It’s not business as usual
An important part of FB Chain’s philosophy is our social responsibility. As the head of the company, I feel a very great responsibility for our employees and their families. This is why we have now made, and in the next few days will make, more changes to limit the threat to our employees from the Coronavirus. Whilst I would love to tell you that our business will continue as usual, the truth is, it won’t.
In common with people from all over the world, our staff are feeling anxious. This is not helped when after a day at work they find the supermarket shelves have been emptied and they have to worry about what they can eat. Who can blame any staff member for lacking focus at this time? Staff wellness has been a key theme in our business in the last 16 months and now is no time to deviate from this. Staff wellness will always be at the core of any decisions we make.
Teamwork is built into many of our processes, but even without deliberate changes to the way we work, team members are naturally keeping a greater distance and productivity is all but certain to reduce, even if only by a little.
Next week most of our commercial and sales staff will be working from home and this will be harder than many people think. We have been successful based on collaboration and quick decision making, working side by side has been key to this so even using the latest technology to emulate this way of working, things will inevitably take a little more time.
Self-isolation is likely to increase in the next few weeks and this will impact on our own abilities and that of our process partners and logistics partners. Again, things will naturally take more time. Today progressing work at a surface treatment company took hours when it would normally take minutes.
Everyone here at FB Chain also feels a very great responsibility towards our customers and we are therefore doing our very best to keep everything going as normally as we can, so we enter and exit this challenging period as softly as possible.
What will get every business and person through this difficult time is patience and control – we have to take actions which benefit the many, not the few, in our businesses and at home.
