The coronavirus has already taken a massive toll on the economy, as businesses of all sizes have had to let employees go because of stay-at-home orders. But in order to keep staff on payroll, companies like Seattle-based Gravity Payments are getting creative.

Dan Price, founder and CEO of Gravity, found a way to keep paying all of his 210 employees, even though the company’s revenue has been cut in half. He asked each employee how much of a pay cut they’d be able to take for the next few months. By trimming salaries accordingly, Gravity now has enough reserves to keep everyone employed for up to a year under the current circumstances.

Gravity Payments, which launched in 2004, processes payments for 13,000 small businesses across the country, which gives Price a unique insight into how mom-and-pop shops are faring. “Across all of our merchants, there was a 55% drop in revenue over the last month,” Price tells me. “That is a bigger decrease than during 9/11 and during the Great Recession.” Gravity takes a cut of about 0.3% of the merchants’ sales, which means it’s seen a similar decrease in revenue. At the current rate, Price said the company would be out of business within four to six months.

Price gained national recognition in 2015 when he set Gravity’s minimum salary at $70,000 after reading a study about income and happiness. The current crisis demanded another out-of-the-box approach, as economists believe the impact of the coronavirus will be enormous—unemployment claims have already dwarfed any other time in history.

So on March 19, Price called a companywide meeting to let employees know the state of the business and solicit creative strategies for navigating the next few months. He and Gravity COO Tammi Kroll also scheduled 40 hourlong meetings with small groups of employees to check in and gather ideas. “We just put all our cards on the table,” Price says. “And we listened.”

Some important learnings came out of those meetings. First, employees agreed that they wanted to avoid raising fees for Gravity’s customers, which Price says are already suffering losses between 40% and 80% in revenue. (Some have already shuttered.) Everybody on the team was willing to make some sort of financial sacrifice if it meant the company stayed in business and people kept their jobs. But employees were in very different situations: Some had big financial responsibilities, while others were on slightly more stable footing. “Some had family members who had just been laid off, some just had babies or bought houses,” Price recalls. “Even a 10% decrease for some families could pull the rug out from under them. But there were others who said they had a savings that could buffer them for several months.”

Together, the Gravity team settled on an unconventional strategy. Each person was given a form that allowed them to privately express how much, if anything, they could sacrifice financially in terms of a pay cut. “We didn’t want to do it in public, because we didn’t want someone who couldn’t afford to take a big pay cut to do so just for the optics of it,” Price explains.