How Business Leaders Are Addressing the Coronavirus – a Call for Urgency and Transparency From Our CEO

Business strategy, hiring and retaining the world’s best talent, and innovating on behalf of customers are three things that regularly occupy the majority of a CEO’s focus. These are time-tested goals to ensure optimal shareholder returns and provide a solid platform for future growth. But with the rapidly evolving coronavirus (COVID-19), the focus of many leaders has quickly shifted to include the core health and wellbeing of employees under their own care and throughout the world.

After speaking to other business leaders and CEOs over the past few days, I’ve found that most are assembling teams dedicated to keeping their employees educated and safe. There is a consistent theme of staying appraised of bulletins coming from the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (C.D.C.) as well as regional, state, and global health departments. Beyond this, many business leaders are outlining company preparedness plan including the removal of non-essential travel, preparation for employees working remotely for extended periods, and flexibility and understanding for those employees dealing with unexpected personal scheduling conflicts, such as local school closures. 

In these discussions, I realized each of us was creating plans from scratch, there was no template to follow or prior experience to serve as a guide. For this simple reason I decided to share the plan we are formulating within EZ Texting in the hope it may help other leaders and their companies.

Under most circumstances, private companies keep their internal plans and communications confidential, but at this moment I believe sharing our preparation may help another leader rapidly implement plans for their company.

Below you will find the latest internal communications our Readiness Committee has shared with our organization. They were developed by a cross-functional team and with the guidance of C.D.C. and state health departments. It’s nearly all common sense, yet provides a shared understanding for all of our employees around the globe. I’m hoping it can serve as a template for other companies to aid in their preparation and to aid in the safety and wellbeing of their workforce.

Thank you, stay safe, and feel free to share your plans or feedback.

Norm
CEO, EZ Texting

EZT Team,

Your health and wellbeing is our top priority.

We are actively monitoring any information provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C.) and local health officials in Los Angeles and Austin. Rest assured that we will take all necessary precautions and actions to ensure your safety at work. As you may be aware, verified cases of the coronavirus (COVID-19) have been identified in California in both Orange and L.A. counties.

As we shared back in late January, any employee who may not be feeling well should stay at home. Prevention and containment are more important than ever.

We ask every employee to actively take steps to keep the workplace healthy including:

• Stay home when you are sick. 
• Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, especially after using the restroom, before eating, and after coughing, blowing your nose, or sneezing.
• If soap and water are not readily available, use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol.
• Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth with unwashed hands. 
• Avoid any close contact with people who are sick.
• Clean and disinfect frequently touched objects (e.g. your cell phone and computer) and surfaces using a regular household cleaning spray or wipe.
• Cover your cough or sneeze with a tissue, then throw the tissue in the trash. If you do not have a tissue, use your sleeve – not your hands.

We have formed a Readiness Committee and are crafting outbreak response plans. The committee is meeting regularly to monitor the progress of COVID-19 and review the next steps in accordance with EZ Texting’s Preparedness and Business Continuity Plan.

Arrangements already underway include:

• Working with our office cleaning vendors to ensure that routine environmental cleaning is being performed.
• Continue to leverage our existing work-from-home (WFM) capabilities. You should expect that we will further test our WFM plans in the coming days. In addition, plans are being evaluated to better support employees not currently set up for WFH 
• Ensuring all employee contact information is updated in the event there are timely communications required. We will be using text communications in order to reach all employees most effectively.

As the Readiness Committee develops our company plans further, we will provide updates through company-wide email and text messaging.

Thank you for your commitment to work together to follow the common-sense protocols around keeping the workplace healthy. The simplest of routines will make a big difference.

If you have any questions, please contact me or any member of the HR team.

Thank you,
The HR Team