Elastic COVID-19 update
This is an update to the email I sent internally on March 6, 2020, unfiltered, and the actions we are taking in dealing with COVID-19 situation, in the hope of helping others, as well as letting our community understand its impact. Here it is:
Team,
As we continue to closely monitor the global situation with COVID-19 (coronavirus), we wanted to share our next steps in our response. This is the delta from the email (and blog) I sent last week. The current status document has been updated to reflect it.
I know the situation continues to cause uncertainty and stress so we want to ensure our actions are clear to everyone at Elastic. We are here to support you with any decision you make, and here to help if needed. On to the updates:
Events
Last we announced that we will be moving our SLT+ELT offsites, the Field Leadership Offsite and the Sao Paulo and Raleigh ElasticOn Tours to virtual events. Our SLT + ELT offsite took place this week and while we missed being able to socialize with our colleagues we were able to cover the content and engage in interactive discussions making the new virtual format a success. We will continue to look at how we can virtualize events (community, Elastic days, workshops).
DoD Cyber Summit / April 1: Postponed to a later date, TBD
ElasticOn Gov Summit / April 2: Physical presence canceled, moved to virtual. Due to travel required from enough Elasticians outside of the event location, we are moving the event to be fully virtual.
GAH / May 11-15: After much deliberation, and in light of the new travel restrictions to the U.S., we have decided to move GAH to a fully virtual event. Coming together for GAH last year was a highlight for me and for many of you. Teams will be working on developing our content to optimize for virtual so please keep those dates blocked on your calendar as we re-imagine GAH 2020. We have full confidence we can make this a rich and productive experience.
Travel
No change to last week - all internal travel should be canceled. For travel to customer, partner or community events, local travel is ok, based on local authorities’ guidelines (shared in our status doc). Approval is required from your manager for regional travel or for any remote working arrangement for which you’d have to travel.
We certainly don’t want to get in the way of your vacations or other reasons for personal travel. However, if you travel to/from one of the CDC-assigned level 2 and 3 locations (including layovers), we recommend following CDC / WHO guidelines and self-quarantine for 14 days following your trip. Given the recent restrictions for the US, we also encourage you to plan for any (unexpected) restrictions you may face upon return as you plan a trip.
Offices
Last week we recommended and strongly encouraged that people work from home. Effective Friday, March 13 at 8:00 p.m. local time we are mandating that all of our employees work from home on a global basis. This policy will stay in effect through Friday, March 27th.
To our knowledge - as of today, Thursday, March 12th -- there are no confirmed cases of Elasticians with COVID-19. Nonetheless, this decision was made to help reduce the risk of the spread of the virus given its dynamic nature in the various communities of our employees. Your safety and well-being is our top priority. Given our highly distributed nature, the majority of you are already working from home and the tools we use inherently lend themselves to effectively working on a disparate basis. Our distributed by design philosophy has never been more important.
If you are typically office based and need help establishing an ability to work from home, we are removing the distance and commuting time constraints on the home working allowance of $1,000. The full policy is here (toward the bottom of the page) but in the period of COVID-19 disruption we will also allow office based Elasticians to also use this for anything you think is reasonable during this time to quickly make the home working arrangements possible such as a monitor, headphones, chair, or internet hotspot.
Time Off
If you need to log time off due to non-illness circumstances related to COVID-19 (school or daycare closings or to care for family) there is a specific time-off category in Workday of four weeks of leave. This will not consume your vacation or annual leave time.
Public Training in-Facility
Per last week, we have cancelled all public in-facility training classes and have moved them to our existing online/virtual instructor-led training for the next few months. We will assess the exact length and if we need to extend the timeframe weekly.
We have set up an email covid-19@elastic.co and a slack channel - #covid-19 - where you can reach out and ask questions. The most up-to-date information can always be found on our briefing document.
Take care,
Shay