Protecting Employees

COVID-19’s implications for business

On February 29th, as many as 54 countries reported cases of the coronavirus. By March 1st, businesses were canceling trips abroad and making changes to company recommendations and policies, including CauseLabs. On March 1st, I made the hard decision to cancel my trip to Bangladesh to convene with social enterprises from around the world. I was devastated, but as the news continues to pour in, the number of cases continues to rise, and the travel restrictions continue to tighten, I feel I’ve made the right decision.

Many are writing articles about the outbreak and its effect on business. The stock market has taken a dive, and it is suspected that there will continue to be a global economic impact. Sectors of industry are, of course, affected differently and to varying degrees. I believe those of us in the technology sector have an advantage.

As of this week, our team, particularly our Fort Worth team that works together at our headquarters office, has actively discussed reducing health risks, and we’ve decided to enforce remote work for all team members until further notice. Being a distributed team, we already have tools and processes in place to work remotely. This change is effective immediately and fortunately, it has little to no impact on our productivity or ability to collaborate and continue business as usual. We understand what a gift this is when so many other companies are not afforded this opportunity without huge losses.

On the flip side of this is our responsibility to protect other community members and employees who do operate in a very face to face businesses. Thus, we’ve requested that all of our meetings be held virtually via video conference instead of in person.

While working remotely allows us to continue operating our business, we know that this may not be the case for our clients. The good news for our business is that we have defined deliverables that allow us to continue delivering features even if client offices close for a period of time. This means that our clients can rely on us to deliver upon our agreements. Also unique to our work is that we design our products to help our clients work more efficiently in a remote work environment. For example, educational programs can be delivered to homebound children who are unable to attend school. Thus, our delivery allows them to protect their team more effectively and still grow their positive impact.

I suspect that this will affect the type of projects we receive requests for in the coming months. Still, our experience and focus on the social sector allow us to continue serving our community in ways that other businesses may not be able to as the spread of the coronavirus grows. It is our hope that our efforts lead to improvements in other businesses so that their program can be more accessible by using technology to deliver life-changing benefits.

Most of our vendors are also in the technology sector and have remote working policies and processes in place. This likely means that our supply chain will not break down as quickly as others who rely on physical products or foreign suppliers who may be restricted from delivering the necessary supplies.

There are great advantages to buying local and also understanding the breakpoints in our supply chain. While the rise of COVID-19 puts a potentially disastrous level of risk and loss on some businesses, this may be an opportunity to evaluate our supply chains and review them for their sustainability and social and environmental responsibility.

There are many benefits to remote work and deploying technology and tools to allow for virtual and distributed access. This week has surfaced benefits that I may have taken for granted. I am grateful for the opportunity to continue doing work that matters in the midst of a global epidemic.

Related posts:

Limit Orders on KyberSwap is different compared to the typical DEX and CEX. Let’s take a look at our comparison infographic that will help you gain a deeper understanding about the benefits of Limit…

MIRO is an online collaborative whiteboard platform, that will help you to work with your team anytime and anywhere. I’ve been using miro for 3 months now and it makes my work efficient. ProductHunt…

I realized that Python lovers don’t necessarily like to code in an object oriented way, instead they have a very linear, notebook style flow to their processes. This is why Jupyter Notebook has…