This is the third of a three-episode series exploring the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic in legislatures and how it affected state legislative staff. On this episode, three legislative staff leaders discussed how procedures changed in the aftermath of the pandemic, what they learned personally about leadership and how their staff performed under the extraordinary challenges of the health emergency.
This is the third of a three-episode series exploring the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic in legislatures and how it affected state legislative staff.
We sat down with Jill Reinmuth, staff director for the Office of Program Research in the Washington House; Eric Nauman, principal fiscal analyst for the Minnesota Senate; and Sabrina Lewellen, assistant Secretary of the Arkansas Senate and the current NCSL staff chair.
The three legislative staff leaders discussed how procedures changed in the aftermath of the pandemic, what they learned personally about leadership and how their staff performed under the extraordinary challenges of the health emergency.
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Ed: Hello and welcome to “Our American States,” a podcast from the National Conference of State Legislatures. I’m your host, Ed Smith.
JR: We knew we had a lot ahead of us, but we didn’t know exactly what form that was going to take or even you know how long that would last. How long would this pandemic continue. How would our needs change over time.
Ed: That was Jill Reinmuth, staff director for the Office of Program Research in the Washington House. She is my guest along with Eric Nauman, principal fiscal analyst for the Minnesota Senate, and Sabrina Lewellen, assistant secretary of the Arkansas Senate and the current NCSL staff chair. They sat down on this episode to discuss this question “What do you wish you knew in February 2020 at the outset of the pandemic that would have helped you deal with what was coming?”
This is the third in a three-episode series that is following the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic in legislatures and how it affected state legislative staff. On this episode, the three legislative staff leaders discussed how procedures changed in the aftermath of the pandemic, what they learned personally about leadership and how their staff performed under the extraordinary challenges of the health emergency.
Here is our discussion.
Sabrina, Jill, Eric, welcome to the podcast. So, this is the third in a series of podcasts we’ve done focused on legislative staff and exploring what we’ve learned in the aftermath of the pandemic. For this episode, we want to explore this question “what do I wish I knew in February 2020 that would have helped me deal with what was coming?” We want to address that question on how was that experience and what was learned help people in the other challenges in emergencies that are sure to come up and kind of inevitable in legislature. Just to kick it off, let me ask you to tell the listeners just briefly about what you do in the legislature. Sabrina, why don’t you go ahead and start.
SL: Hi. I thank you so much for having me. I’m Sabrina Lewellen. I’m the deputy director and assistant secretary of the Arkansas Senate. I’m in my 22nd year of service to a little over 3½ million Arkansans. What I do in my role is I am second in command to our deputy and our principal secretary. So, in her absence, I help to facilitate the sessions. My primary role is I am the voting clerk so I record every single vote, the roll calls and the soundtrack of the senate here in Arkansas so whatever they say, I record. And I’m also the backup to the individual positions along the processing lines of our bills if someone is absent. In the interim, I have a contingency services office that is managed by a member of our staff, but I used to manage it so in the absence of someone, if I need to, I kick in there. And then I handle special projects, citations and other things that may be needed. And I’m certainly honored this year to serve as the NCSL staff chair.
Ed: And Jill, how about up there in beautiful Washington State.
JR: Thank you, Ed. I’m Jill Reinmuth. I’m the director of the Office of Program Research at the House of Representatives. And our office provides policy, legal and fiscal services for the House of Representatives, the standing committees and individual members. Our services run the gamut. They, we research analysis, bill drafting, budget development and committee administration. Our office is nonpartisan. We work with house members on both sides of the aisle and across the political spectrum. As the director of the office, I have broad responsibilities for its work, collaborating with the attorneys, analysts and assistants to our who make up the office.
Ed: Eric, how about there in the Twin Cities. I think that is where your office is right.
EN: Yes, it certainly is. We are in St. Paul. Ed, thank you so much for asking me to join you and I’m just so thrilled to be here with Sabrina and Jill – good friends. My role is as principal fiscal analyst for the Minnesota State Senate. I’ve been doing legislative service for about 30 years. I began with New Jersey and then continued on here in Minnesota or the last 26 or so. I also serve very similar to Jill in a nonpartisan role supporting research and fiscal work associated with the Minnesota state budget. There is about a dozen or so fiscal staff in our office and about 14, 15 attorneys that all do that work including some research staff and some drafting support specialists all of which provide the nonpartisan research and fiscal analysis and attorney work for the Minnesota State Senate.
Ed: Well great. And if anyone missed that, you guys all are veterans. You have a lot of years doing this and that’s why I’m so glad to have you on because I think that’s the kind of perspective that I would like you to share with other legislative staff around the country. Eric, let me stay with you for a second. What are your thoughts on this core question we want to explore. What do you wish you knew in early 2020 when the pandemic started?
EN: In March of 2020, I wish I had known the public policy carnival that we were about to embark upon. There were so many ups and downs. It’s a funny story. When the Minnesota Senate was sent home for remote operations, my wife and I took a look at each other and said this is our opportunity to get every room in the house cleaned. We will take an hour every afternoon to sit down and make sure that we get through every room and do a really deep clean. It was just so naïve. I think we got through maybe one room before the chaos and everything that was coming our way just sort of landed very, very quickly. We just truly imagined we’d have that kind of luxury during the pandemic.
Legislatures who were on the front line of that pandemic and there were a vast array of problems that were coming our way that I just wish I had been able to anticipate. I wish I’d be able to go back primarily and tell my past self to be nimble and prepared for all the different kinds of questions that were coming our way. I would think from new public policy questions to nothing legislative operations in any way. New personnel questions. Figuring out allowable uses of federal funds with almost no information. New legislative oversight methods. Continuing to learn new technology and maintaining the frontlines. Communication while we were online. And frankly, it was a workday that just never seemed to end. So, I wish I’d be able to go back and just find a free moment and say when this comes upon you, strive to be nimble and just take a little time to anticipate all the chaos that is coming.
TM: 06:59
Ed: Now, Sabrina, I know you’ve given a lot of thought to this question over a period of time because you and I have talked about this. I wonder what you wish you knew.
SL: Eric did an excellent job providing a snapshot of the reality that we were all smacked with unbeknownst to us the marathon we signed up for, but we didn’t know we were signing up for. So, what I wish conceptually that I knew and better understood in February of 2020 was one of the things I really tried to drive home this year as staff chair and that is that legislative staff truly are the indispensable facilitators of democracy and that we were going to have to lean and lean it hard and own it all because without us whatever was coming our way was not going to happen. And so that would be driver so that we could have a better understanding and maybe be flexible in the frameworks, forgiving to ourselves. Give ourselves space and grace that we needed to get through it because of the indispensableness of legislative staff. That is absolutely what I wish that I had a better understanding of. It’s always been true. We know it. We feel it. But we were about to exercise it and flex it in a new way and a new day that we had not seen before.
Ed: And Jill. How about for you. What do you wish you knew February four years ago?
JR: There is so much that I wish I had known back at that time and in hindsight, you know, a good portion of that was just unknowable. You know I think both Eric and Sabrina sort of spoke to that that we knew we had a lot ahead of us, but we didn’t know exactly what form that was going to take or even, you know, how long that would last. How long would this pandemic continue? How would our needs change over time and I have these recollections from you know early March of 2020, Washington was in a fortunate position in that we were very close to adjourning sine die when things started changing really rapidly so we were in the final stages of our legislative session. We would gather for large group briefing crowded together shoulder to shoulder in a room unmasked hearing from state health officers about what to expect. Activities that a week later were strictly you know prohibited that we shouldn’t be doing large group meetings because of the risks that were involved at that time. So, it was just a period where we were constantly sort of reassessing taking in new information. Figuring out how to mitigate risks. How to innovate to get the job done. You know there was never any doubt I think as to the extraordinary effort that legislative staff were capable of and that legislative staff would make. It would have been reassuring to know how successful we would ultimately be in doing that work because we were having to take chances with a lot of things. But given the quality of staff, the commitment of staff, those things turned out well and successfully and left us with lessons that persist to this day.
Ed: I think one of the things that occurred to me at the time was that we all know life is uncertain, but boy it’s really tough to have that in your face for years actually. So, I think that’s a lot of what you are describing is trying to come to grips with something that most of us would like to minimize in our lives. We would like to have a little more predictability. Jill, I wonder if I can stick with you and ask is there anything specific that happened in your legislator that was handled differently in the aftermath of the lessons learned during the pandemic?
JR: It’s almost a question of what wasn’t handled differently because Washington was a state that really implemented almost fully virtual operations for much of our subsequent legislative session. But just to zero in on one particular aspect of it, how we use technology. It really changed our operations both behind the scenes and also in ways that were highly visible. Behind the scenes, I would highlight how we use Zoom and Microsoft Teams for all types of meetings now with one another, with agencies, with stakeholders, with constituents. They are practically ubiquitous and require nothing more than our laptops and our phones to execute those.
Out in front, I would highlight our efforts around remote public testimony. In the years before the pandemic, there were a number of pilot programs allowing for remote testimony here in Washington State. During the pandemic, committee operations were fully virtual and all testimony was taken over Zoom. And then in the most complex of all mechanisms, many operations are hybrid meaning that members and staff and some testifiers are in person, but many, many others are participating remotely. You know just last year, there was a budget hearing during which the committee heard testimony from about 50 testifiers who were in the room and nearly 200 more that participated via Zoom. They are just a myriad of other tools and applications that are different now or brand new. And the resources that we use routinely in 2024 weren’t even available just five years ago in 2019.
Ed: Well, I think a lot of people not in our world would be pretty surprised at the level of innovation and change that legislatures went through certainly there in Washington State given the legislatures are often tagged as sort high bend organizations. Eric, how about for you. Did you see a similar level of change?
TM: 12:51
EN: Yeah. We certainly did. Jill hit all the high points. All of those dynamics Jill and I often will say Minnesota looks a lot like Washington. Washington looks a lot like Minnesota in a lot of ways so our response to the pandemic was very similar to the dynamics that Jill had just identified. But maybe one piece that I will highlight that’s a little bit different than the items that Jill identified with how we handled the appropriations for pandemic related responses. The executive branch at that time wanted ultimate flexibility on the capacity to spend money and it didn’t know what it didn’t know. It didn’t know what it needed to spend money on so it wanted the legislature to basically provide open ended appropriations and then a lot of just trust us and we will figure it out. And I don’t say that in a pejorative way. It was just a how do we manage something we don’t know.
Oh, an interesting dynamic in Minnesota, we may have been only one of two states that were in this dynamic. We had a republican controlled senate and a democratic controlled house and a democratic executive. So the body that I support, the Minnesota Senate, we are the professional skeptics. They wanted to take out let’s get more information. Let’s not give away the store. We want to have appropriate legislative oversight. So we had the balancing act of how do we allow the executives to be nimble and make all the appropriations it needs in spending our choices that it needs while still giving the senate and to some degree the house that level of oversight. So, we developed a new commission called the Legislative COVID Response Oversight Commission. And its job was to review within 24 hours almost every item of expenditure. Track what the executive branch wanted to spend and I thought this was so brilliant when we came upon the idea. Ah we can actually look at the items of expenditure and what did the executive branch do. You can just take a guess. They gave all the items of expenditure at about 3:00 on a Friday afternoon almost every week. So what happens with 24 hours to review, we spent every Friday and every Monday morning or every Saturday morning rather going through each one of these items of expenditure. And boy, I really wished we had anticipated that. With a little bit of time and less urgency as the pandemic proceeded, we were able to build in 3 days of review because it wasn’t quite so urgent, but it certainly ruined a lot of weekends.
Ed: The consequences of good intentions. That’s for sure. And Sabrina, what kind of change or did you see change in Arkansas?
SL: Yes, there was change. We retrofitted our chamber with some of the most beautiful plexiglass I saw with curved edges and everything that we possibly could do to make it look attractive so that members could sit next to each other. And we put up safety precautions to the best of our ability because things started shifting while we were in physical session. We had protocols in place and check ins and spacings and the way we ran committees and making sure there was plenty of space between where the public was and where the committees were. There was a lot of retrofitting and recalibration to get through not only that session, but our regular session in 21. But I’m going to say a little bit of a difference on the aftermath side and that is Arkansas has done as much as possible to return back to business as usual as it possibly could. I have no doubt that in our world nonpartisan staff in our chambers and in our legislative supportive agencies that there are some components that probably have been kept internal and have some of those options available. But for example, in the senate, we never started remote work. Never. We have plenty of space so we never worked from home. However, we have the option now if we need to utilize it. So, we had a fire in the building a couple of weeks back so there were 3 days we were able to work from home because it is not a foreign concept. But we haven’t implemented that as any part of our professional paradigm. There are some things that we did not take on, but we again, we did leave people where we were. Meet people where they were at the moment. Circumstances we flexed, but we have returned to as business as usual as much as possible. And if you can kind of consider in place, some of them are optional and some of them are more operational when it comes to the legislative agencies.
Ed: Sabrina, let me stick with you for a second. You know one thing I was struck by during the pandemic was the competency and innovation at both the state and local level. I’m not sure that the public understands that, but the perspective I had I was really quite surprised by how quickly people moved and how many different ideas people came up with. We talked about this a little bit just earlier, but talking here specifically about state legislative staff, what are your thoughts about that. Did you feel both in your state and as you looked around the country, talked to people that people really roasted the occasion or was it hit or miss or. What were your thoughts on that?
TM: 18:17
SL: Across the 99 chambers in our states and commonwealths and territories, I wish the electorate could fully understand how proud they should be of the heroic response that legislative staff have always had, but really displayed in a new way over the several months that I’ve been saying anywhere between 60 to 70 months when America needed it most because the states needed it most from how they shifted in their own lives because these are still human beings and parents and family members, professionals, citizens in their own right doing their own thing as best they could on the weekends they were allowed to have, the nights they were allowed to have when they weren’t working late continuing to balance while doing all the other things that the legislators required. And they were still the professionals that they’ve always been for they are state legislators. Absolutely heroic. One of the things we haven’t seen and we may not see is sort of the deep breath that I think our country should take following the pandemic to reflect on what was. Certainly, a lot of sadness and loss, but there is a lot to be proud of that we were able to do the way that we did it as quickly as we did it, as safely as we did it and it really, really very much falls a lot to our states and the innovation and a celebratory piece to that and it comes to legislative staff. And that is definitely what I’ve heard. There is a significant exhaustion to that too. I certainly have felt it and I say to my colleagues across the country the tests and the testing that we’ve been put through has been like none other because of the layering. We are professionals again, but we are still human beings, family members, parents. Just the caring. All those other things simultaneously and it’s been a big ask of us.
Ed: Well one of the earlier podcasts in this series involved an interview with Dr. Melissa Furman and she talked about burnout being a very persistent problem she sees in the workplace not just in legislatures, but kind of across the board and that sort of sounds like what you are saying. So, Jill, what did you see there in Washington and in talking with your colleagues around the country in terms of how staff rose to the occasion.
JR: It is hard to know where to begin because it was so extraordinary the efforts that were made by staff across the organization here in Washington State and what I hear from my colleagues across the country. The degree of creativity of collaboration and just extraordinary commitment to public service is just as Sabrina said it’s always been there. But it really, you know, went into overdrive for purposes of making sure that the legislature or the legislatures as a whole were successful that they could continue to not only operate, but serve the people of their respective states as effectively as possible given the circumstances we were dealt. You know I talked a little bit about technology earlier and just to drill down into a particular example, I can’t say enough about our legislative technology agency and the manner in which they partnered with our office and also with other House and Senate offices and the contributions that were brought to the table by those respective offices too. Understand what our business needs were to explore our options. Really to try and use our resources in the best ways possible. You know along with our fully virtual committee operations and our remote testimony. Those efforts led to so many changes. You know new systems for receiving written testimony. New procedures for recording committee reports. New tools for dropping budgets. New quality control methods for various work products like build summaries and amendments. Things that still had to be done at the utmost level of quality and people put their heads together. Our technology experts and our legal and fiscal and committee operations and research experts to figure out new ways of continuing that work so that there wouldn’t be you know we wouldn’t skip a beat and we really didn’t. I mean that’s just really one exceptional example where staff came together to ensure the continuity of legislative operations in the face of an emergency for the benefit both of the legislators that we serve and for the people of our states.
Ed: Yeah, boy, that technology piece just comes up again and again and again. I’ve thought a few times like what would we have done in 1975. Eric, how about for you. Technology obviously a piece of it, but what else would you say about the staff you worked with.
EN: Ed, you know as I was listening to both Sabrina and Jill talk about this and I’m struggling to think what do I have to add and there is a phrase that legislators in Minnesota often use which is everything has been said, but not everyone has said it. So, I’ll just add a little bit of communication about it as well. It is my indelible impression from the pandemic just that legislative staff were frequently building the plane and trying to figure out the problem that confronted us at the same time that we were flying it. We have a duty to the public and we needed to build that new plane, that new aircraft and it’s flying along delivering legislative services and it is the staff that made it work. I’ll be honest. We are the caretakers of the institution if you will so it was our job to try to figure out how within the confines of legislative rules and the Constitution do we deliver all the services that we as an institution are required to deliver to the people of Minnesota or Arkansas or Washington at the same time that we are having all these restrictions and changes put upon us. It is the dynamism of legislative staff that made it work. It was, for me at least, 3 of the most difficult years of my career. But as I look back on it and knew what this track record in the rearview mirror, you get to see a whole bunch of metaphors in this discourse. I would say it is also one of my proudest.
Ed: Thanks, Eric. We will be right back with the rest of our discussion after this short break.
TM: 25:06
I’m back with Sabrina, Jill and Eric. Eric, one thing I’m curious about is whether the COVID experience might help legislatures or states generally deal with a future emergency such as a flood or some other natural disaster or was the pandemic unique and really doesn’t help us prepare for other emergencies.
EN: I think it is a good question. Those disasters that you talk about I think we know how to deal with. In Minnesota right now, we are dealing with a lot of we’ve had a lot of rain in the last couple of weeks and there’s many cities throughout the state that are flooding. We know how to deal with those. They are awful for those people who are experiencing it. I think what you are asking about, allow me to put words in your mouth, is the more extensive disaster like what we went through with the pandemic. Those I think are the lessons that we need to take and if you will permit me this is my point where I’m gonna sort of lean on NCSL and the professional association that I belong to, the National Association of Legislative Fiscal Officers, as a result of the pandemic, I truly learned the benefit of NCSL and NALFO. And what I’m leading on here is that there was so many things that we didn’t know. We’ve all talked about that. But during the beginning of the pandemic, I noticed that half my day emailing NCSL, emailing other legislative fiscal officers simply looking for information because when it all happened nationally, the federal government was in a world of uncertainty too so they gave us a whole bunch of responsibility. They gave us some resources to go with it, but they gave us conflicting advice and we did not know initially how to manage the money that the federal government was making available so everything is moving so fast and I and a whole bunch of other staff across the country were asked quick questions like how do we deal with X or how do we deal with Y. And I learned very quickly, I needed to swallow my pride and pick up the phone and call Patrick in Louisiana or Kirk in Alabama or Anthony in New Orleans you know a whole bunch of other people. We developed shared text streams. We had interviews and question and answer periods with folks through the US Treasury all of this led by the fiscal staff and NCSL. We traded rumors, but critically we shared ideas.
I started calling the other fiscal staff around the country my magic covid crutch because it was through sort of crowd sourcing the ideas that we all were sharing just simply on you mentioned technology earlier, Ed. This telephone was my lifeline to other people that were going through the same thing that I was going through and it made us more nimble. I think it made me better able to serve the questions that I was receiving from Minnesota legislature, legislators and if I look back on it, the primary lesson I think was to be able to ask questions of people that you trust and then really listen to the answer. And NCSL and NALFO became my trusted crutch for managing through those problems especially in the early days of the pandemic.
Ed: So, one critical ability is being able to share information in these situations. How about for you, Sabrina.
SL: Definitely. The pandemic I think is an apex moment in American history, but just the global community because of the nature of a pandemic. But with innovation, collaboration, communication and new components in this day and age it didn’t exist in the same way in the past, it is a teacher that has provided some best practices that is really important for us to always remember. And it highlighted for me personally and professionally the reality that again we’ve always known, but in a new way that we should appreciate the fact that NCSL is the convener. The ability to convene legislative staff, legislatures, to provide all of these avenues, the vehicles in which we are able to touch base with one another whether it is at a summit or in the interim times and as Eric said to share the information to build relationships quickly where would we have been without an organization like NCSL that is as experienced as NCSL is and now 50 years into it absolutely. It just was a game changer for institutions like legislatures who are normally slated in just about anything, but had to respond quicker every day and in some cases from hour to hour to make sure that things got done and the respective constituencies in which they served were receiving what they needed.
Ed: So, sort of what I hear both of you saying is it was almost a do-it-yourself ah experiment with legislature sort of figuring out cause there was no playbook for it. Was that how you saw it, Jill?
TM: 31:30
JR: I think there are some critical lessons that come from it. You know I was thinking about what Eric was saying about the flooding in Minnesota and some of the experiences with whether it’s an economic crisis or a natural disaster that have impacted our states and do from time to time. You know and Washington, I look back to the Nisqually Earthquake in 2001. It was a 6.8 magnitude. It was felt throughout the Puget Sound region, but it was very close to Olympia and came right in the middle of our legislative session in that particular year. But it was different. You know it was a discreet event. The earthquake happened and then it ended and then we had to pick up the pieces and figure out how to assess the damage and make plans and resume operations and we did that fairly readily you know with some adjustments for buildings that weren’t safe to be working in any longer. But the pandemic was different. It was you know one that continued for a much longer period of time and it evolved as we went to learn. There was always new information that we needed to take into account to adjust how we were proceeding. I would echo the comments that Eric and Sabrina made about the importance of NCSL and how the organization contributed to our success in that moment. You know when in person meetings were no longer possible, NCSL, the organization, and its staff and I really do want to give special credit to the NCSL staff for how quickly they pivoted also to step up and find new ways to continue their important work to strengthen state legislatures to be that great convener that Sabrina mentioned. We have webinars and discussion groups and part of that was to continue delivering training or providing issue information like the briefings that Eric was a part of. But some of it too was just that support to foster relationships among legislative colleagues from across the country that helped us exchange information, discuss strategies, compare notes on what was working and what wasn’t so that we could all do better in our respective states. And I think ultimately going through that experience it affirms for us what we’ve known for a long time that our legislative staff is capable of doing very hard things. This was perhaps the hardest. Yet we were still able to be successful in that work to serve our states, to serve our legislatures. And the value of connection with one another within our states and beyond our state borders was critical to that.
TM: 34:18
Ed: Jill, let me stay with you for a second and I’d like to ask each of you this if your legislature changed any rules or procedures as a result of pandemic and if those changes stayed in place once the emergency was over. What about there in Washington, Jill?
JR: Here in Washington, there were many, many temporary changes that were put into effect, but there are a few that are permanent or that have evolved a bit in the last couple of years. One is remote participation in official committee meetings and floor proceedings. While our members were participating mostly remotely during 2021, we now have a procedure in place that allows for remote participation for a member is experiencing a medical condition or an illness. So that was a change in our rules. It was broad originally and now it applies to these new circumstances. And another example is committee voting. Historically we would get out paper and we would have a recorded roll call vote on each bill on a piece of paper that staff would take care of and then in addition to that, we would pass around a piece of paper called our standing committee report and the members would be responsible for signing their names and recording their votes on that piece of paper. In an earlier podcast in this series, Sabrina talked about how it wasn’t just what we started doing, but also what we stopped doing. And staff now record each of those roll call votes electronically. That’s displayed on a screen in the hearing room for everyone in the room and viewing the VRRTW to observe and we don’t pass around paper. We don’t record votes on paper and there’s duplication any longer. So that was an efficiency that we gained during those years and have continued into today.
Ed: How about you Eric. Changes there in the senate or in the overall legislature.
EN: I think the most indelible mark is exactly what Jill talked about. The reality of a remote participation and what it might mean and I’ll be clear there are divergence of opinion about this. Some legislators really love the idea of continued remote participation while others say you know the pandemic is over, lets move back to how we do everything. I would tend to focus on the fact that in our collective history during the time of my career, it has evolved significantly. It used to be that when the legislature itself was going on a long debate late into the night, everyone had to stick around here in the office. And one of the dynamics is it is possible to go home and put the kids to bed, have dinner with your spouse and then log back in for a meeting that occurs after the floor session has completed. So, I’m leaning on how to change the life for staff a little bit. We can still be effective members of legislative staff while still not burning ourselves out and creating the work/life balance challenges that used to occur with much more frequency. Now I’m not saying we are all touchy people here in Minnesota and we’ve got everything figured out and it’s an easy place to work at all times. Anything but. It is still a very difficult demanding process, but if we can give folks a little bit of a break at various points in the session and use the technology that remote participation affords for both staff and legislators. But on the staff side, if it allows us to retain staff because it is not as burdensome then I think we have really provided a tangible benefit to the institution.
Ed: And how about for you, Sabrina.
SL: Lots of shifts and changes during COVID. Again, retrofitting our chambers to ensure that members who wanted to be there could be there safely as possible with plexiglass and spacing, etc. We did do remote participation and allowed members to Zoom in to participate in Senate votes, but we did create a temporary emergency procedure. We had to see them and hear them so they couldn’t have their cameras off. We had to be able to hear their voices so that we could verify it was them. So lots of changes along those lines and the same thing with committee setup. Public engagement participations spacing out. By and large in Arkansas though we’ve done as much as we could to go back to business-as-usual pre-COVID, but with our nonpartisan staff and nonpartisan agencies, I have no doubt that there are some nuisances and some things that they’ve kept in place whether as options to implement as Jill referenced medical emergencies, circumstances as needed or to implement in other ways to help keep staff such as the remote work option. But for the most part, most of everything that we used to do, we do have back in place. In the senate, we did not go to remote work. We never started that and we don’t have that as an option. It is only something utilized in emergent situations and it is usually the entire staff. It is not a component as an option to have remote work.
Ed: I mentioned I spoke with Dr. Melissa Furman on an earlier podcast as part of the series about some of the workplace lessons learned from the pandemic. One thing she pointed out was how important leadership was in keeping workplaces functioning. She made the point that it is easy to leave when things are calm, but when everything hits the fan the way it did during the pandemic, leadership becomes critical and very challenging. And so, on a personal level, I wonder and Sabrina, let me start with you, if there is any specific leadership lesson that you took away from this experience.
TM: 40:00
SL: You don’t have time to hear all of the leadership lessons that I learned over these months. But I will hit a couple of the highlights and a couple of them are just real reminders and recertifies in my mind and one of the biggest ones is every leader does not know how to execute leadership. To flex that muscle. To be able to get in the arena. To do the hard things. To be creative. To meet people where they are. To keep things calm. There are certain muscles and skillsets that leadership requires and not every person who is in a leadership role or in an apex position knows how to exercise and that’s one of the other beautiful things about legislative staff, we have so many gifts and talents at the table at any given time that in a room you’ve got some brain power, some past experience, some up and comers and if you allow the space and the opportunity for that collaboration, discussion, the end result really can be something that works best in the moment for the institution which is what every single one of our chambers in our legislative institutions needed more than every throughout the arc of the intense time of COVID. But everyone is in the position. They may not have actually had to exercise leadership and the type of leadership that was needed at this time.
The other thing is just the importance of gratitude. To remember that these are human beings who are in these roles doing things of service and in service to others and in our case for the various constituents these in which we serve, you cannot say thank you enough and really there is not enough we can do or say to truly express our appreciation for the sacrifices that were made and that we all made to some degree every day in this role because of what is necessary for the type of service that we give. And I think we would all do it again because of the type of dedication that we have as institutional staffers, but you need to say thank you to people and never forget the importance of that. So those are 2 things. Not every leader knows how to exercise leadership and you can’t say thank you enough.
Ed: Boy I think that gratitude piece is just so important and not mentioned probably enough. Eric, how about for you. A leadership lesson you took away from this. Maybe you have to boil it down from a bunch of them, but anything that stands out.
EN: I think that during the pandemic I learned the importance of saying I don’t know. So many things were uncertain and we were changing our operations and we just didn’t know how to feel our way through it. Many of the staff of our office came to the leadership in our office and asked questions about the pandemic and how to handle circumstances that were just new or unexpected. We started using weekly meetings to have those conversations and this is a practice that we continue today because people liked it. It was a way of keeping us all informed. But then in those meetings when I would get questions it would happen almost routinely how do we handle circumstance A or circumstance B. I didn’t know the answer and so often in a moment of crisis I think a leader will lead on the I need to display confidence and control and I know how to do handle the circumstance, but we didn’t know. So, I feel like one of the most important things that we did in our office was to just say I don’t know. It’s a great question. Let’s see what we can do to figure it out. Will you help me figure it out and lean on the expertise of the individuals in the office. And I think that was one of the most important tools that I tried to employ. I’m still using it today. I felt like it took the pandemic to really lean into that and I think it validates the question far more than just a simple here is the answer could ever do. I don’t know all the answers; none of us do. But in a circumstance like the pandemic there was let’s drop all pretense that any of us know how to get through this.
Ed: Well, I think you guys need to be on a panel separately about leadership. I think those were two of the better responses I’ve heard. Jill, how about for you. What did you take away from it?
JR: They set a really high bar I have to say and I guess I would pick up on some of the themes that both Sabrina and Eric have mentioned and say that the experience of the pandemic really affirmed for me some of those lessons that maybe you hear at various seminars and webinars talking about leadership. But very much that the success of the organization isn’t due to one person’s contributions. It’s due to the contributions of every member of that team. There is that sense of shared responsibility and therefore there should be sharing in the success of the organization as well. Eric talked about not knowing the answers to questions that were being posed to him and I was reminded of how often and how important it was to be open and adaptable and to consider the ideas that were coming from others within the organization. There are so many good ideas that were generated among the staff. There were so many important insights. That’s a good idea. We will need to think about it in this way or as it applies in this circumstance and that collaboration amongst the staff and the contributions that resulted from that were absolutely critical to the success. But being open to that and acknowledging those contributions expressing gratitude for those contributions recognizing the importance that every member of the team is contributing to its overall success I think is really critical. And that was a reminder you know day in and day out as we worked our way together through what we were facing.
Ed: Just some great thoughts about leadership lessons. We are going to wrap up and I would like to ask each of you if you have any final thoughts that we haven’t touched on yet. Boy we’ve been over a lot of ground, but I wanted to ask you one more time if you have anything else to share and Jill, why don’t you go ahead first.
TM: 46:36
JR: I just want to say how important it was to be able to connect with colleagues from across the country with people like Sabrina and Eric and others who helped me know that I was on the right track and sometimes helped me know when I was on the wrong one. But very grateful to them individually and to NCSL for creating those opportunities for us.
Ed: Eric, how about you. What final thoughts do you have?
EN: We’ve talked a lot about the positive outcomes of the pandemic. One of the things that I want to sort of open as a question is how intentional we need to be about our communication during the pandemic. Everything was a scheduled meeting. We had to arrange to talk to somebody. I remember vividly just working Teams and Zoom and spending a lot of time and effort just trying to connect with the staff because they were doing the same thing with other people at the same time so we were constantly rearranging the calendar to make it work. I think that there is a piece that we lost along the way. Particularly as we lead into online now that we have the technology. Now that we know how to use it, we are all using it much more frequently. Even this recording that we are doing here is done via electronic means because we are not all sitting together in the same room. We’ve lost that social serendipity that used to happen in the hallway where I’m walking down the hall maybe to go to the bathroom, get a cup of coffee and I bump into one of the staff in our office and it reminds me oh I needed to ask Jenna or Casey a question. And here is my opportunity. Or we spitball an idea back and forth. That kind of interaction I feel doesn’t happen as the way it used to. And legislatures, let’s be honest, are a people business. That is what we produce for a living is talk. You know everything from private conversations between 2 legislators in the back of the chamber to a staff question on the side during a committee meeting to a formal committee meeting. All of these things happen in person. Those conversations are what build trust between individuals. People from different sides of the aisle. If you think about this from a legislative perspective, they build trust through that interpersonal conversation. And if it has to be a scheduled meeting, maybe it doesn’t happen in quite the same way. So I worry about what that means for the institution. I think it remains to be seen what the long light path of how this proceeds into our future is, but I think it is important for us to ask the question. Some of the pandemic changes while valuable and helpful for the institution may have an inadvertent result where we are not having the interpersonal conversations in the way that we used to have them and something might get lost along the way. That’s what keeps me up at night, Ed.
Ed: Eric, I’m glad it’s not just cause I’m an old guy that I think face to face communication still has something that you can’t get electronically and I think as you all know I’m a pretty big fan of technology and a fairly sophisticated user of technology, but I kind of agree with you. Sabrina, you are going to get the last word here, but I also want to acknowledge for listeners that this series of podcasts were Sabrina’s brainchild and I think that if you listen to all 3 of them, you will find that there is a tremendous amount of information and I think that it’s important not to move on from the pandemic too quickly because it is one of the unique experience in all of our lives and there are lessons there that I think we are going to continue to learn for a very long time. And now Sabrina, let me give you the last word here in this podcast.
SL: Thank you, Ed, for bringing my idea to life. And a way that NCSL will be able to capture in an important year of celebration of 50 years the first half of its first entry of service. I really appreciate you doing it. I’m so so proud of what we’ve done so far and I hope it serves and supports legislative staff. Jill and Eric, thank you for joining me. You are 2 of my favorite humans for sure and 2 of the greatest legislative staffers I’ve ever met. My final thought is this and it’s a lesson I learned early in my career in a scary way because I wrote a very intense letter one day for a legislature and I was told to fax it yes back when faxing was a thing thing and I faxed it and I went home and I turned on the television and the letter was on the screen. It was on the news. I instantly thought I must have made a mistake and faxed it to the wrong location so I called my mother and I vomited all over here everything that happened and she said to me listen to your mother. Let this be a lesson to you nothing is small ever in this job. Not a phone call. Not an email. Not a conversation. Not a fax. Not a post it note. Nothing is small. This was before texting otherwise I’m sure she would have said texting. Nothing is small. And the pandemic was a circumstance that reminded the world in a way that again I don’t know that they really understand that when it comes to our institutions there is nothing small. Anything and everything we do really matters for longevity, for perpetuity, for the protection of things that are happening and our legislative staff are the indispensable facilitators of those processes and that also means of our democracy because we take nothing for granted and we treat nothing small. So, thank you for this opportunity for at least three of us across our county to share our thoughts and feedback on an arc of time that we will never forget. It very much imprinted our professional experiences.
Ed: Thank you all. I think this has been a great discussion and a great series of podcasts and Sabrina, again thank you for your very important role in getting these done. So take care all 3 of you.
SL: Thank you.
JR: Thank you.
EN: Thank you.
Ed: I’ve been talking with Eric Nauman of Minnesota, Sabrina Lewellen of Arkansas and Jill Reinmuth of Washington State about the aftermath of the COVID-19 Pandemic in legislatures and how it affected state legislative staff. Thanks for listening.
TM: 53:31
You can check out all the podcasts from the National Conference of State Legislatures by searching for NCSL podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast “Our American States” dives into some of the most challenging public policy issues facing legislators. On “Across the Aisle” host Kelley Griffin tells stories of bipartisanship. Also check out our special series “Building Democracy” on the history of legislatures.