COVID-19 GIVES COMPANIES CHANCE TO REVISIT CULTURE
Traditional notions of work under question as social distancing becomes the norm
The mood among Maple Leafs fans at Scotiabank Arena on Tuesday night in Toronto was borderline anxious. The big screen above centre ice displayed a message during the second intermission, a how-to primer, complete with graphics and blue-and-red-lettered script, on decreasing the risk of getting the novel coronavirus.
“Avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth with unwashed hands,” the message stated. There was no mention of avoiding crowds, including a tight cluster of fans, many wearing Leafs sweaters, gathered near the entrance to the home team’s dressing room, who were harbouring concerns unrelated to a growing pandemic.
In a must-win game against the Tampa Bay Lightning, Toronto was reeling, yet still clinging to a 1-1 tie with a period to go. “These guys could really learn something from the Raptors,” an usher observed. “The Raptors know how to compete. They know how to close out close games.”
The NBA 24 hours later closed for business. Twelve hours after that, the Raptors were advised by team medical staff to self-isolate for 14 days. On Thursday, the NHL announced a “pause,” amid a global pandemic washing over North America.
People are getting sick everywhere, stock markets are cratering, and schools and professional sports leagues are turning out the lights for who knows how long. Terms such as “social distancing” have been added to the popular vocabulary, just as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau added himself to the ranks of those under self-quarantine as his spouse, Sophie Grégoire, tested positive for COVID -19.
Uncertainty has become the rule of the day in the face of a constant drip of eye-popping, panic-inducing news that has led to a reordering of the way things were, well, seemingly just yesterday. That includes the way we work and interact with colleagues, which is something David Zweig, on a face-to-face basis at least, has been doing a lot less of lately.
Public health is paramount, but layered beneath it, in an environment where people are keeping their distance, are traditional notions of work and whether, like a seasonal flu, avoidance becomes just a passing fad or a formative moment, where companies truly rethink the way things traditionally get done.
Zweig, a 49-year-old associate professor of organizational behaviour and human resources management at the University of Toronto Scarborough campus, was born in the era of rotary-dial phones, televisions with bunny-ear antennas and gas-sucking station wagons. A time when an office job strictly meant being at the office, looking others in the eye, doing handshake deals and maybe getting up to grab a drink from the water cooler and talk about last night’s game.
In the traditional office arrangement, workers share space. In well-run organizations, they also share a common sense of purpose and culture — an often hard-to-articulate corporate sense of how things get done around here.
“Culture is the social glue that holds us all together and gives us a sense of identity in our organization,” Zweig said.
“Coronavirus could impact the strength of that culture.”
That culture element is perhaps one reason why the idea of teleworking, much ballyhooed by workplace consultants as a corporate cost saver and one that younger workers particularly desire to achieve that elusive work/life balance, hasn’t exactly taken off.
If, say, workers are all suddenly working remotely and there is no place — be it a lunchroom, coffee shop downstairs, boardroom, neighbour’s desk or those corporate box seats at your local NHL arena — to physically gather and talk, not always about work, and create an all-for-one office place vibe, how can workers absorb the culture when the bricks-andmortar office is absent from the equation?
It is a question the senior leaders at Shopify Inc., the Ottawa-headquartered e-commerce darling with 5,000 employees, 4,000 of whom are Canadian-based, are about to find out the answer to.
The company characterizes its “people” as “constant learners who thrive on change and seek to have an impact in everything we do.” Half of those people already work remotely. The other half, as per recent a corporate directive, will be joining them as of March 16.
“We believe working from home is the best option for our employees right now to make sure no one’s health and safety is at risk,” the company said in a statement.
Trailblazers in the tech space, Shopify declined to answer a question about whether the work-at-home experiment, in a time of crisis, could become the new normal going forward. Instead, it said workers will be connecting with one another through augmented/virtual realities. It cited, as an example, a recent podcast with Tobias Lütke, in which a virtual replica of the chief executive, albeit one with no legs, chats with an interviewer, also legless, from a pair of comfy, virtual-reality chairs.
The absence of being physically present at the office could never work for Cliff Trollope, head of enterprise risk services at MNP LLP, a chartered accountancy/ business advisory firm.
“You got to be able to see the troops,” he said.
Trollope’s need for human connection, and for actually seeing the troops, is understandable: He’s a former lieutenant colonel in the Canadian Armed Forces.
He did several tours in Bosnia, as well as stints in Cyprus and other global hot spots. Among the lessons he learned was to plan, and plan some more, and always be asking oneself within those planning efforts a host of “what if” questions.
What if a patrol, say, comes under fire, or loses its communications, or encounters a hostile crowd? What to do when Plan A goes out the window and Plan B follows soon after? And, now, what to do about COVID-19?
“I operate day to day, week to week, on a battle rhythm/cycle that mirrors how the military works,” Trollope said.
The pandemic, he said, might force companies to change the way they work to be better prepared for existential threats. His office has been flooded with phone calls from jittery clients all week, some with corporate continuity plans in place — that is, a plan to operate in the face of a threat — others without any plan whatsoever.
Among the unique challenges posed by COVID-19 is that the crisis isn’t, for example, a Russian hacker compromising a company’s internet security. It’s about employees everywhere being thrown into internal, deeply personal dialogue/debates. Conversations around what Trollope characterizes as “perceived versus actual risks.”
Perceived risk, in an environment where the Canada Public Health Agency has pegged the risk associated with COVID-19 to the general population as “low,” might involve a healthy, robust Employee A, being utterly terrified of taking the subway to work in Toronto for fear of being exposed to the virus and, through a knock-on effect, exposing his elderly parents to it in North Bay, Ont.
Employee A’s fears might not be grounded in statistics, but perceived fears still have to be managed for him to be productive at work, especially since not everyone can work at home.
Employee B, meanwhile, might be that unlucky sod on the second floor at corporate headquarters, who was in Italy on business prior to the country closing up shop and tests positive for COVID -19, thus presenting her employer with a very real problem.
Of course, some companies such as manufacturers depend on employees showing up to work. Others depend on consumers congregating en masse, which becomes difficult if everyone is practising social distance.
The chief consequence of a global pandemic for, say, a widget maker, on top of rattling employees, could be the disruption of its global supply chain. If a company’s raw goods are single-sourced from Wuhan, China, it could be going out of business.
“A pandemic — a human health emergency — is just a variation of a business continuity plan, only it involves people,” Trollope said. People with irrational and rational fears, and, lately, entire countries with vast populations under quarantine. “Don’t panic,” the ex-military officer advises, “but you need to be prepared.”
Companies — and people — need a plan, and a backup plan, and they should never stop planning, not when the situation is fluid, and not even after the current crisis passes since another pandemic, or other threat, is on its way, somewhere over the horizon.
“We are going to have this happen again, pandemics, epidemics, they have been around for centuries,” said Andrew Morris, an infectious disease specialist at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto.
Morris is a doctor, dad, basketball coach and Toronto Raptors fan. He was relieved to see the lights go out on professional sports leagues. Being a fan involves being a part of a community, and fandom is often a common bond between complete strangers.
In this mix, live sports are loaded viral guns. An infected fan with poor hand hygiene might order a beer and some fries, slather on the ketchup, touch this and that on their way to his seats, leaving COVID-19 on surfaces where others might pick it up. Then they all might show up at work the next day.
“The more disease is spreading around, the higher likelihood that vulnerable people are going to be affected,” Morris said. “We have a health-care system that is already stretched. We can’t handle a situation like what is happening in Italy.”
Back at Scotiabank Arena on Tuesday night, the worst-case scenario for Leafs fans would have involved losing to Tampa Bay. But the home team came through, 2-1, in the end. People high-fived as the final buzzer sounded. A few even hugged. Mitch Marner, among the Leafs heroes on a winning night, tossed his stick to a kid in the crowd. Thousands headed for the exits and the streets beyond, bumping shoulders, touching the escalators, heading home to catch a few winks before waking to another workday in a viral age.
Culture is the social glue that holds us all together and gives us a sense of identity in our organization. ... Coronavirus could impact the strength of that culture.