"Remote Work as a Form of Resilience"

Below is an article originally written by Mariano Suarez-Battan, Co-Founder & CEO at PowerToFly Partner MURAL, and published on March 12, 2020. Go to MURAL's page on PowerToFly to see their open positions and learn more.

The uncertainty and fear around the world not only affects us as a business, but also as humans. We're focused on keeping our business moving forward, while taking the time to care for ourselves and our families. Some thoughts from our CEO and co-founder, Mariano.

The world has changed. We are now fighting a virus on a worldwide scale. Our priority as a global society is to slow down the spread of the virus with hygiene precautions and social distancing whenever possible. We also need to aid healthcare professionals as they care for the sick and support scientists working on medical solutions.

Yet, life goes on.

We first saw major business events being canceled or postponed, and we are now witnessing university campuses being shut down. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Millions of workshops, meetings, and classes will shift to an online environment or get canceled altogether.

Here at MURAL, we are receiving thousands of new user requests per day. Naturally, people come to us looking for a digital workspace in which to collaborate, but our customers also need to improve how people work together remotely in complex creative problem-solving workshops, client engagements and other situations typically done in person.

Remote work (as an extreme mode of flexible work) has never been more vital for companies to stay alive. This unexpected global event has made clear to everyone that remote work is not only a cool work perk, it's a key capability.

The good news is after the toughest times have passed, we will be more resilient as a people.

How MURAL is preparing

Remote work is part of our DNA, not just something our product enables, and is unto itself part of our mission and values. We have staff working remotely across six different time zones and continents around the world. Given our remote-first culture, we are not expecting any major business continuity problems of our own as long as we stay healthy.

Here are some extra measures we are taking, given the higher demand:

• We created a Remote Work Resiliency Plan, which anyone can use to deploy a durable remote work culture.
• We've adopted a "work-from-home by default" policy for both our San Francisco and Buenos Aires offices, while the rest of our 140-person team works remotely from around the world.
• We've shifted existing resources and strategies to align around the best customer experience we can provide. We are adding support resources to accommodate the expansion of the MURAL community.
• Our engineering teams are on call, as always, to maximize responsiveness should any problems arise.
• We have scaled our server capacity to cope with the increasing demand.

How we're stepping up

We understand change can be hard, and remote work feels very different when it's your only option. We are here to help make the transition as smooth as possible for our customers. To reinforce our commitment to provide the best experience to current and prospective members around the world, below is a summary of what we've offered to date in response to COVID-19:

• MURAL recently introduced 90 days free for anyone signing up for MURAL for the first time. You simply sign up for a free trial and look for the customer service chatbot in the lower right of your dashboard. Reach out to us there and we will take care of it for you. We enacted this quickly to help teams who've had to suddenly pivot to working remotely, to give them extra time to get up to speed.
• Students and teachers: MURAL continues to be free for education purposes. Sign up here: https://mural.co/education.

• You can learn about best practices in these three #SuddenlyRemote webinars featuring remote collaboration experts Mark Tippin and Hailey Temple. There will be a weekly cadence of new content here, including announcements about additional webinars.
• You can explore this curated page of #RemoteWork resources from MURAL and our partners.
• For those new to MURAL, anyone can sign up for our weekly live demos (or watch a recording) on how to get started collaborating:

• Mondays, 1PM PT // 4PM ET
• Thursdays, 9AM PT // 12PM ET
• Tuesdays, 2pm CET (EMEA time zone friendly)

• If you are a consultant helping other organizations, join the MURAL Consultant Network:
• Free Plus workspace with 10 memberships (for your team) + 25 guest licenses (for your clients) Sign up here: https://mural.co/consultant
• Specialized training and support services
• Discounted membership pricing beyond your free licenses
• Download our free ebook "Facilitating Remote Workshops" which summarizes years of research and observations of best practices in one handy guide.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact support@mural.co. For existing customers, please contact your Account Executive or Enterprise Transformation Manager directly.

We sympathize with everyone around the world who are managing the uncertainties related to COVID-19 — it's impacting all of us. It's our goal to help ease any stress you may be feeling if you find yourself newly working from home and to keep business, schools, and organizations as productive as possible through this crisis.