Barber: Warriors turn to video conferencing to keep the ball bouncing

The Golden State Warriors have been admired and analyzed as an organization since the team caught fire in 2014. But the franchise is being put to the test like never before.

“I think we’re all really thankful to be in an organization that currently has a really, really bad business model,” Warriors president Rick Welts said by phone recently. “We’re in the live audience business. All of our revenue is generated by events we stage at Chase Center. We have none of that right now. But we do maintain all of our expenses.”

In other words, everyone on the payroll is still getting wages. And despite the closure of arenas and the absence of meaningful basketball, there is work to be done. Welts said the team has basically gone into early offseason mode. He and his staff are busily (and optimistically) selling season tickets and suites for 2020-21, cementing sponsorship programs and booking concerts at Chase Center for this fall.

But the coronavirus pandemic has forced the Warriors to examine the way they operate.

Welts said the shutdown has nudged the team to “take the extra time that we have now to cause ourselves to really think outside the box in terms of how we can improve the experience for when fans are back in seats for next season. That’s actually been very intellectually stimulating, I think.”

A lot of companies have been forced to reconfigure their modes of business and communication during widespread stay-at-home orders. The Warriors, a high-profile sports entity with roughly 500 full-time employees, perhaps have a greater challenge than most.

But the response has been the same as other corporations, small offices and even families and groups of friends. The Warriors have taken their gatherings online.

In truth, they got a head start on this stuff. The team went to mandatory remote communications on March 16, hours before San Francisco Mayor London Breed imposed a stay-at-home order. The Warriors spent some time preparing, getting laptops and other equipment ready, and in some cases sending tech support into employees’ homes - back when that seemed like a reasonable thing to do.

The idea of electronically mediated meetings would seem to be anathema to the Warriors’ famed “culture.” This is a place where everyone has been encouraged to walk into Welts’ office, or coach Steve Kerr’s, or general manager Bob Myers’, when they have an idea worth discussing. It’s a team of people persons, and none of them has conducted business with people, in person, for a month.

“I love to operate that way, I love to be around a lot of smart people,” Welts acknowledged. “This isn’t as good as that. I have not found a way to replace that when we’re all home.”

And yes, it was clunky at first. The lead-in to a company-wide video conference a couple weeks ago was a comedy skit (why should these be any different than the scouting tapes put together by the Golden State coaching staff?) depicting a live meeting around a conference table that took on the more exasperating qualities of a chat via Zoom or GoToMeeting or Houseparty or RingCentral, which the Warriors use for all of theirs. One guy in the sketch glitched while answering a question and wound up transported outside the room, trying to log himself back in. Coworkers spoke over each other, paused at the same time, then spoke over each other again.

It got a lot of laughs, precisely because the experience had become so relatable.

“First week, we were probably spending most of our time saying, ‘Aaron, you’re on mute. You have to unmute yourself,’?” Welts said. “We were all getting the knack of remembering. We have had a much larger-than-usual population of dogs and children appear in our meetings than we would have normally had.”

And yet it wasn’t the misfires Welts couldn’t stop talking about when I spoke to him. It was the surprising efficiency of the whole operation.

“I’ve been amazed,” Welts said. “I was skeptical about how we could operate as a 500-person-employee company with working remotely. I admit to being a little bit old-school. I like being in the office, I like having a lot of people around. I was a little skeptical of how well we could function when we have a mandatory work-from-home policy. And I have been just blown away at how successful it has been to this point.”

Welts insists he has never been a technology whiz. “I would say I was below average,” he said when pressed for a rating.

Fortunately for him, the Warriors have a larger and better-paid support staff than most of us. People like Brian Fulmer, the team’s director of IT, and executive assistant Randolph Lim, whom Welts calls “the man behind the curtain for all our big meetings,” have kept things humming.

Welts has become so bullish on remote meetings that he insists they are in some ways better to the old corporeal model. For example, NBA commissioner Adam Silver made a guest appearance on the company-wide conference last week. So did Kerr, who is sheltering in San Diego. That never would have happened if Welts had hosted the event in person. Team doctor Robert Nied, who lives in Santa Rosa, has been “by far our most popular guest” during this confusing pandemic, according to Welts.

“The idea that I can click on my RingCentral app and at 9:30 in the morning have the 20 people that we would have assembled in a meeting room at Chase Center, all there on the screen,” the Warriors president said. “And it’s kind of funny. Everybody’s on time. Shocking, right? Nobody’s having trouble getting to the office because the train’s not running right or there’s an accident on the freeway.”

Welts believes his staffers have been just as engaged online as they are in the office, and may even use better etiquette as they make an effort to take turns speaking.

“I gotta tell you, it’s really opened my eyes,” he said. “I think there’s going to be lasting impact and benefits from having been forced to work this way. I have become a believer that this can be an efficient and productive way to work.”

Perhaps other Warriors employees are among the converts. As of Friday afternoon, the organization had logged a total of 2,756 video meetings since March 16, spanning 691,887 minutes, with 16,448 participants. (Yes, RingCentral tracks these numbers.)

And Welts has been one of the most active users. He is conducting perhaps a half-dozen one-on-one conversations daily, plus small-group brainstorms, new task force meetings - these now include a COVID-19 task force that meets three mornings a week, and another that is exploring the conversion of Chase Center to a cashless facility - and those every-other-week, company-wide town halls, which have averaged 350 participants. Welts sends a message to everyone in the organization at the end of each business day, with relevant updates.

I spoke to Welts by phone. As we wrapped up, it struck me that it would have been more appropriate to conduct the interview through our laptop cameras.

“We could have!” Welts said.

The truth is, I’m trying to catch up to the Warriors on this front. Now I know how the Houston Rockets feel.

You can reach columnist Phil Barber at 521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Skinny_Post.