Three Stages of Preparedness for COVID-19
Many organisations are adopting work from home (WFH) policies in response to the COVID-19 situation.
WFH is a sound approach to manage risk. If you can work from home, you can effectively ride the situation out without the concern that your employees will pass the virus to each other in the workplace. You won’t need to worry about pesky things like contact tracing or quarantine (by sending them home, you have effectively already quarantined them). You also won’t have to worry about thermal screening or enhanced cleaning regimes at the workplace.
By implementing WFH, you’ve decentralised and individualised your risk. It’s now up to each individual’s personal habits and discipline as to whether or not they will be personally impacted. There’s nothing else you need do as an organisation aside for maintaining enabling systems and sending out the occasional morale-inspiring email.
WFH is also good for the community. It keeps people off public transport, away from cafe queues, and generally off the street.
What about those organisation’s who can’t adopt WFH? Many manufacturing companies can’t stop running operations at their facilities. Companies operating within the supply chain also can’t stop. Nor can many retailers. Many NGOs need to continue as well. Many of these organisations provide a vital and necessary service, and without them life would be extremely difficult for the rest of us.
This article is for those of you whose organisations have no other option but to continue operations at their normal workplaces through the COVID-19 situation. I’ll take you step-by-step through how you can prepare your organisation as the virus advances towards your country, as it spreads within your country, and up until the point where direct impact on your organisation will be almost inevitable.
I won’t go into how to manage cases, as that is a significantly more involved process. I’ve written on case management in detail in my weekly “COVID-19 Lessons Learned” series (Week 1, Week 2, Week 3).
For background and context, I’m a crisis management consultant that’s been living and working in Asia for the past 18 years. I’ve guided clients through SARS, Avian Flu, Swine Flu and MERS (I missed Ebola). Recently I’ve been supporting clients in Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea to orientate to, and protect themselves against, COVID-19. I’ve been in Seoul for the past three weeks focusing on the problems at hand here. As you may have seen, South Korea (the government and the people) has done an amazing job at containing the virus. We’re seeing now in Italy what happens when you can’t do that quickly. I fear we’re about to see the same in the US and in other parts of Europe. I don’t want to even think about what will happen if it gets to more densely populated parts of the developing world with more limited health care infrastructure, such as Karachi or Dhaka.
Anyway, let’s get to it.
The COVID-19 Preparedness Framework
We’ve developed a Preparedness Framework for COVID-19 that’s designed to guide organisation as they orientate to the situation and prepare their mitigation measures. We’ve established five different levels of preparedness: READY, ALERT, ELEVATED, SERIOUS, and CRITICAL. Organisations will hit SERIOUS and CRITICAL levels once they start having confirmed cases (CRITICAL is once there is evidence of person-to-person transfer within the organisation).
In this article I’ll focus on the first few stages: READY, ALERT, and ELEVATED.
The READY Preparedness Level
Your preparations for COVID-19 should start once it’s clear that there is a serious viral epidemic gaining a foothold in another country. The virus hasn’t reached your country yet, but it has spread to multiple others, and it should be clear that it’s only a matter of time before it hits.
In our Preparedness Framework, we call this the READY preparedness level. We named it this because you need to start getting ready now. Like right now.
For many countries, you’re already past this level and these preparations should have started. Nevertheless, it’s worth going through them to make sure everything is in order.
Selectively stop travel
Stop travel to and from locations with known outbreaks, and recommend that your employees do the same with their personal travel. Even though countries are imposing their own travel bans, it still important to have your own policies in place. If an employee travels to a known affected location, place them on quarantine when they return.
At the same time, start evaluating the impact of reduced internal travel (travel between your own facilities). You won’t need to implement these restrictions yet, but you may have to shortly.
Start educating and building trust
Now is the time to establish yourself as a reliable and accurate source of information for your employees. You can do this through establishing and maintaining an FAQ and by sending out regular email updates (one or two times a week at this stage would be sufficient). Tastefully designed awareness posters places strategically around the office are a great way to build awareness. Make sure your employees know the key facts of the disease — what the symptoms are, how they can catch it, how they can spread it, and what they can do to protect themselves.
Provide fact-based updates describing how the disease is spreading. Also share information on how your company is preparing. Let them know that their organisation is paying attention and will be ready if or when the time comes.
Remember: This is the point where you start building trust as a provider of accurate and reliable information. You’ll need that trust later.
Get essential supplies
Encourage individuals to buy supplies early, but remind them not to stockpile. A box of 20 protective masks per person per household is actually a pretty good supply if they’re quarantined at home and aren’t getting out much. A non-contact thermometer is a vital piece of equipment, as it allows employees to check their temperatures before they leave for work, pushing out detection as far as possible from your facility.
As an organisation, build up a supply of protective masks and thermometers, however don’t expect to be able to support all of your employees (or their families) through the duration of the pandemic. As we’ve seen in this current situation (and during SARS), it’s rarely possible to secure enough masks for everyone for the entire period. (Later in this preparedness stage you’ll need to determine policies for how you can most effectively allocate what you do have).
Review and test business continuity plans
For those individuals or groups that can work from home, start practicing this now on a small scale. If you think you’ll run split teams for some functions, do a short trial to make sure it’s feasible. Make sure any enabling technology works as advertised. If you’re not already using video conferencing software, subscribe to one and get everyone to start using it so that they gain familiarity with the system and you have time to iron out any issues.
Review upcoming events
Start reviewing your upcoming events now. Look through contracts and determine the impact of cancelling or deferring these events. At this stage you may not need to take action, but start getting everyone used to the idea that there may be some cancellations or deferrals in the near future.
Engage with third parties
Start engaging third parties in your planning. Make sure your supply chains are resilient. Meet with your landlord to share your plans and learn about theirs. It’s good to get in-principle agreements in place now about building screening, visitor management, and building shutdown procedures. This will avoid unnecessary surprises later.
Look at other dependencies
Are you reliant on call centres? What procedures do they have in place? As we’ve seen in Seoul just recently, call centres can be highly vulnerable to viral outbreaks. What about your payroll vendor? You definitely want them to be able to continue their operations (they may even be in a country that’s already heavily impacted).
If you’re reliant on contract staff in the workplace you may have a whole series of other challenges. How confident are you that your staffing company will report a confirmed case to you rather than keep it quiet and just send a replacement? Now is a good time to engage with your partners and have some open and honest conversations about your expectations in this area.
Do contact tracing exercises and impact assessments
Pick a random person in a random department. What if they’re infected and need to be quarantined? What’s the impact on that process or function?
Go through a contact tracing exercise, and determine how many staff may have had close contact with that person, and whom you would have to place on quarantine. What would be the impact of removing these people from the workforce?
Based on the outcomes of these exercises, you should start planning how you can create space between groups to limit the impact (discussed more below).
Identify key positions
What roles require considerable training or licenses? If you operate a warehouse, the people operating the fork-lifts or handling equipment may fall into this category. What about the people looking after your IT infrastructure? You know, the guy you call when the printer doesn’t work? You should start building in some additional redundancy and develop plans for how to protect these people. You may internally isolate them, and you may step up protective measures.
Agree on key policies
Start thinking ahead to the polices you may need should the situation progress. How long should the home quarantine period be? Will you pay employees that you send home on quarantine? How will you determine when it’s safe for them to return to work? Will you provide everyone with masks? If so, how many per day? What about masks for their families?
The list goes on, but it’s key to get these policies in place now so that you’re able to apply them consistently later.
The ALERT Preparedness Level
Once the virus hits your country, you may still have some time to prepare, but you will need to ramp things up quickly. Many of you reading this will be at this point now.
In our Preparedness Framework, we call this the ALERT preparation level.
Increase internal communications
You should have already started to communicate to your employees. Now the threat is inching closer, you will need to build up the frequency of these communications and ensure that your FAQ is updated. Reinforce the mitigation measures you’ve put in place, and outline any key policies they need to be aware of (as developed above). Continually refine your messaging to address new concerns.
Provide clear and actionable instructions to employees regarding their health. The key point is this: if they, or any member of their household, has symptoms (fever, coughing et cetera), they should stay at home. You’ll lose quite a few people to home quarantine this way, but remember that testing may never be an option except in cases where the individual is very unwell and presents to a clinic. You may never know if the employee (or family member) is positive for COVID-19 or not. So you’ll have to be conservative and assume they are.
Implement thermal screening
Now is the time to implement thermal screening. This starts with employees checking their temperatures at home before leaving for work. You can also install thermal cameras at the entrance to your building (or convince your landlord to install them). There are a significant number of limitations with thermal cameras. I’ve outlined some of them in an earlier article.
To do effective screening, you may need to limit the number of access points and resign the traffic flows in the lobby. It’s good to start doing this early so you have time to adjust.
Defer or cancel all non-essential events or external meetings
Defer or cancel all company events and meetings with external parties, and don’t permit employees to attend any other conferences or events. This should extend to visitors as well. Don’t wait to do this later. As a country, you’re now in the most vulnerable stage and everyone needs to act to prevent the disease from spreading. Do your part.
This also removes some reputational risk (in a scenario where one of your employees passes the virus to a customer or a member of the public during a meeting or event), and makes the contact tracing process significantly easier. You can’t stop employees from attending other social gatherings outside of work, but you can strongly advise against it. If they have to go to an event (weddings, funerals and so on), you can advise them on how to protect themselves.
Stop all non-essential internal gatherings
Immediately stop all non-essential internal meetings, visits, and face-to-face hiring interviews. Start doing meetings and hiring interviews by video. Where meetings, visits or interviews need to go ahead, make sure you have the proper protections in place.
Create a buffer between groups
Stop all non-essential movement between facilities, and make sure that those people who must continue to move between facilities are adequately briefed and protected. Similarly, reduce contact between people on different floors, people from different departments, and people from different shifts.
What you’re trying to do here is to limit the damage of a single confirmed case, in terms of how many people you would need to quarantine. You want to be able to wield a scalpel, not an axe.
These social distancing measures will make you highly resilient as an organisation, and will limit the impact.
Start disinfection as part of cleaning
In addition to vacuuming the floors, empting the bins, and wiping the top of the filing cabinets, ask your cleaners to start using a disinfecting solution to wipe down contact surfaces. This is the right time to start this process, even if it’s only once or twice a week. You will increase the frequency of disinfection in the next stage.
Wear masks in group settings
At this stage you should be encouraging employees to wear masks when in crowded areas, such as elevators and on public transport. It’s not yet mandatory to wear masks when moving about the office or work area.
The ELEVATED Preparedness Level
The next level of preparedness is triggered when you start seeing person-to-person infections occurring in the areas where you have facilities or operations. We call this the ELEVATED preparation level.
If you’ve followed the procedures above, you should be able to congratulate yourself for your foresight in preparing early, particularly cancelling or deferring events, and getting your plans in place.
But your job isn’t done yet.
Continue to communicate to your employees
You’re probably seening a theme here regarding communication…
Make sure your employees have access to factual information from reliable sources. Don’t forget that you’re dealing with a lot of unknowns here, and humans, in general, hate unknowns. Make factual information easily accessible through FAQs and email updates.
You have a key role in keeping your employees informed. Empower them to spread facts and good practices in their own households and communities. When rumours arise, as they will, quickly investigate and provide factual information as a counter. You need to stay on top of this, so make sure you establish good feedback loops to that any potentially issues risk up quickly.
Wear protective masks
It’s now time to make masks compulsory at your facilities. Individuals don’t necessarily have to wear masks at their desks if there is sufficient space between work stations, but they should certainly wear masks when moving about or when working in common areas.
Masks aren’t a silver bullet, but they certainly play a role in reducing risk. Use them. (If you want to know what happens if you don’t use masks, you can read about the call centre case here in Seoul).
Carefully manage meetings and training
You might think at this point you would not conduct meetings or training, but for some organisations these need to be continued (for example, on site safety briefings). Employees should wear masks during meetings or training, and some distance should be maintained between each person (you should adjust seating accordingly). Contact surfaces in rooms used for training or meetings should be regularly disinfected.
Disinfect regularly
Make sure you disinfect contact surfaces at least daily. If you’re running shifts, give all contact surfaces a good wipe down with disinfectant between shifts and breaks.
If you’re in a more industrialised setting, you may conduct full sanitisation of work areas using industrial equipment.
Focus protections on public facing roles
Reception staff, service technicians, delivery people, baristas, security guards and other people who are on the front lines need the most education and must be provided with protective masks and hand sanitiser (gloves may be suitable for some roles). It’s important to monitor these folks regularly to make sure they’re following the correct procedures.
Watch for vulnerabilities
Every organisation will have vulnerabilities in their mitigation measures. A key one will be meals and breaks, when people will have their masks off to eat or smoke. We’ve recommended using fixed seating positions, segregating groups in cafeterias (for example, no mingling between different departments), keeping cafeterias well ventilated, wiping down tables with disinfectant after each sitting, and trying to create space between individuals. Splitting meal times can also help to avoid large numbers.
Maintain discipline
As time goes on, people will start to relax. This is the point we are at now in South Korea, where we’re all fairly sure the virus has been contained. But the situation could easily turn with new clusters developing.
If someone isn’t prepared to wear their mask in meetings or training, warn then. If they persist, send them home. Harsh but necessary. Take the same approach with people who are showing symptoms, regardless of whether they say they are ok and can continue working. If people have a fever or are coughing, send them home immediately.
At this point, you’re as ready as you probably can be for your first suspected or confirmed case.
From here you will need to monitor the situation, continue regular communications with your employees, and rehearse your case handling procedures.
Case handling is an entire other aspect that needs specific and additional attention. The way we’ve approach this is to develop a Case Management Guidelines document. This is our “Rosetta Stone” for handing different case typologies. It provides guidance for contact tracing, quarantine, and communications for each of the different types of cases.
Overall, the keys to your success will be to maintain a preparedness mindset, deploy well-tested procedures, maintain high levels of discipline at all levels of your organisation, and hope for a good amount of luck.
If your organisation needs support during the COVID-19 pandemic, please feel free to reach out to us for advice and assistance. We can help you to implement mitigation measures, establish best practice for case management, or implement back to work plans that won’t place your employees at risk. You can learn more about what we do here.
