"It felt like the world was falling apart"

Dunn: When the Tom Hanks thing broke, that brought it home to people in the headquarters. If Tom Hanks can get this illness, then probably just about anybody can. … The news that Tom Hanks had it was such a significant piece of bringing it home to the personal, because people feel such a personal connection to Tom Hanks. I sat in the communications and press department. We had a wall of televisions, and every television had the breaking news story about Tom Hanks on it. And it was a moment where everyone was looking at each other like “wow.”

Tatum: Up until that point, you read the news stories, you saw the cases, you saw people dying, getting sick, but then when someone like Tom Hanks gets it, you’re like, OK, this is real, this is someone we all know. That was a little bit of a wake-up call for everybody that you needed to pay attention to this thing.

Christie: The gravity of telling everybody that they had to work from home for the foreseeable future — not knowing what that end would be — I felt it myself. We didn’t make that decision lightly. I know there was a lot of back and forth [among company executives], as there always is, on [the remote work announcement]. We’re all on a Google Doc, changing and wordsmithing. People were editing, and then somebody would be editing on top of that. Really trying to work in real time as much as we could and get things going. … This was really almost an overnight flip of the switch — globally, too, which was huge. But I will tell you, it was probably as seamless as it could be, because people understood the why. The why was we want you to be safe.