- Nir Polak, CEO of Exabeam, was on a mountain when he learned that four of his employees had contracted COVID-19 after returning from a huge cybersecurity conference.
- The news affected Exabeam employees, customers, and the public, and Polak needed to snap into crisis mode to track the spread of the disease.
- One employee, Chris Tillett, was put into a medical coma and the company nervously watched his condition and traced who he might have been in touch with.
- All four employees have since recovered.
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Nir Polak was skiing in Utah when he got an email no CEO would want to receive: four of his employees had tested positive for the coronavirus after returning home from a conference where they had interacted with other employees, customers, and the public. One of them was so ill that he'd checked into the hospital.
"This was in early March, before COVID was everywhere," says Polak, the CEO of Exabeam, a San Francisco Bay Area-based cybersecurity company. "We didn't have a roadmap."
The gravely sick employee, Chris Tillett, required a medically induced coma and a ventilator to keep him alive. Polak's mind whirred: How do you guide a company through a crisis in which one of their coworkers is fighting for his life with a disease some of them and their customers might soon get too?
Standing there in his skis, Polak called his company's head of human resources and discussed next steps. All other employees needed to shelter in place immediately and cancel all travel and meetings until they knew who had been in contact with their infected colleagues.
They discussed how they could help Tillett's family navigate the crisis. In the days that followed, Polak set up a war room where he and other execs would track the possible spread of the virus by building a chart of everyone the employees had contact with recently and reaching out those people.
The conference added a significant challenge to the company's situation. The firm didn't just need to address employees' health, but anyone Tillett might have had contact with at RSA, a 40,000-attendee cybersecurity trade show. And he couldn't help because he was in coma, fighting for his life.
The company reached out through email and social media to prospects and customers, and worked with Tillett's manager to determine who he might have engaged with. HR stayed in close touch with Tillett's family, helping his wife, who was quarantined with two infants, to navigate her insurance.
Angela Schenone, senior director of global human resources, said that the team moved "incredibly fast" so that anyone who might be in danger could monitor and protect themselves.
"Our priority was to communicate quickly, transparently and effectively with as much helpful information as possible," she said.
Polak says once the company learned the gravity of the situation, it had to throw out any concerns about potentially damaging the company's reputation with customers or the public by tying itself to the coronavirus.
"We plunged in knowing that we might get bad PR," he said. "We didn't care. It was people's lives at stake."
Deb Woolridge, a New York HR consultant, says Exabeam followed the right steps.
"These are not easy conversations to have - bringing such news to a company - but they are necessary," she said. "They are ethical, human and an unfortunate reality."
She said that other companies in similar situations could also set up an employee assistance program, create a resource center for employees to learn how it's handling work assignments, and send around a daily update.
All four Exabeam employees who attended the conference and tested positive for the virus are now healthy.
Tillett, who became Connecticut's first case of the virus, is back home with his wife and twin babies. He is effusive in his praise for Polak and the company.
"Nir, our hardworking HR team, my East Coast colleagues, and beyond stepped up and took great care of me and my loved ones," he said. "I'm proud to be a part of Exabeam."