Webinar Recap: Lessons Learned Through Reopening | The Team Experience

October 26 (Replay at end of page) 

Last week, we were delighted to host the second installment of our newest four-part webinar series, “ABA Live! Lessons Learned Through Reopening,” where we touch upon the most pressing issues facing arts leaders in this time of reopening. 

Our most recent webinar focused on the issues surrounding the team experience as organizations return to both their venues and their offices. The first episode hosted last month focused on the audience experience — a full recap of that meeting can be found here. 

For our second webinar of the series, we were honored to have two arts leaders join us to discuss their experiences bringing back staff members after months of closure. Below is a summary of our panelists’ advice and experiences through this reopening process.

Where are you in your organization’s reopening journey as relates to the returning of your team? 

To start the webinar, we asked each panelist to share details about their return to office, and what restrictions and processes they have implemented to welcome their staff back in a safe and progressive manner. 

Kicking us off was Susie Medak, Managing Director of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, who set the stage for us by first sharing stark figures of staff departures last year, demonstrating the scope of the challenges ahead as her team returns to work. 

Following their closure in March 2020, Berkeley Rep had to lay off 120 members of its team — but managed to keep 30-31 on staff. Now one year later, much of the tech team has returned to work, initially on outside projects. Only last week, the team were able to hold rehearsals for the first time for productions opening in February 2022. 

Berkeley Rep’s administrative and artistic teams have not yet returned on-site, remaining online for now. In fact, many among them have expressed resistance to returning, which spurs questions about what the next couple of months will look like — and what and where work will happen in the long-term. These staffing uncertainties are further compounded by the organization’s recognition of the need to rebuild the team’s morale and become once again a unified company, especially after the damage inflicted on furloughed staff. 

Following this very honest portrayal of the situation at Berkeley Rep, Perryn Leech, General Director of the Canadian Opera Company, compared his time in his current role in Toronto, Canada, with his earlier pandemic experience in Texas as the Managing Director of Houston Grand Opera — two locations where feelings and reactions to the pandemic have been vastly different. 

He explained that Canada has been much slower and more conservative with their reopening policies until very recently, going from a projected 50% capacity reopening in the New Year to an earlier opening allowing at full capacity. This about-face has completely changed their opening plans. 

Originally, anticipating their opening for the New Year, Leech’s team completed an intense set of filming over a seven-week period, providing enough digital content to get the company through December and January 2022. With the recent change to government mandates, however, the company is now working towards their reopening and the challenges this will bring — notably, the challenge of checking double vaccine status in the harsh Canadian winters. 

In both cases, our guests cited the extreme delicacy needed to manage the reopening and return of staff, ensuring compliance with new mandates and ensuring emotional well-being for all. The situation for the arts is all the more complicated by regional differences, as audience and staff feelings vary so strongly about the pandemic restrictions, vaccine mandates, and reopening venues. 

Approaching the return in a depersonalized way by going through each individual position to determine each one’s ability for flexible or hybrid work has ensured as smooth a return as possible. Both organizations have had to work on individualized accommodations while also ensuring consistency and fairness throughout.  

What were the policies for reopening and returning to work generally while also dealing with case-by-case resistances?  

As arts organizations prepared for their reopening, managing the changing government mandates with their own organizational rules and priorities became critical to welcoming staff back. 

Medak mentioned how her leadership team established their own internal regulations even before official mandates were released, requiring double vaccines for in-person returns. This mandate was originally resisted by several staff members, a majority of whom eventually changed their minds and received the vaccines. 

With the initial return of the tech team, Berkeley Rep required twice-weekly tests, mandatory masking, and social distancing at all times while on the premises. They also established their own check-in and sign-out system to support contact tracing in the event of a breakthrough.  

While working at Houston Grand Opera, Leech had a safety advisory group that received support in their work by partners from their local healthcare system, who gave the company a bulk discount to do weekly PCR testing for all staff. Testing was a firm non-negotiable for returning to work, along with established work team bubbles. 

In Canada, Perryn has much clearer mandates from the governments of both Toronto and Ontario, with specific guidelines for the return. In the earlier stages of the pandemic, however, the government allowed special rules and permits for only the film industry to return to work, excluding other arts organizations. 

Leech and his team therefore managed to lobby to be recognized as a film company producing opera to get back to work. Under this title they were able to fall under the government’s scheme to do quick tests free of charge for people working in the film industry. COC shares all testing reports with local health authorities for tracking and data collection purposes. They were also able to train members of their staff to deliver rapid tests for on-site testing as needed. 

Both in Berkeley and Toronto, working with local governments and healthcare officials was critical to ensuring a possible reopening. In the case of Berkeley, one of the few cities in the country with their own health department, working with the health director to explain the particularities of the arts sector required careful navigation — especially explaining the upfront months of work needed to reopen a show. In Toronto, collaborating with the Minister of Culture ensured their reopening with protocols in place for essential tech workers. Regulations for additional administrative office work have yet to be confirmed.   

Thinking further about these workplace transitions, what were the best methods of communication of these changes to your team? And what is morale like in this time of transition and returning? 

According to Susie, the morale is tense, as many of the staff returning from furlough have been dealing with legitimate feelings of abandonment. There exists a dissonance between the leadership’s intentions and the actual lived experiences of staff, which further emphasizes the need to find a careful way to rebuild common purpose. 

At the onset of the pandemic, the decisions to lay off or furlough staff were made with the mere survival of the organization in question, due to the firm belief that the company may not be able to pay people for long. Letting people go at first allowed the organization to offer staff members a lump sum of money as well as generous payoffs, which at the time were seen as a kindness, but in reality were experienced as a ravage. 

In the case of furloughed staff, they did not receive the same generous payouts, but were able to remain with their families on the organization’s healthcare. This seemed like another priority and important gesture to offer during a global pandemic. Furloughed staff had their email accounts deactivated to limit any compromising communication that might put their unemployment status in question. Again, something that was meant as a safeguard for their access to state benefits was experienced as a real abandonment by the staff and is a regret in hindsight from the leadership. 

At the same time that many of the staff were being furloughed, the organization as a whole was also going through a racial and cultural reckoning.  Among the staff still left, there was a sense of guilt and survivors’ trauma that was met with increased job requirements and stress. Finally, the turmoil and anger from George Floyd’s murder created further tension and division within the organization.

As an organization, Berkley Rep’s leadership has acknowledged the incredibly precarious state of morale as they bring back staff who all had profoundly different experiences of the pandemic. They are now in the challenging process of determining how best to bridge that gap.

For Leech, the situation was yet again very different between Texas and Toronto. HGO had managed to maintain most people on a part-time furlough, with a 20% reduction in salary and reduced hours. This allowed the organization to maintain contact with these staff members, thereby avoiding the feeling of complete abandonment. 

In Canada there was a government scheme that helped cover 80% of payroll, so there was luckily no need to do massive layoffs or furloughs as in the United States. Yet regardless, people had to reckon with the pivot of their jobs both in terms of what they were doing and how. The shift to working at-home meant people no longer had the same support system in terms of colleagues or tech help, which in and of itself created more work stress for everyone. 

Additionally, with the intense seven-week buildup of digital content at COC, Leech’s staff went through the rollercoaster of having steady work pre-pandemic, to 18 months of no work, then back on for 7-weeks — a journey that has created burn-out among his team. Transitioning back to work is certainly not without its costs, which also need to be considered and evaluated. 

Leech also cautioned against forgetting how different people live in different conditions. For some, working from home was a benefit — for instance, getting to avoid commuting. For others, however, living in a small single room studio was experienced as a hardship with immense mental tolls. Being aware of these divergent experiences is critical in this transition period. 

Overall, the longtail of covid will be the pressure it has put people under, and the lack of friends, infrastructure, and colleagues that people had to go through. Even as things start to reopen the bottom line is that many people are still very unhappy, and we are all dealing with people who have pent up anger and tiredness that is surfacing across all sectors and jobs. 

How did you facilitate conversations around those experiences for reopening? What did you put in place, what kind of processes at the organizational level did you implement to help people with the feeling of burn out? 

For Leech, open and transparent communication has been key to ensuring his team feels fairly and consistently treated. In addition to regular communications via zoom or in person, COC has established a working group made up of staff from all departments working collaboratively on strategies to ensure people feel comfortable to come back to work. Mental health is also a huge concern and priority, and luckily in Canada they have strong health infrastructure to support people on an individual level. 

Leech also spoke more generally about the inability to please everyone during these exceptionally difficult times. As a leader he has always embraced a “heart-on-your-sleeve” approach, where everyone is privy to his thought process and decision making. Being as clear and honest has enabled Leech to avoid any feeling of personal treatment, focusing always on the greater good in a fair and consistent manner for all staff.   

Berkeley Rep has also set up multiple staff committees, each tasked with different aspects of the safe return of the team. Additionally, throughout the pandemic the theatre’s leadership increased opportunities for connection over zoom, like all-staff meetings every 2 weeks, and daily leadership team meetings (since replaced by weekly leadership meetings). These meetings were more about emotional support and connection, as well as opportunities of learning, rather than being strictly about work output. 

Also, in response to the feelings of abandonment, and the criticism thereof, Medak sent a personalized letter acknowledging the pain and hurt of her furloughed staff. In this letter she promised to do better by them, without trying to explain away what had happened and how they felt. The honesty of her letter was well received and demonstrated the importance of authenticity and emotional vulnerability at this time. 

Indeed, as teams come back with varying experiences, concerns, and feelings towards their organizations, Medak firmly believes in the importance of communication to re-establishing broken trust through expanded transparency. 

What was the most critical piece of feedback you have received during this time? How did you respond?

In addition to the criticism of abandonment from her furloughed staff and her personalized letter in response, Medak also expressed the difficulty of being the targeted personification of issues people were angry about — especially in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder.  Indeed, having been at Berkeley Rep for 32 years, she was personally associated with the old institutional culture that needed sharp changing, and she felt that for the first time in her career that she had a target on her back. 

Medak knew that as a leader of the organization, being the target of this anger that runs deep on a personal, national, and institutional level was not unsurprising — nor was it something she could ignore. Indeed, people needed her to expose herself in a way to help bridge the divisions in order to rebuild on common ground.  It is critical for leaders today to recognize that the staff we are working with today is very different from the staff of two-years ago, both in terms of generation and in terms of lived experiences. This is ever more important as we work to rebuild our communities after so much pain and anger. 

Looking forward, did you find any new best practices that will help you as you continue to work with your teams during these tough and complicated times? 

Leech shared that the degree of open communication maintained and increased during the pandemic has created positive changes in the working culture, in both his positions in Texas and Toronto. He believes that we live and work in a world where all voices are heard and listened to like never before, which previously would have been more difficult to accept within hierarchical institutions. 

This shift towards greater openness to listen to and voice one’s opinions at work should enable for long-term positive impacts where the status quo of “this is how it has always been done” can no longer stand. People expect more from their working environments, and leaders across sectors must be open to feedback and not rely on their own internal biases and experiences to make critical decisions. 

Indeed, the labor market as a whole has also changed. Where once people hoped and expected to work for an institution for their entire career, we are now seeing more flexibility and mobility — which implies a need to internally make workplaces more welcoming and inclusive.  

For Medak, she has considered the long-term impacts of the pandemic on staff morale and has tried to consider and implement new practices and strategies to help rebuild her team’s sense of optimism and belonging. To do so, she originally turned to the expertise of therapists and psychologists (with mixed results). What has proven to be helpful, albeit not 100% perfect, is the concept of prompts to get people to start thinking more positively together through open conversation. 

A first prompt she sent out to the whole team and board was to have them articulate and codify the lessons they had learned during the last 18 months and take stock of the lessons we could take forward together. Another prompt urged people to consider what they would tell a loved one about this moment and these experiences in 50 years from now, allowing reflection on both the good we can keep and the bad we need to let go of. 

Overall, staff experiences in this period of transition towards reopening is one fraught with emotional stress, feelings of abandonment, and uncertainty that must all be navigated with caution and transparency. The parlance of the day is authenticity and truthfulness as organizations and their teams rebuild common purpose and after months apart.