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Anne (00:00:00):

Well, good morning and welcome, everyone. It’s wonderful to have you all here today. I want to thank you for joining the webinar. Today, we will have three Oregon business leaders share their insight on their organization’s strategy related to returning to work and overall plan for the future amidst the health crisis. Today’s webinar is the third out of four webinars that Zennium has offered related to returning to work during the pandemic. So, we’re glad to have you all here, and I’m very glad to have our fellow panelists, which I’ll introduce shortly.

Anne (00:00:41):

A few housekeeping items. I want to encourage everyone who’s on the webinar to sign up for our next webinar, which is around HR compliance and legal updates. That’ll be coming up next week, and then we can also… wanted to make sure that you’re following our COVID page, COVID-19 page, which has lots of resources and tools around how to navigate. Whether it’s HR-related or leadership, workplace-related, that there’s lots of resources on that.

Anne (00:01:17):

We also want to recognize and acknowledge that our country is dealing with an entirely different crisis, and so, we wanted to let you all know that we’ll be planning a webinar on issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. On June 25th at 10 AM, you’ll see an invite coming out for that, to really address how employers can play an essential role in this current state. We hope that you’ll join us for that.

Anne (00:01:47):

A few other housekeeping items before we get started. This webinar will last about an hour. We’ll have about 30 to 40 minutes of discussion with our panelists, and then we’ll open it up for Q&A in the chat. So, you can use your chat at the bottom if you have questions you want to ask throughout the webinar, and particularly, we’ll address them at the end. The webinar will be recorded and available to everyone following the session, and I think with that, I will jump into introductions of our esteemed panelists.

Anne (00:02:23):

So, we have Kyle Dean. Kyle, can you give us a wave so folks know who you are? There he is, okay. He’s the Chief Financial Officer of ZOOM+Care. We have Amy Prosenjak, President of A to Z Wineworks. And we also have Mark Rollins, the Senior Director of Operations at LaCrosse Footwear. So, thank you all for agreeing to be a part of this. You come from various different industries and backgrounds, so I’m excited to talk with you all about this very complicated process that we’re all either just going through as we speak or about to go through, depending on what we do and where we’re located in Oregon.

Anne (00:03:05):

To ground us all in how this pandemic has impacted your business, let’s have each of you share a quick summary of your journey from the start of the stay-home order to now. Have you been open, partially operational, moved to remote work? How has this impacted your supply chain? Mark, if you’ll be our first, let’s start with you. Take a few minutes to catch us up.

Mark (00:03:32):

Sure. Thanks, Anne. For LaCrosse, and many of the Northwest also know us under our Danner brand, we have a factory here in Portland, a distribution center here in Portland, as well as in Indiana, and our factory and distribution center have remained open the entire time and operational. We did very quickly make the decision, just shortly in advance of the stay-at-home order to send our employees home, and the office staff to work remote, so it’s been a rapid change and it’s a whirlwind couple of months.

Mark (00:04:18):

We closed our six retail locations that are throughout the Northwest, and our team really just had a focus from day one that we were going to prioritize, obviously, the health and safety of our workers onsite first, and then just laser-focused on maintaining our full workforce and avoiding pay reductions if possible. And proud to say we’ve been successful doing that. We did have a little bit of a head start on some of this, as our supply chain is often overseas in Southeast Asia. So, since January, we’ve been dealing with issues related to COVID-19 and how it’s been disrupting the workplace, and so, we’ve actually seen a preview from some of our partners in terms of how they have handled it and things of that nature.

Mark (00:05:14):

So, it’s been a crazy journey. It’s starting to feel more stable day by day, but our stores are starting to reopen. Like many, we are in the process of beginning to think about and prepare for reopening our office. And thankfully, we’ve achieved our goals and, frankly, the business outcomes have been better than we expected. Not up to plan, but better.

Anne (00:05:46):

Great. Thank you, Mark. Kyle, how about for you at ZOOM+Care?

Kyle (00:05:53):

It’s been an interesting ride. We have 46 clinics between Seattle… all the way up to Seattle, all the way down to Salem. We have a base camp here in Pearl, probably 200 people here, including a central pharmacy. And it’s been an interesting journey, I would say.

Kyle (00:06:18):

We were classified as essential but not essential, so, all of the ER visits were supposed to be diverted to us, but at the same time, a lot of the care profile, they asked us to reduce. So, I think what it’s been is an exercise in, which operating model are we running this week? First three weeks, we ran as normal, then we went to a phone screen, because we’re direct access healthcare. People get out their phone and they come in. So, because of the COVID stuff, we had to screen people before they came in.

Kyle (00:06:55):

And then to Mark’s point, we started to have supply chain disruptions on personal protective gear; mask, gloves, that sort of stuff. So, we rolled some of that back and closed some clinics, and then we tipped up a phone screening service, and then we tipped up a whole new video care business. And so, we went from having one to two percent of our patients virtual to probably 30% now. And at the time that we started, we had probably 10 clinics under construction, 10 brand new ones.

Kyle (00:07:30):

And so, we had to figure out… we got very, very good at knowing what King County wanted versus Clackamas County, and what they considered as critical or not critical, and sometimes that changed daily. So, it’s been a constant exercise in adaptation. I’d say we were strictly retail before, with a big digital presence, and I would say that we’re emerging as a digital retail on-demand healthcare provider.

Anne (00:07:59):

Yeah, yeah, and you were really in that space, in the digital space, more than most healthcare providers, isn’t that [inaudible 00:08:07]?

Kyle (00:08:07):

Yeah. Yeah, we were founded basically as a digital front, yeah. But the full-on video care, I think probably we self-limited as to, how much care can we actually deliver through video? And when our patient can’t visit the clinics, you get a realtime experience on how far you can stretch that profile.

Kyle (00:08:32):

And we’re pretty amazed at what the extreme… what the range of care is that you can actually deliver through one of these things, because people can send you pictures of their prescription bottle or their current concern, and these cameras are great. And then once you get to video like this, you can actually have a real dialogue. So, we’ve actually had certain specialties in our business grow and actually are producing more visits on the backside of this than when we started.

Anne (00:09:06):

Yeah, that’s great.

Kyle (00:09:06):

Yeah. But to Mark’s point, it has been a wild ride, and continues to be so.

Anne (00:09:13):

Yeah, it’s not over, right?

Kyle (00:09:14):

No, no.

Anne (00:09:18):

We’re far from over. Amy, how about you? Tell us your story.

Amy (00:09:20):

Wow. I mean, similar and different, all above. So, thanks for having me today. It’s a good inflection point, I feel like, for us to kind of think back and think about what this has kind of meant, this beginning part of it. As you say, it’s not over.

Amy (00:09:36):

We have a winery here in Newburg, Oregon where we operate out of, and then we also distribute across the country and to several export countries. So, originally, we closed. We kept everyone on payroll, but we did close our winery for about three weeks, and that was really the easy decision: send everybody home and keep everybody safe, get everybody’s kids out of daycare that was questioning what they should do. I mean, there was just so much angst and unease, those weeks. And that was really the easy part.

Amy (00:10:04):

Then we started to think about, “How do we make our operations safe at the winery?” Wine is a living and breathing thing, so we can’t wait to decide what to do with it for a few months, or it won’t taste very good. So, we had to get to work at the winery and rebuild… really, our bottling stations and how that would all work. That’s a really close, compact kind of situation where everyone’s kind of side by side, or it used to be side by side. So, it gave us the chance to really expand and build that out, and we thought about how we can run the winery operations safely.

Amy (00:10:39):

We did do kind of a slow return back to the winery for those essential employees that needed to be there, and everyone else is working from home, and some of us just kind of rotate in as needed. And we’ll probably keep this situation for right now, because we have individuals in our wine-making and quality teams that need to be on sites. We’ll just kind of wait. Really, where a lot of our hard and critical decision-making was around the distributions. We have some excellent partners at Northwest Distribution and Storage in Salem, and the wine for demand, as some of you may have been participating in, which I thank you for, the demand for wine has been up during this whole time as we’re all at home and making dinners at home. I know I’ve been digging into my wine cellar for some special bottles. Why not?

Amy (00:11:26):

And so, we had to keep the distribution going at a safe pace, and because the demand was so high, places like Fred Meyer, it was like Christmas Eve over and over and over. I mean, the amount of work that these retail employees have done is amazing. Normally this time of year, in March/April, they were taking one semi full of product a day; they were taking six to seven a day to restock these shelves, and so it was really important to keep those distribution lines open. So, my hats off to my partners at Northwest Distribution. We couldn’t have done it without them.

Amy (00:11:59):

And, man, it’s just been challenging and weird and depressing and sad, and also energizing, and finding out how loyal your employees are, and what they’re willing to do for you as a company to keep this going has been really inspiring to me, and has really just kind of, I guess, been that fuel I needed to do all these hours of work to get it all done. So, a wild ride. There’s going to be TV movies and blogs, books and… I mean, it’s a defining moment for us as leaders.

Anne (00:12:33):

It really is, and I’ll just add to that, as the leader of Zennium, we were able to get everybody remote, and I attribute that to our IT team. They were ready to roll, and we had just launched Teams in Microsoft inside our organization. So, within one day, we were able to be working remote at about a 95% capacity.

Anne (00:12:55):

And because we’re professional services, for the most part, that worked for everybody. But we have essential services, payroll, payroll checks, making sure that we were responsive to the tremendous amount of unemployment claims, and those sometimes come electronically and sometimes come through the mail. So, we quickly identified who those folks were that needed to be there, and most everybody else is still working from home.

Anne (00:13:21):

We’re working on our return-to-work plan as we speak. In fact, I have a meeting about it this afternoon. So, I’m excited to hear from all of you about what some of those strategies are, and what you’re concerned about, and maybe some lessons learned around what you’ve already experienced. So, thanks for that, those summaries.

Anne (00:13:40):

What are some of the early learnings that you apply now that we’re entering, really, 12 weeks in this phase? Anything that you learned early on that you pivoted and changed about working remotely, or working through the pandemic? Kyle, I’ll start with you.

Kyle (00:13:59):

How do I boil these down? I think for us, we had to find out what the rules of the day were. So, you have CDC guidance, and then that goes to the State of Washington, then it goes to State of Oregon. And we have a team-based care model where we try and deliver consistent care no matter where you go into one of our clinics. And if Washington allows something and Oregon doesn’t allow something, and the CDC says a third thing, how do you actually do that?

Kyle (00:14:31):

And so, we got very, very fluid with that on a regular basis, like, “What are we going to do? Okay, this is the guidance. How do we put this together?” And we were changing the operating model almost every day for the first… I’d say the first four weeks, based on conditions being changed… I mean, you all remember the mask, no-mask, all the other things that we were going through; we were kind of ground zero for some of those things.

Kyle (00:15:00):

So, be adaptable, be flexible, have a sense of humor; understand that you’re not going to get it right. Give people the freedom to make mistakes. Obviously, not around patient health, but understand that you’re not going to get this right. Nobody knows what they’re doing, and we’re all going to kind of do our best.

Kyle (00:15:19):

I think the other thing as it relates to working through this is, the closer you can get to the people making the decisions on what the environment is, the better positioned you are to actually understanding what they’re trying to accomplish. We had a circumstance at one point where they said… and this is just an example, “We want all non-essential care stopped.”

Kyle (00:15:47):

Okay, that probably means us.

Kyle (00:15:49):

“But we want anything that’s non-emergency to go to urgent care places.”

Kyle (00:15:54):

Okay, how do you square that? And so, you have to talk to people inside the organizations, say, “Okay, what were you thinking?” So that we could be good citizens, be good parts of the community and support not only the patients but our people.

Kyle (00:16:11):

I think the other thing is all the corporate structures go out the window. So, we went to daily clinic stand-ups seven AM, seven days a week. Anybody that had a question could call in. So, you have your associates, you had accounting on, we had sometimes upwards of 150 people on that call, talking about the issues of the day. “I don’t have enough gloves. What do I do with this?” And being transparent with why we don’t have all the answers. “We’ll take all the feedback and we’ll get you a plan in the next two hours,” and that’s probably the best thing when you’re working through a crisis, is constant feedback, constant adaptation, and understand that all of your existing structures that don’t add value to the moment need to go away. Or be suspended. You’re not throwing them all out, but you have to be sensitive to what the people who are closest to the customer are dealing with.

Anne (00:17:14):

So true, yeah. Mark, what are some of those learnings since the beginning of this time, for you?

Mark (00:17:22):

Yeah, I would echo a lot of what Kyle just said, and really, it’s about our organization as being as flexible and nimble as possible. Similarly, we gave managers a lot of discretion in terms of how they led their teams, and what works, and what the needs of their individual teams were. We tried to do as much kind of… I’m not going to say best-practice-sharing, but practice-sharing across the organization, just because we were all learning how to do this in realtime together.

Mark (00:18:01):

I think communication has just been such an important aspect of this, and as Kyle was talking about, when this started, the rules were changing maybe not by the day, but by the hour, and by the time we were able to respond to the news of the day or the change of the day, it was almost obsolete. And so, how do we be faster in terms of getting information out to employees, and working with our teams in that manner?

Mark (00:18:37):

So, I think the other thing is just about also just trusting our employees more. I think you have to do that in the remote environment. It’s a crisis, so we’ve got to delegate, we’ve got to move quickly, we’ve got to trust each other to get things done and done. And I think it’s by no means perfect, but I think we all learned through the process.

Anne (00:19:06):

Yeah. Yeah, agree with a lot of that, too. Amy, how about you?

Amy (00:19:10):

I definitely agree on the communication. It was interesting to kind of realize how much people wanted to hear from you, really, daily, and that was… I’m definitely a manager by walking around. I like to make the rounds every day, and I do, and… In the beginning, you were just wondering how to make that happen, and so you become adaptable and creative of how you can walk around and manage in this new virtual way.

Amy (00:19:42):

A lot of different forms of meetings and so forth, but definitely, communication, email going out every day. About 35% of our workforce is… English is a second language for them, so everything has to be translated, in our opinion. And so, that just added another little extra step of how long it would take us sometimes to get things out. Google Translate is fine for a few sentences, but when you’re sending out policies of this nature, obviously it needs to be correct, so we have a wonderful translator that we work with.

Amy (00:20:12):

And so, it’s just being adaptable and creative within that communication sphere was a big learning curve for a lot of us, because you’re used to doing so much of it verbally, or at least I was. And I think Kyle mentioned humor; definitely try to keep that in place. It really helps. It was, it is still, stressful, but those beginning weeks were unusual.

Amy (00:20:38):

We spent a lot of extra time in all these different forms of our meetings that we were having, whether it was our executive leadership, a department meeting, or some of the all-staffs that we did. We spent a lot of kind of soft time checking in with people.

Amy (00:20:54):

As we were chatting before the call started, I mean, it’s really individual, what people need. And so, checking in individually with people takes a lot of effort and a lot of time, and not every manager is as good as others at doing that. So, really learning how to see… really learning who needed mentored in that place, and being able to check in with people individually has been really important, and something that we weren’t maybe doing our best job of before this. So, I think we’ll take that with us into the future for different reasons.

Anne (00:21:27):

Yeah, I would agree with that. We really got better in some ways at communicating with daily huddles. We needed those daily huddles, and sometimes two, three times a day, because in our case, we were dealing with Department of Labor rules around emergency sick pay and emergency family medical leave, and then the whole CARES Act; that was evolving and actually, our guidance was changing, in a couple of cases, hour by hour based on the new guidelines that the Department of Labor was putting out. It was really stressful, and we pride ourselves on having our research done, and it was really, really challenging on our team. Luckily, we have an HR compliance manager that, that was her whole job, was she was just staying on top of it, and then we were doing the huddles so that everybody who was giving guidance to our client employers was up to speed and up to date on the changing landscape, which was changing under our feet all the time.

Anne (00:22:27):

I can relate to that. That first really three to four, even five weeks, it felt really stressful, and I relate to what you said, too, Amy, about: we were all in this together, and not just Zennium and not just Portland, but the whole planet. And so, there was something kind of weirdly comforting about the fact that we could all give each other a break, and recognize that [inaudible 00:22:51] for everybody, and that kind of human experience that keeps you motivated, right? In terms of, “We’re going to get through this.” So, thank you for all your comments on that.

Anne (00:23:02):

A couple of you talked about this a little bit. Kyle, you especially; the business model changes. Amy, I’ll pitch this one to you. Has your business model changed in this, and do you think that some of those things will continue after the pandemic?

Amy (00:23:21):

In general, our business model hasn’t changed. Probably where we’ve done… because so much of our wine is distributed across the country to national and big-box retailers, independent wine shops, so forth, that part hasn’t changed. It’s accelerated, as I mentioned.

Amy (00:23:37):

Where we’ve been probably most innovative is in our direct sales realm, and so, we have a tasting room that actually is currently under remodel, renovations. So, we’re in a construction project through all of this, as well, the winery. So, we have this team that had already moved to kind of a temporary location on our campus that was trying to figure out how to best provide an experience for our customers that were coming, then we’re closed, then we’re now trying to figure out Instagram and attracting people to a wine experience, and how do you offer that when you can’t come? That’s really where we’ve been the most creative, and that group has been really successful. And that’s been fun to watch and see what they’ve come up with and what they’ve tried.

Amy (00:24:24):

We did an event over Memorial Day where it was a drive-by that, we had a band, you couldn’t get out of your car, but you could drive up and have some experience, and so forth. So, we’ve just tried all sorts of kind of fun, different, interesting things, and our loyal wine club has really responded positively, which is encouraging. So, that’s really where… how to deliver has been where we’ve innovated. We haven’t changed what we’re doing. You know, wine is such a long supply chain process, so it’s hard to be adaptable in the moment. We’ve definitely been thinking about what would, maybe, we’d be doing in the future, but it’s kind of a three-year cycle of how wine happens.

Amy (00:25:08):

That’s what’s scary. We were grateful this didn’t all start during harvest for us. It was happening in the Southern hemisphere. So, we’re trying to learn from our colleagues in New Zealand, what they went through at harvest, because we’re getting ready to go into harvest, and how will that be different? So, we’ll have to be really innovative in our processes, but not in what we offer.

Anne (00:25:29):

Interesting, yeah. Mark, I’m curious about your business model and how you’ve had to adapt. You mentioned some supply chain issues.

Mark (00:25:36):

Yeah. I think, first, the biggest change from our business model was really just the rapid acceleration of online sales, which has always been a big part of our business, but it really… I would actually say from the day that stimulus checks began being deposited, our online business exploded. And not just ours, but our partners, as well. We do fulfillment for various customers, whether it’s an REI or Cabelas, out of our own warehouse direct to consumer, and their business has mirrored that in many ways.

Mark (00:26:25):

So, in some areas where we were nervous and supporting people that were maybe idle, there were other parts of our business where we’re starting to hire, because we need to realign what’s going on. I think the other thing is that our time cycles are becoming much shorter. So, as we plan our business, we’re doing things now that used to be monthly processes, in two weeks, just because everything’s changing so rapidly. And so, we just want to be as nimble as possible.

Mark (00:27:04):

I think the other thing we’ve seen in our organization is just how fast we can get work done in certain circumstances. When we closed our stores, one of the first things we did was try to figure out how to do curbside pickup. And if you would have asked me six months ago about that project, it would have been, “This is going to be a real challenge. I don’t know how we’re going to get this done,” and it would have probably drug on, and we probably would have drug our feet to execute it. And we got it done in a week and a half. So, that’s the interesting things about business model, but also how we work.

Anne (00:27:46):

Yeah. Yeah, a resiliency factor, right, Kyle? I mean, you mentioned how much you had to change because of the world that you live in. Anything else you’d add to that changing business model?

Kyle (00:28:00):

I think what’s going to stay with us going forward is the modalities, different ways that we’re going to deliver care. Whether it be phone, whether it be video, whether it be chat, whether it be in person.

Kyle (00:28:11):

But the other thing that has come up, especially with the relaunch of the economy, is creating bundles for employers, and providing testing services for COVID. Either because a lot of… a number of employers have challenges unifying their benefit programs, and at the end of the day, if you’re running a 100-million-dollar organization that’s shut because you can’t get 1,000 tests, you’ll spend whatever it takes to get that thing opened back up. So, how do we…

Kyle (00:28:50):

We typically haven’t done that, just from a delivery model, but there’s no reason why we can’t. And so, we’re testing some of that, so how do we bring a COVID testing package for people so they can pull someone off the line and send them in for testing and get them screened? Or if they’re sick at home, do we consider remote testing, and how do we work across that?

Kyle (00:29:12):

I think the other thing that we’re going to do differently is how we go into new markets. When we opened up video care, we opened it up to the whole state’s, and because Zoom is such a trendy name right now in conferencing and whatever else, we got calls from all over the world. People getting confused that their Zoom doctor [inaudible 00:29:33] us. Okay, we pick up the phone, but…

Kyle (00:29:37):

So, you’re global overnight as a digital company, and how do you respond to that? And so, how much of the business do we now grow out digitally? Our learning curve on digital, which probably would have taken three, four years, got compressed into eight weeks. But what we could have learned got crammed into that, which is fantastic. You couldn’t ask for a better challenge, and now, what do we do with it?

Kyle (00:30:05):

And so, different modalities, different way of delivering, in a sense, health and care to clients. And what is they want, and how do we service that, how do we support that? Because that’s part of our mission, is to have the consumer drive the healthcare experience, and we got a lot of feedback in the last two, three months about what works for them and what doesn’t. How do we now make that a permanent part of our package?

Anne (00:30:37):

Yeah, yeah. We pride ourselves in being very high-touch and in-person, because we feel like human resources needs… that’s important in the delivery. But we have found that there are ways we can really provide excellent services and consultation through video conferencing. I think it’s way better than just audio. Being able to see people’s faces and look at their non-verbal, and we found the right ways, and there’ll be more in the future, to really maximize that consultation without getting in our car and driving 45 minutes each way. There’s some real efficiency factors gained here, if we can do it right.

Anne (00:31:18):

There’s some meetings that need to be in person, for sure, but I think we got really clear about pushing ourselves to be innovative and nimble to that new normal, and I think it’s… It will stay with us into the future, for sure.

Anne (00:31:35):

Okay, well, I’m going to pivot there and go to the topic of motivating employees during this interesting time that we’re going through. Let’s talk about the dynamic of inviting employees back to work, perhaps that have been on unemployment during a furlough or a lay-off, or even those maybe who haven’t closed. Are you hearing rumblings from employees who see being laid off as an advantage? You know, there’s the federal infusion of dollars for those folks to help them get through this difficult time. Is there any key strategies that you’ve had for motivating employees either that are at work now and working all the way through it, or getting them to come back if they’ve been off? Amy, I’ll start with you on that one.

Amy (00:32:23):

Sure. We don’t have that situation, gratefully. We’ve kept everybody fully employed. We’re a team of 75, so we don’t have that situation, but we definitely have kind of had those conversations with people from their partner’s standpoint, or someone in their life, so, aware of all of that conversation, for sure.

Amy (00:32:44):

What we’re more talking about internally is when and how; as I mentioned, with harvest coming, we’re not sure, should we really be bringing the administrative and supportive staff back onsite when we have people that do need to be there? So, we really have not made a plan yet. We’ve talked about all sorts of things, we’ve talked about office reorganization, who really needs an office, who doesn’t, who can share, who can’t, what kind of spacing, do we need cube walls? I mean, all the things that we kind of got away from in the ’90s and 2000s of open offices and all these catchphrases.

Amy (00:33:21):

So, we have been talking about it, we’ve been talking about some sort of rotating schedule, we did institute a virtual kind of in/out situation. So, one of the days I happen to be at the winery, we had a fire alarm go off, and it was a real alarm. We had smoke coming out of one of the bathroom heaters. So, we all get out there, and then we have our procedure, and somebody grabbed the backpack and the book, and they look at me and they said, “You take roll call.”

Amy (00:33:47):

I’m like, “Well, I don’t know who’s on site.” I’m like, “Oh, my God.” So, then I’m texting, someone had been there… I mean, it was… Thank goodness it wasn’t a real emergency. So, wake-up call to even just, how do you know who’s there? So, we’ve implemented something now where you check in and out on your phone, and we have vendors. Again, I mentioned the remodel we have happening. So, we have people onsite sometimes, and that’s been hard to nail down just from a liability standpoint.

Amy (00:34:16):

So, we’ve been continuing to talk about how to function efficiently. We do move to a 24-hour operation during harvest, so that has challenges, and will with all of these restrictions, as well. I’m grateful we haven’t had to have the other part of the question that you started with, and just continuing to deal with that. We are trying to figure out how to attract the right type of talent for harvest; we normally hire about 30 additional people. About half of them are normally from overseas or other countries that have been where they’ve been working harvests in other wine regions. We may or may not have that opportunity. So, it will be a different harvest for lots of different reasons as we figure that out.

Anne (00:35:01):

Yeah. Thank you. Kyle, how about for you? You mentioned there were some locations that needed to temporarily shut down, I think? Is that what you had said?

Kyle (00:35:10):

Yeah, and it’s strangely, though, similar to Amy. We haven’t laid anybody off, but what we did is we had people go into the clinic, but they would field video calls from there. So, that’s how we preserved… PPE, they had everything they needed, and if they cleared all the screening, we would bring them in and see them.

Kyle (00:35:31):

So, the clinics… again, going through all the different operating models, are generally pretty dialed-in. We’ve got 200 people here at base camp, so we’re in phase two of reopening, so we’ve got a central point of entry, we take temperature readings. We haven’t had anybody go over the temperature, but I think if we did, I believe the protocol is go to one of the clinics for testing, or go home.

Kyle (00:35:59):

Right now, the way we’ve dealt with it, we did have some folks take some voluntary… When we went into this, we sat down with people and we understood childcare, we understood elder care, so we’d talk to people and say, “Look, if you want a reduced work schedule, this is the time to ask for it.” And so, we had a number of people take us up on that, and so, as we come back into that, part of the conversation is, “What works for you now?” What works for you now, because if the childcare isn’t available, or the elderly person in their life isn’t in a situation where they feel comfortable exposing them, and we can continue to support remote, we probably will.

Kyle (00:36:38):

But we have an open floor plan here, very packed together, so we have an assigned seating chart in phase two, up to maybe 20% of our employees, six feet, social distancing; got the little face covering, sanitize before and after using the meeting room, meeting rooms are limited to two people, so on and so forth. But really, where we started is we went out to our employee base at the base camp and said, “All right, how many of you want to come back? How many of you are ready to get out of the house? How many of you don’t have an optimal working environment?” And we got enough people from that cut to start to test phase two.

Kyle (00:37:15):

And then, phase three probably is going to come in July, and that’s going to be probably more volume-driven. As the volumes of certain work grow and we need more people in the building, we’ll have different conversations about where people are at. But we’re evolving it based on what we’re learning and based on what people want. So far, we haven’t run into a circumstance that we couldn’t accommodate, or that didn’t work for people.

Anne (00:37:42):

Yeah. Fascinating. Definitely feels like it’s all happening in realtime, and you’re just doing what you know now, and then trying to plan for the future, but it’s really interesting times. Mark, how about you in terms of inviting the employees back, or keeping employees motivated while they’re working through it all?

Mark (00:38:02):

Yeah, I think the motivation… I think at first, it’s that rallying cry of, “Hey, we’re going to scramble to keep the company in good shape,” and to preserve the jobs and things like that. As it’s gone on, our remote employees are actually expressing high degrees of satisfaction with the remote environment. I don’t think that’s dissimilar to what other folks are seeing out there.

Mark (00:38:33):

Our onsite operations, while different layouts and some different procedures, it’s still been work. It’s largely the same job that everyone had been showing up to for years. And so, that hasn’t been so much an issue. I think as we prepare to open our office, we’ve previewed some of the changes that Kyle described, and we’re doing many of the same things. The interesting thing was there was a… I think, somebody in our company told me there’s a sense of mourning about the culture, because going to work wasn’t going to be the same.

Mark (00:39:12):

So, that’s something that we’re adjusting to, and trying to figure out, how do we maintain the best parts of our culture and the things that are most important to us in a drastically different environment than any of us were used to. I think the other thing is actually just people taking care of themselves. I’m concerned about the amount of unused PTO we have right now, because people… they don’t have the ability to maybe take that trip to see their family in whatever city, or go to the coast for a long weekend, and so, people have just been working. And so, I’m a little worried about how much people are not taking time off, to the point where our own executive team has had to…

Mark (00:40:09):

We have to model this, because we’re not taking the time off, either. And so, it’s like, “[inaudible 00:40:15] take days off, and I’ll be the first one, and here’s my schedule.” So, it’s a different environment, and different challenges than we’ve had to deal with in terms of adjusting on how do we motivate our teams.

Anne (00:40:29):

Yeah. Yeah, [inaudible 00:40:30] things that we heard from some of our employees with small children; when we were saying, you know, “There’s this emergency family medical leave you can use. There’s the sick pay that is designed for this,” some folks said, “I don’t know what the future holds, and I am worried about using that all up now and then in the fall, in the winter, will I need it then? And I’ll run out.”

Anne (00:40:52):

So, all of those sort of just… [inaudible 00:40:54] family worries that we all have, it’s just interesting how that plays itself out because, Mark, we’re seeing the same thing. People had vacations planned that were canceled, and they don’t really want to just stay at home for another day, which feels like every day of the week PTO.

Mark (00:41:09):

Exactly.

Anne (00:41:11):

And so, we’re trying to balance the encouraging people to take breaks and be away from the Zoom calls, and take PTO, but also trying to be cognizant of the fact that everybody would like to save their PTO for a nice trip with their family, which is what they had planned originally. So, I think that’s another way to… something important to navigate.

Anne (00:41:33):

So, how has… I’m curious, you’ve touched on this, but I’m curious how each of you feel about this work-from-home situation post-pandemic, and how has that influenced your philosophy about working from home? What was it before, and has it changed, or do you feel like, given your business model, you’ll get back to similar, or are you kind of forever changed? Kyle, I’ll pitch that one to you first.

Kyle (00:42:01):

Well, I think we’ve never… obviously, as a country, we’ve never gone in that direction all at once. I was always concerned about the bandwidth and the how would these things hold up, and by and large, it actually worked pretty well. And our employees are great. They’re very responsible, they work hard…

Kyle (00:42:31):

The cultural things are the things I worry about. How do you create connection for people? I saw a meme bouncing around the internet, and it said, you know, you all have to stay home and not contact people, and the introvert says, “Yes, I’ve been preparing for this my whole life,” and… Yes, I’m an accountant, so that resonated with me, but you would run into… I would come into base camp here periodically and I’d run into people, and it was just like, “Oh, my gosh. I forgot how much I missed seeing people.”

Kyle (00:43:01):

And so, that connection that you get, and how do you continue to create that shared sense of purpose, and that shared connection, and that commitment to each other? Because in a sense, the last three months have been built on the previous years. We’re trading on the trust that we built with each other when we were talking to each other every day. And so, how do you build that deposit back up?

Kyle (00:43:26):

But from a tech standpoint, I think we can handle it. I think future state is smaller offices, more remote, probably some floating… conference areas where we can get together periodically, but… So, the hotels will probably do better, because we’ll need to gather, but I don’t think there’s a genie going back in the bottle, and I think that’s a good thing. Because, again, we’ve tested it, and people are extremely responsible and worked hard.

Kyle (00:44:00):

But to Mark’s point, I will say that the eight- or 10-hour or 12-hour day that you have in the office feels completely different than 10 hours of Zoom. I mean, I’m just wrung out after about four hours of Zoom. And you take out all of those breaks you have in the day, driving to work, going to lunch, all those things, and it’s a much more draining day. So, how do we help people? How do we help people stay connected and charged and not burned out?

Anne (00:44:31):

That’s a great question, yeah. Amy, what would you add to that?

Amy (00:44:36):

Well, I guess I’ll give you my honest answer. You’re telling me there’s 100 people on this call, I can’t see them, so I’m just going to tell you, Anne. But I know…

Amy (00:44:44):

In the old days, I used to think, when I worked from home… I tried to work from home about one day a week, without meetings, interruptions, so forth, and I thought, “Oh, this is perfect for me. I’m super productive,” and so forth.

Amy (00:44:55):

But when other people worked from home, I really was doubtful. “Are they being productive? Are they really…” You know? I mean, I just kind of had a… I started at the [inaudible 00:45:03] headquarters out of college. It was just grained into me, like, “You got to be at the office.” And so, I always just really questioned it.

Amy (00:45:11):

And this has taught me that work can and does and will get done. It’s slightly different, and everybody has a little bit of their own style, and it’s really kind of created a little bit more of an inclusive culture within our team, that it’s okay. And we’ve allowed people, as long as you’re kind of keeping it up to date on your calendar, you can have a slightly more flexible schedule. Whether you have childcare, or elder care, or just a different kind of rhythm to how you do things. Some people are early birds, some people aren’t, and so forth.

Amy (00:45:43):

So, as long as we are maintaining kind of the little bit of that workday… I have 12 salespeople that live around the country already, so we were already used to a little bit of that timezone difference. So, it’s taught me that it works, and it’s okay, and you don’t have to be in your chair from eight to five exactly to get the work done. That’s been helpful and kind of releasing to me.

Amy (00:46:06):

As far as how it will go forward, I think it will stay, for sure, and I totally agree with Kyle that we’re trading on the past. That’s worked for now, and how do we do it in the future? We had two employees that actually started the first week when we went to stay-at-home, and trying to onboard them, train them in our administrative departments, and have them feel a part of things has been weird. We’ve been doing all sorts of things, like a little company hot sheet where we’re putting pictures of people, and introducing people to each other, because you don’t have those hallway conversations for 30 seconds where you find out someone’s dog’s name, and then you can follow up and ask how the dog’s doing next week.

Amy (00:46:50):

So, it’s been a real push for some of us that are not of the millennial generation to kind of accept this, and know that it’s okay. So, I appreciate a lot of my younger colleagues that have kind of shown me how this would work.

Anne (00:47:09):

Yeah. I can relate to all of that. Yeah. How about you, Mark?

Mark (00:47:14):

Yeah, I think, like I said before, we’re orienting towards a remote-first environment, because I think… particularly in certain departments in our company, things are going really, really well. Our finance team cut a day off the close cycle. And there’s less interruptions, and it allows for… I think the remote environment, generally speaking, allows for a deeper, more focused work, and like others have said, it’s the collaboration, which is why you want to come together.

Mark (00:47:57):

We have departments that are… we make physical, tangible products, and the engineering of those products require you to be often onsite, and working together. And so, I think that will still be part of our mix, but I think there’s a lot of cases in our business where things are going a lot better.

Mark (00:48:20):

I would add, though, the thing I’m most concerned about is onboarding new people into this remote world, and how to get them connected with our teams as best as possible. Not to mention just the basics of training and things like that. But that’s the challenge where I’m spending a fair amount of time on is, hiring’s going to be starting [inaudible 00:48:46].

Anne (00:48:47):

Yeah, yeah, totally agree. I’m going to shift our conversation to strategic planning, the strategic plans that maybe we all have built, and what are we doing with those now? Most of us do that planning towards the end of the prior year, we put our strategic initiatives in place, and we set those milestones throughout the year. Kyle, I’ll start with you: what have you done? Have you shelved the plan and you’re working on a new one in realtime, or, how has that worked for ZOOM+Care?

Kyle (00:49:22):

All of the above. We’re a June 30 year-end, so we’re right in the middle of annual planning, and I think I’ve done the budget half a dozen times already, and probably I’ll do it two or three more times before we get to the end of this month. I think what we’re doing is we’re probably going to go lighter on real estate, we’re going to go heavier on video, we’re going to spend a lot of time working on the infrastructure that showed itself to have holes in it in the midst of this, and probably…

Kyle (00:50:02):

My phrase is, how do you have funds set aside for the opportunities or the crises that come up? Because you need to be able to pivot. Like I said before, we didn’t have a COVID-19 test package until one of our employers… or, a person, frankly, that we didn’t have a relationship, called and said, “Would you do this?”

Kyle (00:50:26):

And we went, “Huh. Well, we got this and we got this and we got this, we got this. Sure, we can do that.” And so, how are you… an invitation for the business community, or the world in general, to reach out to you with creative ideas? And how do you have funds set aside to do that? And I think that’ll be an ongoing part of the budget and part of the plan. And we still have our revenue targets, and market targets, and all the other things that you would have, but how we grow revenue and how we grow market and how we serve patients is going to look different. And how do measure satisfaction of someone who actually never comes in the doors? I don’t know. We’ll figure that out.

Anne (00:51:08):

Yeah, yeah. Great. How about for A to Z, Amy?

Amy (00:51:13):

Well, our general business plan really hasn’t changed because of the long cycle of it. We’re definitely thinking of what to alter in the future. Really, where our strategy has had to shift is in our sales and how we… what we’re targeting, how we market with on-premise… excuse me, restaurants being closed for so long; that was a portion of our business. That went away for a time. So, we’ve worked hard on the reentry strategy, working with our distribution partners across the country.

Amy (00:51:43):

How does grocery… I was reading an article last night about grocery, where maybe they won’t have so many selections in all the aisles because less people are coming in. They’ll have it all in stock… with more a warehouse model, you’re doing a lot of your shopping online and either picking up or having them delivered. So, we’ve put more of our emphasis toward digital marketing, so when you’re shopping on these Instacarts and A to Z pops up, we’re looking at those kinds of opportunities.

Amy (00:52:12):

We had shifted some of our national marketing strategy to digital already, whether it’s podcasts… we were sponsor of The Daily Show, and it happened to happen at this March and April time, and so, that was fortuitous for us. So, really more on the marketing and kind of how we’re going to market, and trying to reach consumers and talk to consumers, and also our distributors, that’s really where we’ve had to shift our thinking and our plans, and thinking about what to do in Q3 and Q4 with our budget funds for those opportunities.

Amy (00:52:46):

So, some things we could change and some things we couldn’t. We had already put our print strategy in place of what magazines we would have ads in, and you sign up for those at the beginning of the year. So, we did shift the content for that, or what we said; we advertised in The New Yorker and we took a stand on a few things in there. Because we feel like that readership appreciates those types of things.

Amy (00:53:09):

So, it’s just really being selective and careful of our marketing and our route strategies for the wine that we’ve already produced.

Anne (00:53:18):

Mm-hmm, interesting. How about for LaCrosse, Mark?

Mark (00:53:22):

Yeah, I think, as I’ve said, our planning time horizons are shortening. Especially early on in this endeavor, it was… I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow or next week, so how do I build a plan? And you have to build a plan, because we’re building products and we’re buying inventory, and things like that.

Mark (00:53:48):

So, it’s about being short-term, and as Kyle said, as flexible as possible, because whether it’s something coming in terms of a second wave, or maybe it’s an opportunity due to a [inaudible 00:54:07], something happening with a competitor. So, you never know the upside or the downside of what’s coming, and you want to have as much flexibility as possible.

Mark (00:54:17):

I would say we are prioritizing one-time investments over fixed expenses. I think that’s… when we get comfortable to spend more money, it will be one-time in nature is our priority right now, so… But we don’t have the lead time of wine, necessarily, but I just finished buying inventory for October and November, and so, we’re committed to that plan. But looking ahead to ’21, which I need to have a point of view on here pretty quick, but it’s… try to wait as long as you can before you pull the trigger on making those investments.

Anne (00:55:11):

Right, yeah. Being nimble is certainly the strategy of the day, because it’s just so hard to tell what coming out of this is going to look like, and how long it’s going to go.

Anne (00:55:24):

Well, I’m looking at our time. As we kind of get closer to the 11 o’clock hour, there was a question in the Q&A. I want to just… because I think it’s really helpful for our participants. That was, “What technology are each of you using to keep business functioning and keep the team connected, engaged, and motivating to meet the business needs and goals?” So, Amy, anything in particular you want to talk about the technology you use, or any motivational strategies to keep people connected?

Amy (00:55:55):

Cell phone minutes; I don’t know. As far as techniques, I mean, you have to be on the horn, I think. It takes a lot of effort.

Amy (00:56:02):

We’re using the same thing; Zoom, Microsoft Teams. I’m open to any… If you have a better suggestion out there, open to it. You can send me a sales call email on it. There has to be something that maybe can bridge the gap a little bit better, I’m hoping will be developed. I know a lot of conferences and so forth are being put into this virtual environment, and those seem to be pretty adaptive. Non-profit galas have been happening virtually. So, I think the software will develop really quickly, which is exciting. I’ll look forward to maybe something even a little bit better than what we’ve been using so far.

Amy (00:56:39):

The motivation part is where I’m putting a lot, a lot of my effort. As a leader, that’s what you do, anyway. It’s about the people. People first, and that’s where 80% of my time every day goes.

Anne (00:56:53):

Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Mark, how about for you?

Mark (00:56:57):

Yeah. Microsoft Teams is kind of our base of communication. Like I’ve said, I think we’re looking for some other collaboration tools to really help facilitate more of the creative process, and what that’s going to look like.

Mark (00:57:18):

In terms of connecting people, I think one of our bigger issues is actually getting people outside of their own functional department. Those groups are connecting and staying close quite a bit. We’re trying lots of different things in that realm. I had an online lunch on Monday with nine people from nine different departments that aren’t within my team, and just trying to get people to connect in those hallway conversations that aren’t occurring.

Anne (00:57:55):

Yeah, yeah. Kyle, bring us home. Anything interesting that you guys have employed?

Kyle (00:58:03):

We’re a Google house, and Macs, as well. So, Google Chat, or Google calls, we do those a lot. We use Slack. We’ve opened a lot of additional channels. If people have an idea, we’ve created a creative business idea one, because people were starting to come up with ideas. We’ve created all sorts of…

Kyle (00:58:23):

And our employees can create their own Slack channels. So, you’ll see hobbies in there, you’ll see videos posted in there, you’ll see pictures of dogs posted in there, kids, whatever. So, there’s a lot of creativity showing up there. And then, we do what we call a base camp call every week, and then we do a company call every month, and then we have a virtual happy hour once a month, as well, and with the Google [inaudible 00:58:56] thing, it’s kind of entertaining.

Kyle (00:59:00):

With some of the ones, I can’t remember which call platform, people start playing around with… You see a lot of creativity and playing around with the backgrounds, and we’ve had a bring-your-pet-to-the-social-hour, so we’ve seen puppies and dogs and…

Kyle (00:59:17):

And that seems to… people talk about their cocktail of choice, so, it’s… You realize at those moments how much you miss people, and so, that tells me we’re doing something right. But some of those have worked and some of them have not. So, it’s interesting, how do you allow creativity and a little bit of structure, but not too much?

Anne (00:59:41):

Right, yep. The balance, as always. One of the things we’ve done is done trivia games through a Zoom call, and then used Cahoot, where you vote for your answer on trivia. And that’s been wonderful, because we do it at the end of the day, typically on a Friday, and this cross-departmental development of relationships has been greater than what we had when we were all together, because we would tend to stay in our departments. And that’s been kind of an unexpected, wonderful thing that we’ve all experienced.

Anne (01:00:15):

We’ve really tried to flip our recognition programs, too. We do a video call where we record it, and we recognize what people are recognizing in each other, and then publishing it every week, and that’s been really helpful, too, to keep the team connected. So, all these new things that we have to be resilient and adapt to, it’s good for us, I think. And what I am amazed about is that the entire planet is going through this all at the same time, so we’re reminded that we’re all human, and that we’re all going to make mistakes, and nothing’s perfect. But if we’re doing the right things for our employees and our customers, we will get through. We’re a resilient group.

Anne (01:00:54):

I want to thank you all for being here today and for participating and sharing your experiences. I really appreciate all of your insights and input on these questions. For everyone, we will send out this recording and feel free to share it with others that you think will benefit from it. And I want to thank our panelists, Amy, Mark, and Kyle for being a part of this.

Anne (01:01:19):

I hope you all have a wonderful day.