On June 10th, we recorded the third of four webinars that Xenium has offered related to COVID-19 and all of the many adjustments, changes, and plans we’ve had to make to accommodate it. In the webinar below, Xenium’s President Anne Donovan had the opportunity to talk about organizational strategy and plans for the future with Kyle Dean, CFO of ZOOM+Care, Amy Prosenjak, President of A to Z Wineworks, and Mark Rollins, Senior Director of Operations at Lacrosse Footwear.
Since each of these guests comes from various industries and backgrounds, you’re sure to get some good insight into the future of your business. Below, we’ve compiled some takeaways to help you approach your organizational planning, but to get the full scoop, watch the full video below.
Q: When it comes to the COVID-19 crisis and your business, what are some of the lessons you learned early on?
Kyle — ZOOM+Care
We had to find out what the rules of the day were. We had to take into consideration the CDC guidelines, the State of Washington’s rules, and the State of Oregon’s rules. We have a team-based care model where we try to deliver consistent care no matter which clinic our patients choose. And if Washington allows something and Oregon doesn’t allow something, and the CDC says a third thing, how do we actually implement them?
This caused us to become very, very fluid on a regular basis. We were changing the operating model almost every day for the first — I’d say the first four weeks — based on conditions being changed. The mask, no-mask — all the other things that we were going through — we were kind of ground zero for some of those things.
Overall, we learned to adapt, be flexible, and have a sense of humor. We learned to be transparent that we don’t have all the answers.
Mark — Lacrosse Footwear
We learned quite a bit about being as flexible as possible as well. Similarly, we gave managers a lot of discretion in terms of how they led their teams. We tried to do as much practice-sharing across the organization as possible, just because we were all learning how to do this in real-time together.
I also think communication has been an important aspect of this. Since, as Kyle said, the rules were changing by the hour, we had to figure out how to be faster in terms of getting information out to employees and working with our teams in that manner.
I think the other thing is learning to trust our employees more. I think you have to do that in a remote environment. It’s a crisis, so we’ve got to delegate, we’ve got to move quickly, and we’ve got to trust each other to get things done. It’s by no means perfect, but I think we all learned to trust throughout the process.
Amy — A to Z Wineworks
You’ve got to become adaptable and creative with how to check-in and manage in this new virtual way. And so, we’ve been learning how to be successful within that communication sphere, which 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.
Q: What changes have you had to make when it comes to your business model? And do you think these changes will continue even after the pandemic is over?
Amy — A to Z Wineworks
In general, our business model hasn’t changed. Because so much of our wine is distributed across the country to national and big-box retailers, independent wine shops, and so forth, that part hasn’t changed. But it has accelerated.
Where we’ve been probably most innovative is in our direct sales realm. We have a tasting room that actually is currently under renovation. So we’ve been under construction through all of this, and so we have this team that had already moved to a temporary location on our campus. They were already trying to figure out how to best provide an experience for our customers that were coming, then we closed, and now we’re trying to figure out Instagram and how to attract people to a wine experience. How do you offer that when customers can’t come to our winery? 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. We’ve innovated when it comes to how we deliver to our customers.
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 we’d be doing in the future, but it’s dependent on a three-year cycle when it comes to wine.
Mark — Lacrosse Footwear
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. I would actually say from the day that stimulus checks began being deposited, our online business exploded. We do fulfillment for various customers, whether it’s REI or Cabelas, out of our own warehouse direct to consumer, and their business has mirrored that in many ways.
In some areas where we were nervous and supporting people that were maybe idle, there were other parts of our business where we were starting to hire because we needed 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.
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. Shockingly, we got it done in a week and a half.
Kyle — ZOOM+Care
I think what’s going to stay with us going forward is the modalities — the different ways that we’re going to deliver care. Whether it be the phone, video, chat, or in person.
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. Many employers have challenges with 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…
Right now, we’re working on how to bring a COVID testing package for businesses so that 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?
The other thing that we’re going to do differently is reaching new markets. When we opened up video care, we opened it up to the whole state, and because Zoom is such a trendy name right now in conferencing and whatever else, we got calls from all over the world.
So, you’re global overnight as a digital company, and how do you respond to that? Our learning curve on digital, which probably would have taken three or 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.
Q: Let’s talk about the dynamic of inviting employees back to work. Can you share any key strategies for motivating employees who are at work now? Or what about getting those to come back if they’ve been off?
Amy — A to Z Wineworks
With harvest coming, we’re talking about when and how to bring the administrative and supportive staff back onsite. We really haven’t made a plan yet. We’ve talked about all sorts of things: office reorganization, who really needs an office and who doesn’t, who can share, who can’t, and what kind of spacing we might need. We’ve also been talking about some sort of rotating schedule.
So, overall, we’ve been continuing to talk about how to function efficiently. We move to a 24-hour operation during harvest, so that has challenges. 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. 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.
Kyle — ZOOM+Care
We’ve got 200 people here at base camp, so we’re in phase two of reopening. We’ve got a central point of entry, and we take temperature readings.
When we went into this, we sat down with our people — understanding their potential childcare or eldercare concerns — and said, “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. As we transition back to work, we need to be asking, “What works for you now?” And where we can continue to support remote, we probably will.
For phase two, we have an assigned seating chart, up to maybe 20% of our employees returning, six feet, social distancing, face coverings, sanitizing before and after using the meeting room, meeting rooms are limited to two people, and so on. We went to our employees at our base camp and asked, “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.
And then, phase three probably is going to come in July, and that’s going to be probably more volume-driven. As the volume grows, and as 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.
Mark — Lacrosse Footwear
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.
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.
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. So, that’s something that we’re adjusting to. We’re trying to figure out 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’m also concerned about our team members not taking good care of themselves. I’m concerned about the amount of unused PTO we have right now because people can’t 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.
Q: Despite the uncertainty, how do you plan for the future?
Kyle — ZOOM+Care
Our fiscal year ends on June 30th, 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, and 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.
We also want to make sure we have funds set aside for the opportunities or the crises that come up. 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 serve patients is going to look different. And how do you measure the satisfaction of someone who never comes in the doors? I don’t know. We’ll have to figure that out.
Amy — A to Z Wineworks
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 — what we’re targeting and how we market. So, we’ve worked hard on the reentry strategy, working with our distribution partners across the country. We’re also placing a lot of emphasis on digital marketing.
So, we’re really being selective and careful of our marketing and our route strategies for the wine that we’ve already produced.
Mark — LaCrosse Footwear
I would say we are prioritizing one-time investments over fixed expenses. I just finished buying inventory for October and November, and so we’re committed to that plan. But looking ahead to ’21, we’re going to try to wait as long as we can before we pull the trigger on making those investments. It’s all about being flexible because it’s hard to plan when you don’t know what to expect.
What’s Up Next
I want to encourage everyone to check out our COVID-19 resource center, which has lots of resources and tools around how to navigate this crisis in the workplace.
We also want to recognize and acknowledge that our country is dealing with an entirely different crisis. That’s why we’re planning a webinar on issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. On June 25th at 10 am, join us as we address how employers can play an essential role in this current state.