Newsletter – Test
When our last TMB Newsletter went to print in mid-January, who among us could have foreseen where we would be a short two months later? While we may have heard of a coronavirus in January 2020, no one was yet calling it COVID-19 and it seemed far away and unrelated to our daily life. We now know how quickly everything can change. Since March 13th, when President Trump declared a National Emergency, to a week later when we closed the doors of our Headquarters, we have embarked on a great experiment.
Every day, we are having to create workarounds to current policies and procedures as well as being asked for normally intrusive information on the health of our employees by Government agencies. In order to continue the most regular operations possible, I had to direct the suspension or modification of normal policies and procedures and establish many expedient work arounds. We had to strengthen our controls on teleworking while at the same time, suspending core hours. I am now required to report to NAVSEA on a daily basis (including Saturdays and Sundays), the number of our employees who have been tested and confirmed to have the virus, those who have been hospitalized, and those who had the virus but recovered. I am also required to report any deaths, which Thank God, has not yet been a requirement.
Throughout this entire crisis, we have continued to honor the commitment to mission that our Sailors and Marines show every day in the kind of close quarters that we are now being told to avoid. DoD contractors and the work we perform are considered essential services and our work clearly is. We adopted the DoD guidance on maximum flexibility for teleworking and abandoned the requirement for core hours knowing that many of our employees were balancing work and parenting. This has not lessened the stress of having children at home when they would normally be in school, but it helps provide the flexibility needed to work. All TMB personnel have been calling in to some level of work meeting or check-in everyday which is not only helpful for accomplishing work but keeps us in contact with one another. We have learned to use MS Teams, Skype For Business and other desktop video tools. The scary part of that is seeing how disheveled a person can become after weeks of not shaving or getting a haircut.
Now comes the real test of our resolve. Remote and disbursed work has both positives and negatives. The vast majority of people enjoy not coming to the office, but social distancing also means a greater degree of isolation than most of us are accustomed to. As a company, we regularly check on each other to combat feelings of isolation and stress. I am also acutely aware that some of our employees have had to go into the Yard for work and we have employees who have to work in building yards and cannot shield themselves at home. We have had a close relative of one of our teammates succumb to the virus and we have a spouse who is a nurse treating seriously ill people. Our problems pale in comparison. We are where we are, we must work our way through it, and continue to support the Warfighter while managing our feelings and those of our families.
From what had not even been a blip on our screens to something that touches every aspect of every day, has likely changed how we live and work forever. We need to think in new ways and approach how we work and where we work differently. This is going to require the deployment of smart and motivated people in new ways irrespective of organizational boundaries and traditional titles. What we did yesterday is not necessarily what we will do tomorrow and that continues to unfold.
The majority of this issue has been given over to life and work during the pandemic. Cute cat pictures cannot hide everyone’s realization that millions have been sickened and thousands have died. Again, we are the lucky ones.
~ Tom Dority, Chairman of the Board, CEO
