How to Manage an International Team in a Global Crisis

I left the office in early March about a week before anyone else did. It was a Thursday, and I had one final in-person meeting that was a low-level overview of 80/20 training. It was a grab bag of folks from all departments, and I searched their faces, wondering if I was safe. At the time, we thought it was surface-based. No one thought to buy masks or limit time inside with groups of people. I tried not to touch the shared conference table space and stared at the old kitchenette in the back of the room. It was one of those conference rooms that had been nice ten years ago, maybe used for big meetings with high-profile customers, but now the fake plant and faded linoleum cabinets just reinforced the outdated, Midwestern aesthetic that many offices espoused.

Unlike many offices in the oughts and teens, ours did not experience a burst of color and open desk areas that bounced sound and apathy around a room like a wilted corporate clown festival. Our office lacked windows, especially in the winding, dark outer reaches of offices and high-walled cubical farms that signaled employees who were an afterthought. Only important people had offices with windows, you see. We had outgrown the original space, such as it was, years ago, but that was before my time. 

I was just thrilled to get an office when I’d started five months ago. I’d already gotten into polite email wars with our facility manager over lighting and the buzzing madness of a white-walled room with no windows and overhead lamps that were absolutely not fluorescent lighting, we swear. My little box was homey, and I’d recently brought in some wedding pictures at the urging of my boss. I would kick my beaten black pumps off under my desk and fold my stockinged legs under me, startling out of my Excel-induced reveries when my manager would burst into my office muttering about user experience. I was comfortable at that office, only just so, and I left knowing I would be back within a week or two, and that I was likely spending my limited political capital in a new role on a fool’s errand of fear. 

That weekend I bought a second monitor and an external keyboard. I quickly bought a new desk and chair. Much of the early time at home was spent deepening my connection with consumerism. I knew from prior experience that a proper setup was the stuff of madness and that I would quickly give myself an onslaught of migraines if I didn’t prepare even for this limited vacation from pencil skirts. At this point, I thought it would be a month, at best or worst, depending on your appreciation for bad office lighting and ability to time your commute to avoid the school bus that stopped like popcorn with a minute on the clock at 7:45 am near your office. 

I watched Andy Beshear every single day. I wrote signs on printer paper and put them in our window. #TogetherKY. #HealthyAtHome. I thought we were going to get through it, get through it together. I repeated his words like a prayer and knew we wouldn’t be St. Louis, couldn’t be St. Louis. I told everyone I knew that we had to flatten the curve so we could buy time to find a vaccine. I watched Italy and New York with remote horror. Not here. Not us. 

I’d been slowly ferreting away supplies since mid-February; buying cleaning wipes and hand sanitizer and hand soap. We were well-stocked in toilet paper and paper towels, and I remember sitting up late at night making last-minute purchases while questioning myself about whether it was anxiety or reality that was driving my decisions. I would make one last large shopping trip, my cart filled with flour and soup and rice. I remember my cheeks flaming as I rushed through the self checkout, absolutely convinced of my own shame for buying slightly more than normal. Weeks later, I would make a trip to our local Kroger at midnight after a panicked call from a friend who used to join me for Sunday shopping sessions where we stalked the aisles with lattes and pawed at apples and compared containers of hummus. The shelves were empty, she said. Get to the store. 

In America, we are accustomed to full shelves of everything from carrots to cereal. We’re used to shiny rows of shampoo and grumbling about the good bacon not being on sale. That Saturday night, the shelves were empty. There was no produce, no soup, no meat. And it was oddly busy. Women in plaid pajamas darted between aisles, occasionally making eye contact, but none of us knew how to process what we were seeing. I snapped a picture of a pallet of pasta sauce, assuring my limited audience that the supply chain was still intact even as I tried to convince myself that things would be fine. At the time, I asked my husband, what do we do? What if it does fail? He jokingly told me that our hound Molly was wonderful at nabbing squirrels, but he would still mention buying emergency supplies from time to time. 

My husband is a military guy with a degree in international business. He’s the kind of person who will tell you that he’s not a big fan of a certain high-ranking Democrat, and then will spend twenty minutes talking about a crime bill from the ‘90s. He’s seen some things, and I’ve always used him as my barometer for whether The Shit Has Hit The Fan. Three or four times a day, I would ask him to rattle off the signs for a failing country. I would sit on the floor of our bedroom, fingers picking at our hardwood floors, terrified but unable to cry, and ask him to tell me why our country would be okay. And then I would take a deep breath and dive into my next project to make sure that we would be okay if society failed. Because it absolutely felt like it might fail that spring. 

Spoiler: it did not fail. 

Somehow, spring melted into summer. We developed a routine. I walked the dog during lunch each day and found new hiking trails. I would find myself in the woods staring up through the trees, a curtain of green above me, forcing myself to suck in air and wiggling my toes against the rocks on the paths. Nothing felt real, but it got better. We ate dinner outside at a restaurant and the relief of feeling normal was addictive even as we felt the danger. By that point, we knew it was airborne and we knew outside was much safer. I got my haircut that August and spent the drive to the salon wondering if this was the mistake that was going to kill me. We had no guidance. No consistent truth. By this point, I had been listening to Andy Slavitt for months trying to make a bible out of tweets. 

Work continued. It had never stopped. My meetings had always been online, always been video meetings, so functionally little actually changed for me. My boss was sometimes hard to read and even harder to reach. I tried to tell him hard it was, to fear so much and still have to be a responsible adult, and he said that he knew I hadn’t signed up for remote work. Funny thing is, it was the global pandemic, not the remote work, that was making my world so disjointed. 

We set 2020 goals in May. We launched a new product. I hired a new member of my team in late spring. I held onto my weekly 1x1s and team meetings. I learned to turn my video on with wet hair and red cheeks, and taught Molly to stop barking at strange digital voices. 

In late summer, we had layoffs. We’d gone through two humane rounds of furlough in the US earlier but the layoffs felt like a serrated knife: it was all sharp and jagged and fast but there was no way to avoid tension of the cut. I lost a member of my team and lost credibility. How could they trust a boss who had told them things would be okay? The truth is that sometimes decisions are made above me. The truth is that sometimes being in a big corporate company means that decisions are taken away from you. The truth is that I couldn’t save them. 

Summer crashed into fall. Diwali came. Thanksgiving came. By then I was able to find apples and pie crust, and we had a feast as we sat on the couch watching Die Hard. Quiet holidays aren’t so awful. I watched the Thanksgiving Day parade and tried to hold on to the holiday cheer that threatened me with memories of family and connection. Autumn became lonelier as winter seeped in and distanced dinners outside became a question of hardiness. 

I heard rumors of a return to the office and spent more political capital ensuring that my new writer could start remotely and stay remotely as long as she liked. I thought I knew what protecting my team meant but I learned to light caution on fire as I argued with colleagues two rungs higher than I was. In a global pandemic, there is either accommodation or there is unholy inhumanity. I knew capitalism wasn’t there for me but we were finally saying the quiet part out loud. We were all replaceable, especially in a world in which so many people were losing their jobs in an economic global freefall. 

I was terrified I was going to lose my job and I was terrified that I was going to die. All of this even as I was a white collar mid-level manager who was still producing if not stellar results then at least respectable digital marketing results. I was as safe as someone could be in a global disaster and I still had to mute my meetings sometimes so I could cry between updates. 

And then Christmas. Christmas came like a charlie horse after running a marathon. I slowed down our sprints of work. I loudly announced that my team was going to have a break because I needed a break so badly. We limped toward the new year. I took two whole weeks off after my boss announced that he was taking his vacation. Privately, I struggled with the idea that furlough was sort of my vacation, right? But how can it be vacation when you think the world is ending? 

This became normal. 

Sometimes I wonder if my response has been an overreaction. We’ve just been asked to sit at home watching Netflix, right? And then I remember how long it’s been since I’ve hugged my mom. 

Managing an international team in a global crisis isn’t something you find in a how-to listicle. It’s not something you can prepare for. It’s like asking how you learn basic math but the answer is actually how you learn to paint. We’re all just trying to stay alive while balancing these disparate pieces of our broken lives. No one is okay. And the fact that they’re working at all is a miracle.