Responding to COVID-19 By Kathryn Mackenzie
Wayde Carroll | Cook Inlet Tribal Counci
B E S T O F A L A SK A B USI N E SS SPEC I A L SEC T I O N
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isk assessment companies will tell any business owner that having a crisis plan in place is crucial. In Alaska that means being prepared for a lot of potentially disastrous scenarios—earthquakes, snow and ice, fires and smoke, even bears or moose. And now businesses have added pandemics their risk mitigation plans. This year as part of the Best of Alaska Business awards surveying process, we asked you which businesses have been particularly impressive with their response to a whole new set of challenges presented by COVID-19. While state and local leaders were scrambling to figure out how to best protect the public, companies small and large were carefully, quickly, and thoughtfully determining how to protect their employees and customers—not just from the virus, but from job losses and financial distress. As classrooms closed and students were sent home to learn, families had to adjust their work schedules to accommodate yet another significant change to their lives and companies had to figure out how to help them. When we were sorting through your answers to this question, one response was repeated over and over: employees were most impressed with their employer’s ability to quickly pivot them from in-office to remote work. And workers whose jobs require them to stay on location say they have been most impressed by the safety protocols put in place by their employers: plexiglass partitions, masks, hand sanitizer, and social distancing have all helped client-facing workers feel more secure during a very insecure time. We thought instead of interpreting these answers ourselves, we’d eliminate the middleman and print the answers just as they were given to us.
42 | July 2021
Alaska Business www.akbizmag.com
