Teresa Hutson
Corporate Vice President, Technology and Corporate Responsibility, Microsoft
Powering up a Pandemic Playbook
Teresa Hutson, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of technology and corporate responsibility, was at the company’s headquarters in Redland, Washington when the first cases of COVID-19 were announced.
As one of the largest employers in the first state to be hit with the virus – and as a multinational company with access to local, national, and global data – she knew Microsoft was positioned to both serve as a model and provide critical information to others.
“I remember being in a meeting with the senior leadership – it was an in-person meeting. We said, okay, we’re going to close down. That put Microsoft in a position where people were watching to see what we did – from creating playbooks for how far apart you put your desks to how you clean your desks to what are the protocols around various aspects of keeping a business running.”
There were no Playbooks
Still, like most companies in America and around the world, Microsoft didn’t have a protocol designed for managing a pandemic response in the workplace.
“There weren’t practical playbooks on how to address an airborne illness in a workplace, particularly when you’ve moved to lots of open space offices. It was really hard to know what to do when we didn’t know what was scary. Everything was scary!”
“Even planning the return to the office, we had to decide, what are the things we need to do? Is it the air we need to worry about? Is it surface space we need to worry about? What do we do about coffee cups? Can you continue to serve food? Do you have to have box lunches if people are coming into the office?”
“Every single question became very tactical. Our playbook included practical small details that we had no answers to, and it gave me a really good appreciation for the kinds of questions that folks in our real estate and facilities team had to think through. It was really hard with imperfect or no information. Do we require vaccine attestation? How do you do that in a space where you don’t have a controlled entrance?”
Like many other national and state leaders, Microsoft turned to management consultants for help—in their case, Boston Consulting Group.
“Using management consultants to help with playbooks turns out to be not a terrible thing to do. That also gave us the idea of putting people in spaces where they can excel. It is so important to get really specific at the beginning and ask for people to bring to bear what they do best. For example, through the Challenge Seattle coalition, Starbucks helped with the logistics of people moving. We also had folks who were experts at marketing to help us think about how you could market a vaccine campaign, alongside hospital staff who were helping us think about how to set things up from a medical perspective.”
The Microsoft team quickly expanded outreach to the community and links with state-level decision-makers, sharing its newly developed protocols and expertise with other organizations, including schools.
“The other place that the need for practical details and playbooks came up was with schools. Even if we could get people back to work, the schools weren’t open. So, we brought the school systems in, and this was a place where our scale helped us help the community. For example, you have to have a core and common way to organize buildings, with workplace and human resources policies. We started to collect the questions.”
“We needed to do it for ourselves, and there was no reason not to share it with other people. We knew it wouldn’t apply to every single workplace; for example, if you can work completely remotely, you don’t necessarily need to do this. It’s not going to apply to the grocery store. But if you have an office space like ours, this might be useful to you.”
“The superintendent of schools joined us regularly. The governor’s office joined us regularly. We did a lot with data dashboards, for example to help the schools track cases to help them make decisions about when to open or not. Part of it was about listening to what they were most worried about, but also the superintendent of schools got to hear from a lot of business leaders that they wanted the schools back open because their employees couldn’t work while their kids were running around and climbing on their heads…I think everybody has those memories of being on calls with children climbing over other parents.”
In-House Emergency Management
As a large company, Microsoft was able to use pre-existing emergency management systems to run its internal pandemic response.
“We have a crisis response management team at Microsoft. They have historically been in place to deal with issues like disasters, weather disasters, or with losing power at a data center. They were in place and recognized COVID-19 as a crisis; they served as a centralized way of addressing the questions that were coming up, and then they convened internal working level teams to create proposals around those questions. That allowed us to make a super-fast decision about sending people home.”
I think the thing that was unusual is that the crisis response management team stayed in play. The team included three very senior executives – the Senior Leadership Team – from across finance, legal, and human resources. That helped with fast decision-making. We had Senior Leadership Team calls…almost weekly to go through the questions that were coming up. How do we deal with the fact that some people are against getting a vaccine? We have extra PPE – can we use shuttles that are sitting idle in order to take the personal protective equipment to Eastern Washington, which has much less access to the community than we have here in the Puget Sound?
Flashpoint: Masking
Many businesses found themselves in the middle of controversies around masking and vaccine mandates. Microsoft tried to develop pragmatic approaches that would maximize employee safety and garner broad consensus.
There was internal discord around masking – on both sides of the issue. Some people had the reaction: How dare you ask me to wear a mask? And others had the reaction: How dare you not wear a mask and be sensitive to my particular situation?…But, largely because we didn’t make people go back to work, we were able to avoid some of the conflict.
“We said that we require masks and, if this is creating conflict for you in any way, then it’s okay to keep working from home. If somebody said, “I will not work with people unless they’re wearing a mask,” we’d say, okay, stay home. If somebody said, “I don’t want to wear a mask,” we’d say, okay, stay home.”
A Powerful Sense of Community
It wasn’t easy for large businesses to plug into pandemic response, a lesson learned following the 2014 Ebola epidemic. Washington’s business coalition, Challenge Seattle, stepped in to create a coordinated command and control platform that enabled companies like Microsoft to help locally, even as they were stretching to create internal practices for their multinational staff and clientele.
One of the powerful things that former Washington state Governor [Christine] Gregoire did was to start convening the Challenge Seattle companies every day at noon. There was a deep partnership with the state government, including the governor’s chief of staff regularly attending. Governor Gregoire would say, okay, “We need some more PPE. Who has access to PPE?” Or, “We need more information from the medical folks,” and she would pull in the University of Washington to give us updates. Or, “We need to set up some vaccine clinics. How do we do that? Who has space? Who has the capability to help us understand how people move through space?” We recognized Starbucks knew how to move people through space, and that this would be a useful thing when setting up vaccine clinics.
“Microsoft offered data. We offered the expertise of our Crisis Response Center. It was the most powerful sense of community I’ve ever had. The thing that was the light for me was…as I felt completely lonely and sad and isolated and hopeless…the community gave me hope.
“We set up a vaccine site, in addition to the one we set up on our campus, that was open to the public with the capacity to vaccinate 20,000 people a day. We set up at one of the stadiums. When you checked in, you were on the top floor, and I remember standing up there, being with people for the first time.”
“I think it was March of 2021 and it finally felt like there would be an end to this when you looked down at the scope and scale of the vaccine operation. This was people working together, not something distant and far away. It was people working together to solve a common problem, and that was the first thing that gave me hope during the darkest of the days. I just stood up there and cried.”
Admitting what we don’t know
Data and transparency were critical, as was choosing the right, trusted messenger for each audience.
“I think many institutions have undermined their ability to be trusted speakers. When we thought about this in the context of how to encourage people to get vaccines, we thought about it very locally. Who are the trusted speakers locally? Do we get the sports teams, because Seattle’s a huge sports town? Do we get the sports teams when you don’t have trusted speakers, and you don’t have trusted institutions? It’s a very hard problem to solve.”
“I think one of the biggest mistakes was not acknowledging that we didn’t know stuff. I think we made such a mistake with masks that really just undermined credibility from the get-go. We didn’t say at the beginning that we don’t have enough masks, so please save them. We said, you don’t need to wear a mask, and from then on people stopped trusting public health. This is not specific to pandemic responses; it is specific to basically everything related to democracy.”