A Leader’s Guide to Safely Reopening the Workplace
PERHAPS THE SINGLE BIGGEST IMPLICATION of reopening national economies is that responsibility and thus liability for dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic will shift from the public to the private sector. Fortune 500 CEOs and small business owners alike will soon be making decisions that affect the health not only of their business but also their people (employees, contractors, customers, suppliers) — which in turn will affect the health of their families, friends and neighbours.
With so much at stake, how should business leaders plan for operating in the post-stay-at-home phase of the recovery? In this article we will present a simple but powerful framework for creating a plan.
Two Types of Solutions
The current crisis is driven by a health problem: We don’t yet have a treatment or a vaccine for the novel coronavirus. Managers have little control over that, but until the health problem is solved, places of work will be opportunities for infected people to infect others. This creates a management problem requiring management solutions — and managers do have control of those.
The management problem at hand is whether and how to reopen businesses, given that workplace spread of the virus remains a real threat. This management problem is caused by an information gap: We don’t know who has the virus (i.e. is infectious), who had it (i.e. is immune) and who has never had it (i.e. is susceptible). If we had that information, there would be no economic crisis. We would simply require infectious people to quarantine
