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The Biggest Mistake I Made as an HR Leader Navigating the Pandemic

And why you should rethink this zoom-related assumption

Jessica Donahue, PHR
Index
4 min readSep 23, 2021

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Requiring employees to be on camera does more harm than good
Photo: Alex Green/Pexels

I hadn’t yet taken the leap from full-time employee to self-employed consultant when the pandemic first began shuttering the doors of workplaces across the US. At the time, I was working as an HR Director and was responsible for leading learning & development (L&D) initiatives for my company.

After suddenly sending our employees home to weather the pandemic from their kitchen counters and makeshift desks, my focus pivoted from executing our regularly scheduled L&D programming to figuring out how to support the needs of our newly-remote workforce.

I had no trouble finding a plethora of well-intentioned advice from remote work “experts.” Quite the opposite, it seemed all anyone was writing about was how to support managers in their quest to keep remote team members engaged.

Within a couple of weeks, I had collected bits and pieces of advice from thought leaders across the web and consolidated the most helpful nuggets into a training for leaders on how to lead remote teams.

Overall, I think most of what I recommended in that training was valuable. But, looking back, there is one thing I got wrong that I wish I could go back and do differently.

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Jessica Donahue, PHR
Jessica Donahue, PHR

Written by Jessica Donahue, PHR

Fractional HR & People Ops for Startups & Early Stage Companies

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