Put your employees first while dealing with COVID-19

If you are running a business and are secretly hoping that the COVID-19 will not impact your company, you are missing the point. Your business is or will be affected, worse, there’s not much you can do about it. Your focus now should be on how to minimise the losses and speed-up the recovery. No-one blames you if you did not anticipate the virus, but the decisions you make now are under close scrutiny and will define how you get out of the crisis.

I believe the best you can do for your company and the society is to protect your employees. Just like you, they are living under great tension, look at the shelves in any supermarket (don’t go there if you don’t need to, just watch the news)! They feel the need to protect themselves and their family from an invisible enemy. Very likely you have been telling them along the years, and it is even written in your corporate values, that their safety and health is one of the company’s top priorities. It is time to prove those were not empty words.

Your priority should be to limit their exposure and chances of being infected. For that, you should:

1.      Maximize work from home

2.      Limit cross contamination

3.      Don’t decide alone

Maximize Work From Home

This seems like a no brainer. You don’t want colleagues looking at each other like if they were mass-destruction bioweapons, especially because there are chances that one of them will be.

Sooner or later, someone in your company will be diagnosed positive. You may feel tempter to wait until that moment, but why? Would you like to be that employee that suddenly finds out that he has been silently contaminating his colleagues? Wondering if they will recover or not?

Chances are that people working from home will be more productive than working at the office, pondering on what’s going on with their kids and their families. Dismayed by being required to be at the office, making themselves more vulnerable, while they could have stayed home.

Some companies are already well prepared for having people working remotely, for those it should be easy. For others, you may need to do things that you wouldn’t thought you would do – let the people bring their office computers home, use remote desktop solutions, plan to send them laptops by mail. I’m not an IT specialist, but this doesn’t seem to be rocket science.  

VPN to your systems may be a constraint, think about cloud hosting. For collaboration, I have been using Microsoft Teams extensively and the Redmond giant recently announced a free 6 months trial to support remote work during the crisis.

If your company is just starting to use these tools, plan for online training and assistance.

If you follow this, probably most of your people will be working from home, but you would likely need to have some in the office. That’s where the next step comes:

Limit Cross Contamination

For the people that still need to come to the office, limit their chance of cross contamination:

1.      Limit public transportation

2.      Set-up fixed teams

3.      Ban “hot-desks”

Public transportation in big metropoles looks like the perfect storm for a pandemic – high people density, low ventilation. Your employees are aware of that, let’s try to minimize their stress and their chances of getting infected. When setting the teams that need to come to the office prioritize those than can walk or drive – facilitate parking spaces. Uber may be an alternative; the risk should be lower than in a train or metro.

While I’m a big fan of cross-pollination and exchanges between teams, this is not the time for that. If you limit the amount of interaction, you limit the potential for propagation – that’s our priority for now. Therefore, set-up small fixed teams that have all the skills required. Use the same team all the time or use different teams for different days but avoid exchanging people between teams.

Finally, if you are limiting the chances of contagion by limit the interactions, don’t let desks undermine your work. Assign a desk to each person, keep more distance between occupied desks than usual.

Of course, spread the word about the basic hygiene habits that can prevent contamination.

I’ve been writing – you, you, you, but you are not alone.

Don’t Decide Alone

As a business owner, CEO, Managing Director or General Manager you shall decide the overall strategy, you should be transparent about your goals and motivations across the entire organization and you should engage it in the decision-making process.

You probably have a very good idea of how you want the top management to act during this crisis, but the further you go down the organization, the fuzzier it gets.

Trust your middle management in defining the critical activities that need people in the office and let employees volunteer. Make sure you define what it means “critical”, again, certify that is clear for the entire organization. Ensure people understand why it is critical, treat your employees like grown-ups.

Governments across the world have been announcing measures to support businesses, but that might not be enough. If you are facing liquidity problems, again treat your employees like grown-ups and find a compromise, together.

Like in every crisis, this one is also an opportunity and your job is to make sure it makes you stronger in the long run.

By taking this approach your employees will respect you and the company, they will feel part of the family. Chances are you will be more productive than if you try to keep business as usual, you’ll keep a healthier workforce and, because this seems to be really serious, you will limit the number of casualties in the company.

This attitude should help you cross the crisis in a less dramatic way and be more prepared for the ramp-up that we are all hoping for. By limiting the exposure of your employees, you are also limiting the exposure of the society and contributing to the greater good. Do the right thing!

Disclaimer: This article is nothing but my personal opinion. I’m not condemning any different strategy and I admit that is strongly biased by my values and personal experience. Some principles may not be applicable to certain critical sectors like healthcare, food supply chain, utilities, ...