Inside Covid-19: Office life after lockdown; Vaccine tests begin; Oil explained; Connecting schoolkids – Ep 23

In episode twenty three of Inside Covid-19 we open a window into what it’s going to be like going into the office post-lockdown; revisit the Oxford University prof who promised a coronavirus vaccine this year – with human trials starting tomorrow; speak to a London oil trader who explains why virus-impacted crude oil traded at minus $40 a barrel; we share a model for how parents can pull together to help internet-deprived school kids keep up; and reasons why the US’s Covid-19 infection plateau may have been reached. – Alec Hogg

The lockdown in South Africa has brought new challenges particularly to big corporations that have to keep the wheels rolling. Many companies have been struggling with this. One company that seems to have got it right is Discovery Health, whose chief operating officer is Karren Sanderson. Leading up to the lockdown, did you have any idea that this was going to happen and indeed being able to prepare for it?

In the lead up to the lockdown, there was a lot of ambiguity and that’s paramount in any unfolding situation. We were very much in the same position as many, where we didn’t know the absolute rules of the game that would lie ahead.

Karren Sanderson

We had to spend quite a lot of time doing multiple scenarios. We built out a number of scenarios ahead of time to be in some sort of position, once it was clear what the government was or wasn’t going to do, we’d be easily able to flick a switch on and go with the right scenario. In our business, it takes quite a lot of setup and logistics to move people around and move technology around or change technology setups. You need a better lead time for that kind of stuff to happen. We spent a lot of time building multiple scenarios ahead of the final decisions.

It is a health crisis and you are the dominant health insurer in the country. You presumably also had the challenge of dealing with higher volumes.

In the lead up to the lockdown, there was a lot of anxiety in the minds of customers – their access to healthcare services, their access to medicines. All that created an increased amount of activity and service load towards our business. That all died down quite substantially post the lockdown – with many people no longer being in their normal environments or going about their business and their normal day. We have noted a significant decline in the service load that comes through our business at the moment. Presently, about a 50% reduction in load across various services, but there are some services who’ve actually spiked above abnormal levels and those tend to be the services that require support for medicines or in the social media spheres. A lot of interesting outcomes post lockdown.

How many people did you have to send home?

The Discovery Health team – the health operations team, is made up of about 3 500 people. We’re a distributed team,  we run out of 5 different offices across South Africa, in different provinces. We’ve always had – work from home policy at Discovery, we’ve always had about 500 people on our team who’ve been working from home across the country.

That’s been an employee value proposition model that we’ve had in place. The point of that model is that it’s been pretty much an aspirational model, something that we give to top performers and people who aspire to to earn that privilege, and that flexibility. For the longest time, we’ve actually had that kind of capability in place. We really saw ourselves just in a position where we had to scale that up rapidly in a very short space of time. We’ve sent under 900 more people to work from home. At the moment, we have over 50% of our health operations team who are now working from home. Those that remain in the office are largely there because of technology limitations. We’re simply not feasible to send the certain rules home and those are largely our call centre type roles.

I‘ve seen a few calls into. Usually people are in cubicles, sitting next to each other, packed into a room answering phones and with social distancing you’ve had to make some adjustments?

So much work went into reconfiguring the very pragmatic things like the office layouts, or you know the shifts or the timing of how many people to have in any given space.

Woolworths and the retail outlets led by putting those little stickers on the ground that help people standard at the right distance to each other. All of those types of things you have to think about when it comes to your canteens and the places where people tend to create groupings and in any given business day.

In addition to all of that, we’ve spaced everyone out by moving a significant portion of the total discovery staff out of the offices nationwide to create enough space and have social distancing. You also have to bring in quite a number of new services to maintain the health and safety of the people in the office. From healthcare workers that need to do temperature scanning screenings regularly throughout the day. They do it up to three times per person per day. To make sure that hand sanitisers are available with them and all of those typical rules that we all know about.

In the beginning stages, we didn’t know about that. It wasn’t natural and normal and people did have to go through quite a lot of change to adjust to the new world of work in the office – as much as they might have been adjusting to a new world of work at home.

In the canteen, do they have to sit at different tables?

We don’t dictate to people exactly what they need to do, but people do need to keep a safe distance from each other. The canteens are free flowing areas, that you kind of grab and go.

The way our offices are laid out – you have various large spaces: pause areas across the buildings where people can all distribute and go and have a meal or have a break. There is certainly enough space since half the staff complement are out of the buildings, and that makes it even more easier.

And masks?

When you arrive at the Discovery office in the morning to start your day you no longer just walk and greet your mates and then you know get on with your job. You have to approach the scanners, who first scan you and take your temperature, then you get issued with gloves for every day of the week, we issue everyone with masks. They get two masks a week to use.

Everyone has to pick up that and then make their way across to their workstations, with all the pragmatic limitations around. With so many people in the lift at any given one time. It has created a few interesting new rules that we’re all adjusting to, but we’re doing a good job. I’ve been really pleased with how people have internalised the changes and taken them seriously.

This is fascinating because this may be a window into the new normal for many other companies who aren’t essential workers at the moment but will be going back in May to the office space. There’s quite a lot of adjustment that’s gonna be required.

Even to this day, we hold daily DR ops disaster management planning meetings and there’s where we try and discuss every single detail. At this moment in time, we’re discussing returning to work once lockdown ends. How we are going to need to just, and orientate the people that haven’t been in the office,  about what it’s like to be in office these days and how much that’s changed. It’s almost like a customer journey but for our own team. We were building toolkits and information guides. We are setting up webinars and showcasing things to people in fun and exciting ways so that when people arrive your natural tendency of  simply walking up to somebody sitting on the desk next to them to ask them. You just can’t do those things anymore.

You have to be specially divided so it’s even these few minute details that matter, you do need to pin down and make a formal toolkit or rule book, or guide. We try to just make it fun, the way we translate that to people

This is perhaps the template for government. Have you been able to share this or I’m aware that you the executives of Discovery are very involved with the government and on fighting this virus, but is this kind of an approach also going to be worked into the post-lockdown reality?

I must give the government kudos, they have been issuing very clear and deliberate guidelines for the office settings of essential services that are operating. They’ve been not just good at getting them out but they’ve been really good at managing them.

They’ve arrived in our offices on multiple occasions already you know various authorities have arrived to inspect us to to check that we are meeting all those regulatory requirements and and so on and yes they might have picked up some tips from us but many of the things that we’re implementing are already government guidelines for companies that can’t continue to operate as essential services. Definitely for other companies to need to do their homework on and get you know get busy with.

(Dr Shenoy Phanoro) was at Discovery today, watching a presentation that you put on with Professor Karim – who does appear to have the whole country’s support at the moment. Has he helped in advising and guiding, he does seem to be on top of things?

We’ve been very fortunate at Discovery because in the industry we’re in and the work we do we have access to these extraordinary people and they’re great, thought leadership and we’ve been using that not just to our advantage for our own teams but you know for our customers and as publicly as possible as well.

Many thought leaders, including today Professor Karim but so many others who constantly are brought into the fold so help us you know, conceive, understand scenario plans and keep on making changes that suit the new future. We’ve got to be very adaptable and flexible and we’ve got to be finding all the information artists soon as possible so that we can keep making changes to suit the new future.

It’s a fascinating story and a window into the new world. How are people taking it mentally, the psychological impact of not being able to stand around the water cooler or the coffee kettle?

It’s so difficult to just do basic things in the beginning, like break the habits of just walking up to people shaking a hand or even hugging a friend. In the beginning stages, we all kept messing that up – prior to lockdown even when that was kind of urged and we quickly made good fun of all of that. We all do footsteps and elbow taps. We keep each other honest about it. If you spot somebody doing something wrong sneezing incorrect in our virtual world –  where we have so many virtual meetings – if we notice somebody touching their face or coughing unexpectedly. Everyone’s always keeping everyone honest and pointing out how that could have been done better. Creating heightened awareness and constantly being on everyone’s curse about it does matter. But, doing it in an open and fun way.  It  is pushing our cultures, making cultural differences that don’t come naturally. People need to do it deliberately in order to make it.

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