On March 5, 2020, Amy Spurling attended her last in-person networking event before Covid lockdowns began. She says her colleagues lightly kicked her shins by way of greeting. The Compt CEO remembers she found it funny—it was a previously unthinkable social faux pas that, as news of this ominous new virus took hold, was somehow now more acceptable than a handshake.

Her amusement didn’t stick.

Many hoped Covid’s disruption to life and work would be brief, but it dragged on…and on…and on. As we pass the two-year mark since many workplaces announced a move to “temporary” remote work in mid-March 2020, HR Brew asked HR professionals what they remember about the shocking spring of 2020 and how they led employees through the trauma of a global pandemic.

“There’s no playbook for this.”

By late February 2020, Mineral’s chief people officer, Carla Yudhishthu, was thinking about Covid daily. Yudhishthu told HR Brew that she met with her CEO every morning at 7:30am to “comb the news” and discuss data from the World Health Organization and the CDC. Yudhishthu said the two would ask each other, “What are we going to do?”

Finally, Mineral, an HR compliance software company, decided to close offices in Portland, Oregon; Pleasanton, California; and Milwaukee. They made the decision on Wednesday, March 11, and would shut their doors by Friday.

“We had 48 hours…to get our communication ready,” Yudhishthu said.

Amy Rice, senior director of communications at Workhuman, told HR Brew that the decision for Workhuman to go remote came from a Covid “SWAT team” composed of C-suite executives: the CEO, CFO, chief legal officer, and representatives from supply chain.

Other companies made the decision in a split second. Spurling remembers standing on a sidewalk in Boston’s Chinatown after a team lunch when a coworker received a text from her husband. He worked for a large tech firm and had just been told to pack up and go home. It was March 17.

“I just got chills thinking about that,” Spurling recalled. “That moment was like, ‘OK, big companies are telling their people you’re not coming back, [so] we’re done, [too.] Go home.’ This is very, very real and very serious.”

“The first week was very chaotic,” Rice remembered. “There’s no playbook for this.” Keep reading here.—SV

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SusannaVogel1 on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Susanna for her number on Signal.

When HR Brew asked human-resources professionals about the decision to go remote in the spring of 2020, they emphasized that the decision came from a place of care. As time went on, HR sometimes felt like the “wet blanket,” as Carla Yudhishthu, Mineral’s chief people officer, put it, when they told executives no, it wasn’t the time to reopen offices. Still, they were steadfast in the decision.

“We want to be on the forefront of a lot of things,” Yudhishthu told HR Brew, “We don’t want to be on the forefront of going back before it is safe.”

For HR leaders watching the Covid data daily, the decision to keep workers home and out of physical harm’s way may have been crystal clear, but for their workers, the emotional stress sometimes weighed just as heavy as the physical threats.

HR Brew caught up with the working professionals that human resources departments supported, to hear how they rolled with the punches, stayed sane, and carried the emotional weight of Covid when they were physically safe at home but increasingly isolated in the spring of 2020.

Gallows humor. At first it was all so absurd that it was “kind of funny.” At least, that’s how Harry Napell, analyst at Accenture Federal Services, remembers it. 

“It went from, ‘Oh, cool. I get to work from home. This is kind of funny to see how long my beard can get. I don’t need to shower—that’s convenient,’ to being like, ‘Oh my God, I look like shit.’ And then going down from there.”

We’re gonna be here for a while. Napell was initially told he’d be working remotely for a single Friday as a test. Before the test day had run its course, the employees received a new announcement: They were remote indefinitely.

“So this meant everyone had left all of their crap at the office,” Napell said, including his coworkers’ sweaters, shoes, keys, and Napell’s Costco-sized container of peanut-butter pretzels.

Napell said that as time went on, he lost his sense of time working from home. Keep reading here.—SV

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SusannaVogel1 on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Susanna for her number on Signal.

On Wednesdays, we schedule our weekly 1:1 with HR Brew’s readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

During her 20-year career in human resources, LynnAnn Brewer says she’s done “pretty much almost everything in HR,” from managing HR on a cruise ship, to working in HR for a tech startup. She spent more than a decade at Texas State University, where she served as director of talent acquisition and inclusion for five years. She is currently the director for HR research and advisory services at McLean & Company, which conducts research in HR and advises organizations on workplace development strategies.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

How would you describe your specific job to someone who doesn’t work in HR? My role is to help HR analysts conduct and write research on HR areas and create content for HR leaders and partners to implement programming and HR strategies. The most important thing we do is support HR in sustaining a thriving workforce.

What’s the best change you’ve made at a place you’ve worked? The best change I have made is to take down unfair practices and policies that make it hard for women and minority groups to succeed at education institutions. I hope the changes and initiatives make it easier in the future for more people to do well and be happier.

Can you elaborate on that? Going through our policies [at Texas State University] and making sure that we use inclusive language and taking out gendered language. We had a specific policy around reporting of HIV danger, and so we cleaned that language up. In terms of HR, what I found with HR at the university was that it was very siloed, in terms of how it operated. So we took the talent-acquisition piece out of HR there and moved it under DE&I. So I took my  team and our HR expertise and moved it under DE&I, to hopefully move that needle to make the organization more inclusive and retain women and minorities.

What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job? Keep reading here. —JDS

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: More than a third of US public-health officials who left their positions during the first 10 months of the pandemic said they experienced at least one experience of “harassment,” according to a study published last week in the American Journal of Managed Care.

Quote: “​​We are not anti-union, we are anti-being fired or litigated against due to a conversation that could be better served in another outlet…”—a moderator for a private Verizon employee subreddit, defending the decision to place conversations about unions on a “banned topic list,” via Jacobin Magazine

Read: “What if working in sweatpants unleashed your superpowers?” (The Wall Street Journal)

Do better than basic. Some companies offer pizza parties and vague “wellness” programs, but you’re focused on the benefits employees can actually use—like Student Loan Management by Betterment at Work. Learn more here.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

Losing sleep over the DE&I initiatives in the workplace? Wondering how to retain employees while building a future of inclusivity, while keeping all the other balls in the air?

We feel you. That’s why we’re talking with Sara Porritt, Omnicom Media Group’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, about how she’s spearheading DE&I across a company of 64,000+ employees, and what’s at the heart of a successful DE&I strategy. Looking forward to seeing you there—March 30 at 12pm ET. Register here.*

*Note: This event is brought to you by Qualtrics.

Catch up on the top HR Brew stories from the recent past:

• Recruiters face fierce competition as the tech industry decentralizes from Silicon Valley
• We need to stop putting “Great” before every post-2020 labor market trend
• Making your workplace inclusive for the disabled starts with job listings