Lessons Learned from COVID 19
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DENNIS HOFFMAN, CEO
ENGAGE USA
We were surprised by our two cases of COVID 19 at Engage USA. We were early adapters. I spent hours learning best practices for keeping the virus outside of our walls. Before Covid was spreading in the US, I networked with business owners in China and Italy through the Entrepreneurs Organization. What they told us was alarming but I knew what to expect.
By the end of February, we were establishing health and cleaning routines, distributing hand sanitizer to our employees and stocking up on cleaning and sanitizing supplies. In early March, we locked down both of our facilities, banning visitors and delivery people, and transitioned 60% of our team members to working from home. We cleaned up their coffee cups. But family photos, notebooks, and tchotchkes are still sitting on the desks of of the majority of our team members who we haven’t seen in person since March 9.
It was a little bit embarrassing when Engage started locking down. Was I being Chicken Little?
But I felt a duty to protect the health of our employees. And I knew that planning was critical for the continuity of our business.
Our goal was to empty our facilities as much as possible, keeping those who have to remain in-office to operate specialized machinery or handle sensitive data as safe as we could. Those staying behind were spaced six to 10 feet apart.
We supplied our on-site staff with cloth masks and instituted mandatory mask usage in our facilities about two weeks prior to CDC recommendations. As soon as we learned air flow was key to preventing the spread of Coronavirus, we installed additional ventilation throughout our facilities.
On April 17, when an on-site employee in our East Street facility notified us that they were directly exposed by a family member, we instructed that employee to quarantine at home and roped off their workspace. Three days later, we learned that the employee had tested positive for COVID-19.
I immediately closed the office to allow for an environmental remediation team to fog, mop, and sanitize the entire facility. We reopened the following day.
At that point, tests were still hard to come by, but six staff members who worked closely with our sick employee were tested. One tested positive. While I can't know for certain, I had to assume this second employee contracted the illness in our offices. That would mean we had a community infection.
Following CDC and Maryland Department of Health protocols, we evacuated the building and closed Engage for two weeks. Those were a tough two weeks for Engage USA. For the first time in years, we weren’t keeping the promises we make to ourselves and our clients. While our content, data, and production teams were still working and our Highland Street facility was still open, our lockbox was shut down and the flow data and money our clients depend on came to a screeching halt.
High Speed Scanning Stations Being installed at Engage USA’s mirror lockbox
We stayed busy those two weeks. Incoming mail was stored in a secure warehouse. We ordered four highspeed scanners, bringing our fleet to 16 and we began planning to open a mirror lockbox at our Highland Street location to lower the number of people our lockbox team members come in contact with and to make sure we’re never crippled by a disaster like this again
We reopened our business on May 7. A week later, both of our formerly sick employees received clearance from their doctors to return to work.
We have continued enforcing social distancing, masks, and cleaning. If there's one thing I've learned in all of this, it's that social distancing and masks work. Our only community infection was a close co-worker of the first positive person. About a dozen other people tested negative.
Since our COVID crises, we keep our groups small and limit interaction. I truly believe if it wasn't for us adopting those guidelines, our infection could have been much worse. Social distancing is the reason it wasn't.
Today we are still practicing the precautions we implemented back in March. As we learn, we adjust the measures we take to reflect the data. For example, I learned disinfecting wipes weren't nearly as effective in eliminating the active virus from surfaces as I thought. So, we switched from distributing wipes to distributing a disinfecting aerosol that would reach all the nooks and crevices in a workspace where the virus can hide.
Coronavirus has made me think about things I never had to before. We believed we were prepared for just about anything. After massive Thunder Storms four years ago caused unstable power, we installed massive generators so we could continue to process donations and data when the power went out. Nine years ago, we built redundant data connections to make sure that our lines to our banking partners were never interrupted. When our tests showed that those data connections weren’t enough, we contracted directly with level three internet provider Century Link, to bury our own data pipe, bypassing local ISPs and providing a third way of guaranteeing data access to our building. We ended up with far more bandwidth than I thought we would ever need but when COVID came, it wasn't nearly enough to handle remote banking, data capture, and off-site employees. We're still adapting to the new normal, changing and upgrading all of our systems.
I was amazed at the attitude our employees had toward this whole thing. When we evacuated our office because of our COVID infection, we had people who didn't want to leave. They said, “I need to take care of something, first” or “I have to finish this project I'm working on for a client.” We had to make them leave.
There used to be this idea where we imagined a future where we were going to meet by Zoom and our relationships were going to become more digital, but certainly talking to the people at Engage, we've seen that world of the future...and we don't like it very much.
So, we're trying to find ways—like our weekly Town Hall on Zoom —to keep our sense of community. All these years encouraging people to come together—I still believe in having a community and a culture, and how we're going to make that work in the future is going to be a really interesting challenge for us.
The most difficult thing about all of this has been the unknown. Our best disaster readiness plan turned out to be irrelevant. In theory, planning for an emergency is straightforward. But none of us planned for a global pandemic.
Right now, we are making our plans as a company based on the assumption Coronavirus will be around for the foreseeable future I l ook forward to the day that life is back to normal. In the meantime, Engage USA is adapting to the new normal . The Normal of living in a COVID world, not a post-COVID world.
When I think back to those days in March when we didn’t know what to expect. As I assured our team members that my friends in Italy could still get groceries, I wondered about the future of our business. I read and researched as much as I could and prepared for the worst. I’m pleased to say that Engage USA is as busy as it’s ever been. The backlog of mail is gone. We’re keeping our brand promise, and our staff was able to take a three day weekend for July 4th. Our current clients are keeping us busy and we’re clearly doing something right because new clients come on board just about every week.
I have to say that 2020 is the oddest year of my career. I’ve enjoyed the extra time with my kids. And, to be honest, I’ve enjoyed the struggles and puzzles of helping Engage USA and our clients navigate these last few months. I hope the rest of the year is a lot less interesting.