National Post (National Edition)
When the pandemic arrived
Six Canada's Top 40 Under 40 alumni describe how they're providing a steady hand during this time of unprecedented change and what they've learned from managing through the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kevin Read, president, CEO and founder, Nomodic
The moment COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic: I was in Orlando, Fla., at a modular building conference when it was announced the NBA and NHL had suspended their seasons because of COVID-19. I flew home March 12, 2020 and spent two weeks in quarantine. That turned out to be an opportunity to sit in one place and think. I'm on 125 flights a year and until then, I didn't notice how hard it is to travel that much because I was working on delivering my vision.
Rapid response
On Friday, March 13 we assembled in the boardroom for a meeting and closed the offices on Monday. As a construction company we were deemed an essential service. We did a tonne of research and our sites developed a COVID-specific manual with all the protocols necessary to ensure physical distancing and safety. Everything focused on how are we going to take care of everyone this week? Communication was paramount. We had early-morning meetings with executive teams. We set up a COVID committee and made sure we shared health authority news. Clients were made aware of our policies. We held weekly town halls over Microsoft Teams to update all of our 130 employees across Canada and the U.S.
I was appointed to the Modular Building Institute's COVID task force representing Western Canada. We looked at what we could do with existing inventory of modular buildings to help. Units were quickly converted to temporary medical clinics for testing and to serve as quarantine facilities and mobile treatment centres. From day one (at Nomodic), our purpose has been to leave things better than we found them. COVID-19 has highlighted the disparity in health-care services, particularly for the Indigenous population in remote communities. It made us think about how we could make a difference by taking an innovative approach to problems that existed even before the pandemic. We've been working on the design of long-term flexible spaces that can meet immediate needs and be converted into senior living, supplementary care facilities … whatever is needed.
Lessons
I can be a more effective leader by doing less. I don't think I would have ever learned that if I hadn't been forced to stop. Sometimes you have to slow down to speed up. That is absolutely what happened.
Dr. Prabhat Jha, Director Centre for Global Health Research (CGHR), Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and PI, University of Toronto
The moment COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic: In March, I took a week to go to Guadeloupe with my family. While I was
there I got a note that everyone was becoming nervous and scared. I wrote an email back as soon as I landed, saying this is an extraordinary pandemic. We are the leading epidemiological research centre in global health in the country. We have a responsibility now to up our game and figure out how we take on this pandemic directly.
We took special precautions to return to work safely and then it was about getting people to see the value of science and information. We can't outsmart the virus unless we study it. We have to know how it operates and the level of infections.
Making a difference
We've done work in two areas. One is trying to understand who COVID kills, where and how. From that we're learning there are a lot of avoidable deaths. Now we're looking at how did the world get to a million deaths
and what can we learn from those experiences across countries.
The other part is trying to get a handle on how many people have been infected. In April, Angus Reid released a poll showing eight per cent of Canadians were reporting symptoms that might be suggestive of COVID. I called him on April 20 and said, `I like your data, what can we do with it?' That evening we decided to launch a national antibody study. In the next three weeks the results will give us a picture of how many Canadians got infected in the first wave, with differences by age, province. We didn't wait to try and get funding. We just did it. During this same time, CGHR received a $1 million grant to help countries monitor COVID deaths. We created a simple tool in record time that's being tested in India and Sierra Leone.
Lessons
Always have someone who is sceptical inside the tent right from the start. Often, it helps to have a woman in that role. In our case, it's Hellen Gelband, who is very experienced and careful and critical and doesn't accept conventional wisdom.
This is always helpful when you are trying to do something quickly.
Fabienne Colas, President and CEO of the Fabienne Colas Foundation
The moment COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic: When (on March 19) Cirque du Soleil announced it had cancelled all of its shows and was laying off thousands of people, that was the world coming to an end for the entertainment industry. I started to talk to my admin people about cash flow, expenses, what can we cut?
Rapid response
I called my partners, my team, our artists, our board to see how they were doing and how their businesses were doing. Everyone started working remotely. We still do. That's not something that would have happened two or three years ago. I just didn't expect you could be so productive working remotely. I always trusted my team but the pandemic put me in a situation to really empower them to make key decisions and that saved some of our festivals. I thought we needed to postpone Festival Haiti en Folie because there were so many live events and it attracts about 100,000 people. My team all said no, we could definitely do this online. They came up with a plan. We attracted more than 1,250,000 festival-goers online from all over the world.
Making a difference
What's happening (with the resurgence of Black Lives Matter) has affected everyone here because we are a Black-led and owned organization. With that came new opportunities. We landed partnerships with Netflix, National Bank and the Canada Media Fund for our incubator, Being Black in Canada. All the partners want to make sure the program, which is the largest mentorship and training program for Black filmmakers, continues and gets bigger and is sustainable. Desjardins also became a co-presenter of the Montreal International Black Film Festival, the largest Black film festival in North America. For the first time, it was completely online and available internationally.