crisis for years, but we never imagined the need for a pandemic plan. The good news was, much of our existing crisis planning served as the framework for our COVID-19 response, and my hope is that yours will too.
PA CHIEFS OF POLICE ASSOCIATION
As a friend and family member of first responders, I have a glimpse into the pressures and challenges you face daily serving our communities. I am grateful for your work and hope these reflections and tips on how PowerDMS responded to the pandemic will be of service to you and your agency.
Reflection #1 In the presence of silence, employees will form their own narrative. At PowerDMS, we use an internal messaging system called Slack for both one-on-one and non-policy and procedure-related communication. Once COVID-19 hit, we realized our employees were using Slack exponentially more for one-on-one conversations than before, and we had no visibility into what they were saying.
As a leadership team, the last thing we wanted was for misinformation to spread or for our employees to start forming narratives about what was happening. We knew we had to take control of the conversation in a way that was visible and transparent to everyone. The first thing we did was create a cadence of communication and posted everything in our own PowerDMS site for our employees to attest to. Because information was changing so quickly, we made sure we only spoke about what we did know and were open and honest about the things we didn't. As leaders, our tendency is not to talk until we know all the facts, but with something as impactful and fast-moving as COVID-19, silence was more dangerous. Being honest about what we didn't know meant our employees didn't need to go out and find answers, but they would receive them as soon as we had them.
Reflection #2 Where and how we communicated mattered. As a cloud-based company, we have many tools at our disposal to communicate with our staff, including email, Slack, and PowerDMS. While email and Slack are great communication tools, they weren't the right tool for critical pandemic related communications. We knew we needed visibility into whether or not our employees were reading what we disseminated. We also wanted a one-stop-shop for all things COVID-19, so there were no questions about where to find or reference information. While we have always used PowerDMS for policy updates and dissemination, we quickly realized we
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