Speaker 1 0:19 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to strategies to remotely manage your team presented by Autumn. My name is Holly Lundgren autumns online professional development manager. And I will be your staff host for today. I'd like to quickly take a moment to thank autumns annual webinar sponsor, Marshall, Gerstein, and Borun. And we thank them for their support. Just a quick couple quick points, all lines have been muted to ensure high quality audio. After the brief presentations by the presenters, we hope to make this webinar a little bit more interactive. If you have a question or a comment during the q&a time, you have the opportunity to type it into the q&a box. Or you could raise your hand if your hand is raised. We'll call on you and temporarily unmute your line. So you can ask your question or provide your discussion point or just participate. At this time, I will introduce our distinguished speakers. As director of inter entrepreneurship at Northeastern University, Ted oversees the center for research, innovation, and develops programming to assist faculty and staff commercialize their research. Ted has an extensive background in leading and growing businesses such as plum choice, a leading national remote services company. As a mentor. He has worked with over 40 companies spanning IoT, digital health and service industries. through mentoring services at MIT BU and Northeastern, he worked for the MIT venture mentoring service as part of their entrepreneurial, entrepreneurial ecosystem matching ventures with mentors. As an investor Ted has been active in area investment groups through Launchpad and hob angels. Ted received a BS in electrical engineering from Lehigh University, and an MBA from Northeastern University. He is a lifelong advocate of creative thinking at all levels of education, and of connecting community investors, employees, customers and industry partners to create impact through entrepreneurial efforts. Jenna Masini is the director of technology transfer at UNH AI. Jenna advises and educates the UNH community on relevant intellectual property, and technology transfer issues, encourages and facilitates activities in support of the development, disclosure, protection and commercialization of UNH intellectual property and represents UNH his interest in these matters to external organizations, including state agencies, relevant professional organizations, and private business and industry. Jenna works with innovators across the University and has particular responsibility for innovations. Originating from the College of Life Sciences and agriculture. Jenna received her Juris Doctor degree from Tulane University Law School, and her Bachelor of Science in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT. She is active with autumn and is a member of the annual meeting program committee. She served as a member of the Board of Directors at Louisiana bio from 2013 through 2019, and is a frequent speaker on intellectual property contracts and technology commercialization. And now I'll go ahead and turn it over to our speakers. Welcome, Ted. Welcome, Jana. Speaker 2 3:42 Thank you very much, Holly. Give me a second here. This. Speaker 2 4:02 Once there it goes. There we go. All right. Ken is assuming everyone's seen this correctly, and I'll be notified if you're not. The morning, as was just mentioned, I'm the director entrepreneurship. at Northeastern, I lead a very dedicated team of 10 people are responsible for commercialization of research coming out of the northeastern labs. We've had a really nice seamless transfer home. I think our big problem is going to be getting people back. And after we do this, and I'm happy to share with you some of the learnings from that process. But probably more importantly, I had a startup that had about 1000 people working from home and I'm gonna give you just a real quick case study on that as well. In reading the autumn posts, I realized that some of you are aware addressing more detailed questions about how to operate and possibly before considering some of the fundamental priorities that you really need to put into So when you work from home, and as I said, let me do this correctly. I'm going to talk about my company plum choice. Real briefly, this was a work from home service model, we had about 1000 Tech's working from home, all US based servicing about 600,000 calls a month. And we almost never saw these employees from before they got hired until after they left if they chose to leave the company. And this, this was a leading premium service business. It was a business that we resold through HP, at&t, the company sold, I don't own stock, I'm certainly not trying to push that aspect of it. But anyway, when you move to a work from home model, you have to assess what what's important to you. All right. So these are the priorities that we set up as a company. And this took years to develop. Number one was customer service, we were number one in our industry, customer service was very important to us. Number two efficiency. If you can imagine an organization or all you have to do is take one minute off of every call, average call time, and you save $250,000 You spend an awful lot of time focused on efficiency of your workforce. Last one that we paid a lot of attention to was employee churn. And employee churn was people who hired in and then left the company, if you go to offshore call centers, they actually have something on the order of 80% churn a year, because we had a lot of training for our real resources, employees. We knew that anything close to 80% would kill our business and put in place all the practices and processes to reduce that to about 20% churn may still sound high for the environment we're in today. But it was a very, very big achievement for us as a business. So outside of sheer scale, I do have to say, what we are doing with moving and workforce it was hired in the home, I'm sorry, hired to work in an office, working more on the administrative side of things, working a lot, a lot more with a diverse set of people and connections both inside the organization outside of Organization. This this effort is all saw by people tools and process and doesn't matter whether it's a big work from home, or like lunch choice doesn't matter whether it's a very small organization, you want to make sure that the people are engaged. Last note, I'm going to say about this, this model worked because we hired people to a very rigorous model, we have the tools in place to monitor down to the second everything they did. And we made sure that we did a lot of things to make them feel part of the company even though they weren't actually residing at the company. Let me let me turn this now. And let's talk about our priorities. I actually went down the path of trying to figure out what would be the right priorities for us, one of the obvious ones, and there's a few that I discarded was employee safety. I know there's a lot of concerns about employees, this has already happened, there's very little you can do. Now that you know the university has had people go to work from home, maybe you have to worry a little bit about making sure people get up and walk around a little bit periodically. But the employee safety is really off the table. employee retention, another thing that occurred to me, you do not have to worry about employee churn. At a time like this, I do know that a lot of number organizations are very worried people are gonna leave. This is not the environment that people are gonna leave. And then the thing that I really do think is number one priority is what I'm going to call team cohesion. This is a very short term situation, it will be over we can all debate whether it's going to be one month, two months, three months, but it will be over. And so they use this as an opportunity to improve the way the team works together. If you can figure out how to excel in this environment, imagine what it's gonna be like when you're all back in the office again. But having said it's all about the team. Let me talk about the big elephant in the room because there's a very big people component to this. You need to be aware of this. You have to address this. I'll talk briefly about how to address it as well. Some of the stresses, they're all stressed by the virus. We had 1000 people in our country pass away yesterday. They're projecting it's gonna go up to 2000 people are very scared. So this is going to be Introduce stresses that have to be managed, it appears in different people in different ways. Believe it or not, even though you're not worried about people leaving here, people are very stressed, they're gonna lose their jobs. There's huge unemployment numbers, as I'm sure everyone's watching those numbers. Now. There's questions about stability of every single organization out there, and what's going to happen to people in the meantime, believe it or not, people want to do a good job. So they're stressed that they may not be able to do the same type of job that they do, or have been doing in the office before. They are stressed because they don't know what you expect. What specifically are you expecting to have them do and productivity and so forth, they're also stressed that they won't be as productive won't be as professional, there's gonna be dogs barking in the background, babies crying, things that we were able to make sure that our workforce upon choice didn't have it will happen here. So just be aware of these type of these type of stresses. How do you address this? You have to set expectations for your employees about what you expect, do it around the priorities that we're talking about? And then communicate, communicate, communicate, it's all about communications at this point, I would recommend you set your expectations on productivity. Do you expect them to do everything just as productive as before? Is there some indication that you're going to look at things a slightly different way? What are your expectations on ours? We are now we've moved our office at Northeastern to nine to four, so that people have flexibility on both sides to do what they think is necessary. But we do want that overlap in the middle expectations on work environment, I have no expectations that I would be talking to a plant, it would be a pristine environment, I'm expecting and actually somewhat entertained, with some of the noise and distractions that end up in those places. Set your expectations on communication that sounds like a sort of a recursive thing. But we expect everyone to keep their schedules live, keep their team status, which is Microsoft communications package. Correct. Make sure they notify people when they're going to be out of the office. I know there's been a lot of discussions around tools, this does enable this to happen. I already mentioned we use Microsoft. So we have teams, you do want to make sure you have a set of CI tools that will minimally allow you to communicate, collaborate, and keep track of, of actions and share files. And you just need those type of capabilities doesn't have to be for one tool, but you do need it. We also have daily checkups on special with special topics. Some of them are entertaining, some of them are work related, and maintain all of our standard meetings. So there's there's no dis continuity from what happened in the office to now. All right, remember the elephant in the room. We have word quality, productivity as the sort of last two priorities. I love these together. Because the solution set involves sort of the same things work quality, you have to decide how much you what type of oversight you need. If you can't provide all the oversight you do normally, what are you going to do because at the end of this period of time, you don't want to have a lot of cleanup. This is why I click work quality above productivity. Productivity is all about the tools and processes and enabling people to have those. You need to be careful because when you get to number three priority, there will be trade offs against other priorities. And you will have to give let's see, what else can I tell you about this. With respect to productivity, give your team the time to settle in. Speaker 2 13:59 Make sure that all the tools work. In this regard, you want to make sure that we had our first day out, we had a meeting in the morning and probably longer than most people liked. But we went around a major app see every single person who had to share docs, access files, collaborate so that all those issues are tidied up and there were a lot of them. So take the time and let people settle in this is we're in here now. For more than a week. We're gonna be here for a couple of months. So let's enable people to be comfortable with where they are. All right. Speaker 2 14:41 I'm not going to walk through these. I put them in here. I believe this presentation will be available later. If you This is some of the things that we did. This was written up in a document sent out to all the employees. It was written up by people in the team. It actually has been adopted around the university for you by other departments, and it certainly I think has served us very well. All right. Off to you, Jenna. Unknown Speaker 15:12 Great. Thank you, Ted. And thank you, Holly, for organizing this. This is great. So I am, as Holly said, the director of technology transfer at UNH innovation, we have a team of five that I lead, we are part of a bigger UNH innovation umbrella with a couple of other business units, our Entrepreneurship Center, our corporate engagement and our interoperability laboratory. So the experiences that we've had our I'm going to talk about are based both on what we've done as a B tech transfer team, and as you an H innovation as a whole. So when we first encountered this situation that we all find ourselves and UNH, I had the good fortune to be well positioned already. So many of our team members, were already working from home, you know, a day a week, or on the occasional snow day that we had. So we had our tools already set up with Sofia, box, zoom, and Trello. So that we were all able to communicate via web, we had a quick recognition, though, that team morale was a primary concern for us. And so we implemented slack relatively quickly, and the entire team seems to really be getting a lot out of it. You know, it's, it's became quickly apparent to us that the social aspect of work is absolutely critical for people's well being and to feel connected and engaged with what's going on. And so we've found that we've learned more about, you know, the first couple of days of using slack, found out more about our team members on a personal level than we really had before. And I think that even though we are far away, physically, we have been able to feel closer to each other than, you know, the work had previously allowed us to be. And so with that focus on team morale, you know, we're really trying a couple of things. One is taking people's circumstances into consideration more than ever before. You know, as Ted alluded to, you know, we, in this in the tech transfer industry do not get hired or are not hiring people for work from home positions, on the most part, people are making the best of the hand that they've been dealt right now and have a lot of different competing concerns, the stresses that had already mentioned, as well, as you know, the general uncertainty about what is everything going to look like tomorrow compared to today. And to the extent that we can provide flexibility and the the certainty that work will be here, and you will be able to do your work when you can, that can alleviate at least one concern. But also, because we are in this position of having a number of team members who were not hired from work from home jobs, and are now in the position of making the best of what the situation that they're in, it's important to respect to the different perspectives and boundaries that some people may have, you know, some people may not be comfortable with having their video on every single time and showing, you know, the interior of their house, until they're able, you know, if you're working with a tool, like zoom with virtual backgrounds, then that's a concern that can be alleviated. Other times, you know, if the expectation is standard, that video beyond but someone has, you know, something happens, and they need to join by audio only having that flexibility to allow them to do that is something that is absolutely critical to keep the team engaged and moving forward. And then in terms of, you know, combining social interaction with work, you know, people do have different perspectives on that as well. And so having the opportunity for people to engage, while not having any sort of negative attitude or negative consequences for people who don't feel comfortable engaging in those sorts of social interactions and social activities that you've organized, also really important to keep in mind. And as we continue to navigate you know, what is a collectively traumatic experience for you know, everybody in the world right now, it's important to demonstrate empathy and trust towards your team. No, we you're hiring adults, you're hiring professionals, and being able to understand that, you know, they do want to do their work, they are trying to do the best they can, but they need flexibility in one way or another and being able to provide them that empathy and compassion and trust that yes, the work will get done even if it's not getting done at exactly the same time as other people can provide a level of comfort that is really important right now. And then in terms of setting up these new systems and the the meetings that you're putting in place, the you know, the check ins, the get togethers, you know, make yourself available for feedback and be open to hearing you know, this isn't working for me, and here's why. And here's how it could be better for me. You know, people are often not comfortable giving that feedback in a large group setting. So having smaller one on one type check ins to be able to make sure people feel supported, and that they have the tools that they need, whether it's you know, do they do they need a second monitor at home, or simply, hey, you know, we've got this standing meeting. And right now, because of my childcare situation is not working for me, those are the different kinds of feedback that you might hear that people may not want to share in a entire group wide video call. And then the last point, I think it's really important to come at this from the perspective of leadership, rather than acting as a manager or, you know, in worst cases than a micromanager. The idea that we can lead our teams through this while providing communication and support for the work that they're doing in their particular circumstances, requires not being focused so much on the idea of if I can't see you, you're not doing your work. But understanding that everyone shares the same goals and is pulling in the same direction and coming at this from the perspective of a team, rather than employees that need to have somebody standing over their shoulder. And a lot of the communication points here are things that have been reiterated. So we keep our team meetings, we have different team meetings focused on different things, you know, whether you're focusing on your intellectual property portfolio, or your team or your marketing, you know, having those regular, larger format meetings are still important. And then, as I mentioned, the one to one check ins, where you can really get the feedback from your individual team member on you know, how it's really going for them and listening to them on both a personal and professional level is very helpful. One tool that we have found to be extremely helpful is Trello. And for those of you who aren't familiar bit with this, this is a web based service where you can create boards that everyone within a, you know, that has been invited to view the board can see and can edit and can move different, you know, move different documents to different places, we use Trello, to share agendas, and to keep track of different projects and keep track of different topics of discussion. You know, if you haven't checked it out before, I highly recommend it, it's been very useful to us. And so when we have these one to one meetings, or even the team meetings, we use the our Trello boards, and you can use Slack or teams for the same function or a similar function, to share agendas ahead of time. And to keep track of the different action items that you that you have going on in your different work groups. You can also use different channels or boards, depending you know, the terminology varies depending on the tool to keep track of different projects or your functional teams if you are working with one team on a database project and another team on some marketing projects, and so on and so forth, having different dedicated channels where people can keep track of you know, what other people were working on and the status when you can't pop your head in your next door neighbor's office and just say, Hey, what's up with, you know, this better the other is important. And then transparency. You know, I think a lot of the communication that we've been hearing from, you know, from what Ted has already said, and the messages that we've heard from on the different boards about, you know, communication and transparency. I think it's important to emphasize, though, that people value hearing what it is that you know, at the at the time that you know, it, even if everybody knows the situation is constantly evolving, there's going to be new information coming out. Or perhaps you know, you as the leader don't have the complete information about what the entire university or institution is doing at any given time. But sharing what you know, does help build the trust between you and your team, and helps people have the groundwork to be able to ask questions and know Okay, here are the things that we don't know, here still, you know, here the gaps that we're working on trying to fill. Ted mentioned productivity and I just have a couple of things to add to this, you know, the circumstances do call for for adjusting of expectations, the idea that, you know, business as usual without any changes whatsoever. I think that the last couple of weeks have proved that that just is not true. And while the having said that I think it is possible for the vast majority of the work for us to continue as tech transfer offices. And for you know, for a number of our colleagues, especially, you know, those attached to large medical centers or medical schools, you know, their circumstances are so vastly different than from you know, what we what UNH as an institution without a medical school is experiencing. So you know, in terms of expectations around people's productivity levels, how quickly they are responding to different requests or different tasks. All of that needs to be adjusted to match the particular circumstances not only of your state your institution your team and you know what's going on in the world. Unknown Speaker 25:04 For us, at least most tech transfer functions can be done asynchronously. So you know, this does allow for flexible hours. You know, if you if your team is able to accommodate, you know, a common set of core hours, then that's great. But again, with daycares, and schools being closed, you know, it's this recognition of people with small children do have to make some concessions as to when they can be available. Having this expectation, that flexible hours, in terms of being able to get things done, rather than asking people to use their leave, if they can't be available for a regular business day, will allow you to have more productivity as an office than taking that opposite perspective. We are finding, in particular, that faculty are more receptive to zoom meetings than we originally thought they might be. We have been taking this time to you know, conduct some individual outreach to our various faculty, just as a check in Hey, what are you working on? Can we help you in any way? Is there anything you want to disclose, you know, likely they're working on manuscripts getting those revised for submission, all of the different, you know, non lab based research activities that that are on their plate, those might be coming to the forefront about now. And so being able to get in front of them and check in is something that we have found more faculty than expected to be to be available for and then considering whether programming can be delivered online. So we were able to complete our spring iCore cohort online through zoom, we made the decision that our other programming that was planned for in person this semester, we would just cancel. But we wanted to take new we're taking a look at what we have planned for the fall. And in the event that this situation does continue into the summer or even into the fall it Are there things that we want to or could be doing now, that would contribute to fall event planning? Or do we need to start making contingency plans in the event that this situation does continue for longer than we expect right now. We've also shifted to some internal facing metrics rather than our outward facing metrics that we that we generally use to talk to our upper administration, things that we're working on now include data audits, implementing systems, looking at process improvement, and then compliance. You know, I, Edison, everybody, you know, we're not alone in having notifications that have to be dealt with. So being able to use this time in which companies may not be as respective as receptive for your outward facing interactions to look inward and see what you can do in terms of improving your own workflow. You know, this, this is an opportunity to take to review that we're also focusing on clearing our dockets of disclosures that we've already received that need prior art analysis, commercialization plans, you know, understanding that those may need to be changed once we are on the other side of this and know what what people's, you know, people's focuses have changed, putting together marketing materials like nonconfidential summaries, reviewing the different centers and capacities for research at the university. And then going through and updating just your docket in general are you are is all are all of the administrative status is up to date. And then with regard to professional development, you know, for us in particular UNH is on a July one fiscal year start. So towards the end of the semester, we will be starting to do performance reviews. So now might be a good time to examine what your individual team members have, is their performance review metrics. And is there anything that you can do to adapt those to allow them to either meet the metrics or shift them in a way that recognizes the current situation? And then taking a longer focus with strategic planning? You know, a lot of us are seeing if there were holes in the business continuity plans, or, you know, given the idea that budgets might be quite a bit tighter in the fall, what, what is that going to look like? So taking the opportunity to to be proactive about planning for the future, is something that can be done right now. We have to we have provided 90 Day project plans to our administration to alleviate any concerns about you know, what are we up to? And are we still able to carry on our business? You know, given that the financial situation for a lot of people might be quite a bit tighter, we did include any applicable budget adjustments. One thing that we are trying to do though is, is reframe the situation as we communicate with our with our internal and external parties, you know, that we are doing our best to maintain our business and workflow as much as possible. So we're not you know, in terms of being physically located. Yes, it is a disruption of business, but in terms of, are we still producing the same level of work and are we still getting things done? And this isn't up portunity to pull those things that get pushed down further and further on priority list back up to the top and able to, you know, position the entire team and hopefully the entire office for the best possible start to the fall semester. And so with that, I think we are ready to open it up to questions. Holly, do you want to take the lead with that? Speaker 1 30:31 There we go. I'm that person I was talking to the mute button. Yes, absolutely. Let's open it up for questions. If you have a question, you can put it in the q&a box. Or if you raise your hand, we can call on you and unmute you temporarily. We do have a couple of questions already in the q&a box. The first one is what is Slack. Unknown Speaker 30:56 So slack is a chat tool, it is somewhat analogous to Microsoft Teams in the sense that it has functions for having attachments embedded within it for linking with other applications for for having phone calls, although I don't know if it actually has video calls. But it's it's a combination of a chat platform with productivity tasks, if you have any, you know, if you have used Skype before, in terms of having both that chat function and the call function, and it's like that, with the added functionality of the file storage in different channels that you can invite different participants to so for example, we have a couple of different channels. One is general for our general announcements that are applicable office wide. One is specific to the tech transfer team. One is specific to a, a project that we have a handful of people working on, and so on and so forth, so that you're able, and you can do it on an individual basis as well. So if you have, you know, chats going with each of each person that is, you know, a one to one report to you or your project basis, then you can keep things organized, it also has a search function, which is really helpful. Speaker 1 32:13 Great, thank you. The next question we had, how have you managed notification overload from implementing new technologies, we found too many platforms hinders productivity and can be overwhelming for those who haven't really used these technologies. That Unknown Speaker 32:29 is a very, very good point. And that is something that we have a running joke about the the the different pings who's getting what notifications. And so we are trying to have a limit of one tool per type of communication. So we're using zoom for all of our meetings, and we would not we would rather use that than try to implement multiple different multiple different meeting tools. We're using, you know, box to store all of our files, because that's what is approved by our university. Um, you know, I know there are other file storage capabilities out there. And then in terms of having, you know, that that chat function of, you know, instant messaging, we've picked Skype, but or slack, but you know, if you have Microsoft Teams, then you can do, you can, you know, you can pick which one works for you. And you also depends on what your university is implementing. I do know that some companies have a strong preference away from the non Microsoft, in our, you know, requiring their employees to use Microsoft, Microsoft tools only. Speaker 1 33:33 Thank you. The next one is for Ted, specifically, I'd like to have Ted explore his comment on bring people back to the office. Speaker 2 33:45 Okay, it was just simply a statement that at the end of this, everyone's going to be coming back to the office. And as much as you're considering getting people comfortable at home. There are both opportunities and adapting things you've learned through this process and probably challenges is you have to reverse some of those things. Speaker 1 34:07 Okay, thanks. Let's see. Next one, we've got remote work has put a lot of new pressures on team leaders. What advice do you have for them to cope with this? And that could be for either one of you or both? Unknown Speaker 34:24 Okay, do you want to go first? Yeah, I Speaker 2 34:25 it actually is one of those questions that almost requires a little clarification on what type of pressures are there there's a different type of work that has to be done if you want to be effective and I don't always do those as pressures if you have to communicate via someone else on here has a question about burnout by using Zoom. As an example and this has changed and whenever there's change, there's pressure on the organization to figure out how you adapt and what you have to do to be successful. I think all work. All people have to take a look at what their work is figuring out How to prioritize it. And when there's new pressures you have to figure out is this does this require a change on your tools and without changing process, you can't just build pressure, add more work on any input anybody in the work world and not expect that there's going to be some issues coming out the other end if you don't take things off the plate as well. Unknown Speaker 35:26 I agree with that. And I would also add that, you know, it's important to recognize even you know, for, for team leaders with new pressures that everybody is human, there's a really great article that has been making the rounds from HBr, on that discomfort you're feeling right now is grief. And if you haven't had a chance to read it, yet, I would highly recommend it. But having that perspective, that you're only human, and you have to process this as well. Taking a time, you know, to reflect on that and be able to understand, this is how I'm feeling about things, and this is how I need support or help in order to be able to meet the new pressures, you know, the idea that we can have a lot more empathy for each other as colleagues and co workers and you know, people in the industry, I think is going to be the thing that can help people cope with the new pressures, and understanding again, that, you know, this is an unprecedented situation. And what we are dealing with is trying to make the best of the hand that we've been dealt, and still keep things, you know, looking towards being on the other side of this. Speaker 1 36:31 Thank you. Let's see, we have one, how do you suggest we approach faculty members, most are busy with online classes, and others just aren't conducting research right now. Unknown Speaker 36:43 We've just been sending, you know, a pretty short template email, you know, we're still here, we're still up and running, you know, understand that you have are being pulled in a lot of different directions. But, you know, if you have anything to disclose now, it'd be the time reminding them of public disclosures, if they're, you know, engaged in the type of work that is patentable, and that might be an issue, and just making that offer and putting it out there. You know, we're not following up on a weekly basis, I think we were following up on more of a month to six weeks sort of timeframe, you know, especially given where our semester is going to end and being able to, you know, we have had a couple of faculty say, Yes, we'd love to talk to you. But can you check back in at the end of May, you know, when we're done teaching, you know, and we're, you know, we're expecting to still be remote at that point in time. So just putting that on the calendar, and, you know, not trying to add any pressure to their workload, but you know, adding that opportunity to them that yes, you're here and you're receptive. Unknown Speaker 37:44 Thanks, Jenna, anything to add Ted? Speaker 2 37:46 Well, I was actually gonna say they're absolutely right, there's a impact on everybody's ability to engage on things that are necessary for what my group is doing, we've actually seen a lot more responsiveness from researchers just simply because they seem to be more free. Certainly stress level teachers has gone up since they are doing remote teaching, and they're not comfortable with that. And then the other dynamic is that a lot of the labs have now been closed, which is probably why my first statement that more of the researchers are actually available to have discussions. Speaker 1 38:26 Great, thank you. Okay, next question. Did you consider the benefit of having all things in one place with teams versus using a bunch of different tools like Slack truly are, etc. Unknown Speaker 38:40 So, we slack was the thing that we implemented last. So we we implemented Trello, which is tre fllo, in case you want to look it up. We implemented that months ago. And so that was the way that we found even when we were having in person meetings, having a web based tool for us to track all of our different action items in the status was, was something we had been doing on an ongoing basis. So, you know, UNH as an institution is implementing, or making available Microsoft Teams. And some, you know, other groups that I'm interacting with in the university are using it. But for us, because we had all of the other pieces in place other than that chat function, we went ahead and chose slack as opposed to trying to shift all of our work that was already in these different, you know, on a couple of different places like zoom, and Trello. And we thought adding slack would be easier than trying to shift everything that already existed into one single new platform. Speaker 1 39:42 Okay. Let's see. You mentioned shifting focus to internal facing metrics, rather than outward are your office's still conducting business development and outreach to industry partners for technologies in your portfolio? Or are you focusing more on the internal work to prepare Are for this outreach at a later date. Unknown Speaker 40:03 So we are doing both, we had quite a few meetings that we had scheduled for business development that were meant to take place at the autumn annual meeting, we have had, we've had quite a few of those get shifted to zoom and are still working on scheduling a few. We are hearing from a few industry partners that you know, hey, we're not really focused on this, or we're not really sure if we would have the budget to do this, can we? You know, can we talk in a few months once we have a better handle on things. So the business development work is still ongoing, but it's not as high of a volume, given the responses from a few industries that you know, this is just not a that type of instance, development is not a high priority for them at that point, at this point in time. 10? Speaker 2 40:50 Um, I actually, it's, I'm sort of tying this into a couple of the other questions that are on here about how do we continue to engage with potential industry partners and so forth. You cannot, you can't force a discussion when other organizations are either not functioning, or prioritizing other activities. Some industries are still running. Many are not, or are being prioritized. And I have the end of the example that's come up recently as a number of the medical spinouts, and so forth, that I've been working with. Hospitals are focused in another direction, and no matter how pushy you are, they're not going to engage. So I think just a considered approach to the partner and possibly ask them, you're, you know, the whole idea being to push it up to anything is not good. Find out from your partner, are they engaging on these sorts of things? If not, yes, schedule something for sometime in the future. Speaker 1 41:52 Great, thank you. Let's see, what advice would you give to CEOs experiencing budget cuts, especially with regard to patent renewals and filings? Unknown Speaker 42:05 That's a hard question. We have a very small patent budget to begin with, you know, if you can, if you have any ability to advocate for, you know, the fact that this is going to have long term impacts, and perhaps budgets could be shifted in another direction, I would recommend that the other approaches that you may want to consider are any sort of negotiations with your law firms, can they give you a volume discount? If they're not already doing that? Are you doing, you know, are you using, there are a whole bunch of different strategies for cutting patent costs, in terms of using, you know, not filing in as many foreign countries or using dedicated translation services, as opposed to letting your law firms go through a different one, or, you know, having, you know, one or two select foreign firms that you interact with directly, as opposed to again, having your law firms pick those for you, or using, you know, an annuity service directly, as opposed to paying, you know, multiple hundreds of dollars and, you know, administrative fees to your law firms for them to use the third party services? You know, I would, I think just in you know, instead of digging down into each of those, it's a higher level way to approach it may be to just have a conversation with each of your law firms, hey, you know, our budgets are being cut, you know, help us understand your workflow. And, you know, can we achieve some efficiencies and you know, a couple of different areas. Speaker 1 43:37 Okay. Let's see, should we back off marketing of Tech's with this difficult time for business and licensing? We were going to focus more on customer discovery and feedback. Unknown Speaker 43:54 10, do you wanna go first? Speaker 2 43:56 Sure. I tend to look at this as a business perspective that if you're going to go out and spend money on marketing, you want to make sure you get a return on your marketing budget. If the response is not out there, then it sounds like there's money issues across the board from a number of these, these questions are coming in, you do want to redirect them towards areas that are going to have more productivity. So absolutely, I it's hard, it's really hard to push a company that has other priorities this moment, and they're very big priorities, to do something that you want, that may be off those priorities. customer discovery. It sounds like it's a spin out question. If the spin offs are running, that's a terrific way to focus, your effort number, the spin offs that I'm looking at are all hit the same skids in terms of their ability to conduct business at this point. And I'm not sure how, how successful you'll be at that I do think there's a real opportunity to I think you might have mentioned earlier during your presentation, Holly redirect efforts to improving things that you can control. internal processes are a good one, maybe tools that need to be optimized, because right now they take too much of time, because they're not optimized, there's a lot of productive things that can be done during this time period. Unknown Speaker 45:25 We also are planning to do some customer discovery as well, but in a taking a very no pressure approach. And I think that, you know, if you are engaging in active marketing, and you know, in terms as opposed to just posting new text on your website, or you know, pushing things out on your socials, I think that, you know, taking a very, you know, hey, we understand if this is not your highest priority, but you know, when you get it, you know, when you are back up and running, we'd love to talk to you about X, Y, or Z, you know, having a very no pressure approach, I think is the way to go. For our customer discovery process projects, we were going to, again, do it in a very low pressure sort of way. And if the answer is, hey, we don't have time to have that conversation now to say, you know, you know, would you mind if we check back in a few months? And if they say, No, then, you know, then they get taken off the list. But I think having, you know, offering a chance to talk, but not applying any kind of pressure is the way to the right angle to take on these sorts of things. Speaker 1 46:32 You know, there's there's another question on here that I think goes hand in hand with that. It says the genocide they conducted iCore remotely? If so, how did that work? customer discovery seems difficult right now. Unknown Speaker 46:42 Yeah, we saw our last two sessions were the final presentations of our teams. So this was when they were presenting their their final value proposition canvases, and getting feedback. So you know, we were we did relax the requirements in terms of number of, no, we didn't relax, we did not relax the number of interviews, we relaxed the requirement on in person interviews and allowed them to do more telephone or video call. But we still steer them away from email or surveys or things like that. So the vast majority of their customer discovery was already done. But for the ones that had not completed the required number of interviews, we did, you know, we did allow them to be more flexible on the way that they were conducting the interviews, as opposed to being strongly strongly encouraged to do in person. Speaker 1 47:38 Okay. Let's see what would be a good approach to let colleagues know that you're not micromanaging, even though you need to monitor progress more frequently, given that people may not be working in sync towards certain tasks, especially the ad hoc ones. Unknown Speaker 47:58 So I think this depends on the tools that you're using. So if you're using, you know, teams, or slack, then you can, you know, you have that ongoing conversation channel. And with teams, you have even more functionality, I believe, in terms of creating to do lists and seeing, you know, what people, you know, are they uploading their files to on the team channel or whatnot? It depends, I would evaluate your tools and see if there's a way for people to just say, like, Hey, I've, you know, can you I've completed this, and now I'm letting you know, for if you are using Trello. In particular, there is the ability to create to do lists, and it because it is a shared platform, Whoever completes the to do can simply mark it as completed. And so you have that, that ability to know, yes, this has been done or No, it hasn't. And if you are, you know, on a one to one weekly meeting schedule, then you can use that time to just kind of get an update on, you know, where everything is, as more of just a, you know, hey, I'm keeping you updated, as opposed to, you know, any kind of more micromanaging, feeling, interaction. Speaker 1 49:12 Let's see, the here and now is absolutely critical. But I also wonder how all of this will change how we work after this is over. For example, if there are staff who are uncomfortable coming back, how would we handle that? Speaker 2 49:30 No, I mean, it's a wonderful question. And I think everyone's looking forward to the time when this becomes a problem. I see two things. One is there's an opportunity that this will change the way we work together, it will be positive. And I'll give you an example. Before we move down to the office, we had to put in place a few tools that did not exist before. One of them was esign. Here's a tool now that we're using because As we're remote wanting to go back, it's going to be beneficial beat that we have it, because of us being external. And having been driven to do that the fact that staff is going to be uncomfortable going back is going to be a transition, I do think that's going to be an issue for everyone. I, how long before people shake hands again, there's gonna be a lot of things that have to be managed through this transition, it's gonna be a very individual situation. I think some people have no problem, and other people will have tremendous problem. And it's hard to predict who that will be until the time comes. And it has to be managed on an individual basis. Unknown Speaker 50:39 I agree with everything Ted just said. And I would add that I think the answer to this depends on how long the crisis drags on, you know, if this is something that we are dealing with coming into the fall, then I think the chances of people feeling more uncomfortable as we come out of it, as opposed to you know, are we going to be back around June or July, and and on how individual workplaces deal with the restrictions put in place by their state, you know, if they're, if there's a workplace that is, you know, encouraging people to come back before, you know, the state is moving away from a, you know, stay at home advisory or whatever your your state is calling it, then I think that may have a negative impact. I have seen a few people. One, one saying, you know, when they think about interview questions in the future for potential employers, one would certainly be How did you protect the health and safety of your employees during the COVID crisis? And being able to answer that in a way that can you know, shows that you do value your employees well, being not just physically but mentally as well, I think will be critical to how you frame the yes, this is now how we when we are going back to the office, and also how we are going to be back if you do it in gradual, you know, some staff comes in now some staff comes in later, and so on and so forth, to be able to address any concerns that that the staff or your team is sharing with you. Speaker 1 52:10 Great, thank you both. Okay, we have one more question. Has the current situation caused you to reexamine your functional coverage in anticipation of the possible other possibility that there could be many staff members either ill, or caring for family members for an atypical amount of time that we are all up and running at the moment? There is, of course, of course, much uncertainty as to what things may look like in the coming weeks. Speaker 2 52:38 Yeah, maybe I'll just jump quickly on this, there is a lot of uncertainty. And we're in a time period where it's not clear how you can predict what's happening going to happen well enough that you can plan for specific members to be ill. We're in a situation where we have a lot of people who are critical, because they're the only ones doing their job. And if something happens, we'll have to figure out what our next step is for coverage. I don't think we've really looked at are we changing functional coverage at this moment, simply because it's hard to anticipate Exactly. What's going to happen? Unknown Speaker 53:17 Yeah, we have also, you know, with the size of our staff, you know, a lot of people are aware of what their colleagues are doing, but not in terms of can they step into their shoes, I think we would approach this though, the same way that we would approach anyone who had a potentially long term health issue in terms of, you know, the manager, getting a download as to what's going on helping to re reallocate or reassign tasks. And then, you know, having the expectation of, you know, an automatic out of office message that it's, you know, away from the office and not, you know, not responding to email contact such and such in the person's place. Speaker 1 53:58 Let's see, what strategies would you suggest for cross globe collaborations or getting an IA in such a situation, especially for the various COVID-19 fundings? Unknown Speaker 54:13 That I think is very context specific. I can take a stab at her TED, if you want to go first. That's fine. Speaker 2 54:20 i This is not my area of expertise. Go right ahead. All Unknown Speaker 54:24 right. So I think this depends both on the the funding and the government response. I think, you know, the fact that we are seeing not just the government pouring tons and tons of potential funding opportunities, putting them putting, you know, so many out there at this point in time, we're seeing different companies, having, you know, specific quests and then different, you know, regional and local accelerators having, you know, funding that's available. So depending on, I think it's very context specific on what the funding you're working, you know, who is providing that funding. And the project I think, is In particular, though, if you're not already using, you know, public health, and other sorts of template language and your license agreements for situations where your innovation may be applicable to a low resource country or low resource setting, that you could look to that sort of template language and I know that I think the autumn has some, at least on the on the message boards that you could take a look at. But being mindful of the fact that whatever innovations are produced to respond to this, there's going to be tremendous pressure to prove to provide them to low resource settings in a way that you may not otherwise be thinking about providing, you know, traditional therapeutics or, or even diagnostics and being just keeping that in mind as you develop whatever the terms of your IA or your license agreements are. Unknown Speaker 56:04 Either Valley? Unknown Speaker 56:19 Can you hear me? I can hear you. I think we may have lost Holly here for a second. Speaker 2 56:23 Okay. Well, why don't we keep going, I can see the questions that are on here. How do you address time for personal volunteerism in the crisis versus time dedicated to the office where let me take a stab at this one, I think it's a really good poor point. I think this is a time period where everybody would like to help volunteering and the issue is extremely hot. I don't know that I would approach it any differently than I would other volunteerism opportunities for people in our department. However, having said that, we have placed a very high priority within the university to help sponsor help drive any program forward. And there's a number of these that are happening associated with the the virus issue. And I actually think that some of the people that are in our group would be far better suited helping out focusing on those because that's where their skill set is. And, again, this is one of the things you've evaluated, and everyone's got a very sensitive spot when it comes to what's happening in the world. Did you want to add anything? Unknown Speaker 57:34 I would just add, I think what you said is great. And and I would just add that this may be an opportunity to raise the question with other levels of the administration, I think, you know, at the beginning, unh, you know, is doing a number of things to respond. And at the beginning, there was not campus wide communication as to you know, what those various initiatives were. So if you do have people who are asking for volunteer opportunities, this may be a great time to check in and see if there's an opportunity with the administration for whatever your institution is planning as a potential response. Speaker 2 58:12 Got it? Okay, there's one more question prepping for the future or office went through an exercise. Just I don't know if everyone sees these questions when I have to read them, called critical function, each individual list of those functions that were critical and required in their absence. We then identified backup after this was over, we examined the exercise to see if this experience points to functions we missed or over emphasized, this is a fantastic management process to go through regardless of time. So I think it sounds like you've got someone who's very active and trying to make sure that they get the right coverage, it becomes more important in a time period right now, because it's more likely that you're going to need this to happen for the other question, you and I Unknown Speaker 58:57 agree, that's a great point. Unknown Speaker 59:00 Are we done? Unknown Speaker 59:01 I don't see any more questions. Unknown Speaker 59:03 No hands? Speaker 1 59:04 No hands up. No more questions. I think we're in good shape. Do you guys have any kind of like, parting thoughts? Or? Speaker 2 59:15 I didn't think about that one. No, I mean, I just think, like so many things is we're all together in this. I've seen other people very active in trying to support this issue from different perspectives. And certainly, me my department, Northeastern University is all about working with the rest of the world to see if we can have positive impact in a time like this. So and I leave it at that if I can help anybody reach out and I will respond. Yeah, Unknown Speaker 59:52 same I you know, I put our email addresses up here happy to answer any individual questions. I would just, you know, re emphasize is what I what I've said a few times, which is compassion, not just for, you know the team and what everybody is dealing with, but for yourself as a leader and as a person as well. Speaker 1 1:00:10 Great, thank you so much. On behalf of autumn, I want to thank both of you for this great discussion. And I want to thank all of you who attended, there was some great questions. We hope you got some good information. A evaluation will pop up when you close out of the webinar, so please complete that that'll help us in the future. One last shout out to our annual webinar sponsor Marshall, Gerstein and Borun. And a recording of this webinar will be available within just a few days. We'll have it available under your my Autumn section of the website. I believe that is all so this will conclude our program for today. Thank you for joining us and have a lovely afternoon. Unknown Speaker 1:00:54 Bye Ted. See you later. Transcribed by https://otter.ai