THINKING Ahead By Carl Lamb
Leaving the pandemic better than before hen the COVID-19 pandemic blew up, we at Snavely Forest Products knew that sitting passively by in hopes the crisis would work itself out wasn’t a realistic solution. Hope is not a plan! With that in mind, our company began making decisions and operating from two distinct, but parallel mindsets. First, we looked at the outbreak through the lens of what steps did we need to take immediately to address the circumstances at hand. And, second, we envisioned what kind of company we wanted to be as we emerged on the other side of this calamity.
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Over-Communication Early On We sprang into action at once, assembling a COVID team whose purpose it was to ensure that Snavely—which has locations throughout the U.S.—remained in compliance with local, state, and federal pandemic requirements. Just as importantly, we recognized the need to educate our employees. Although we quickly reduced office occupancy in the branches to 10% or less of staff, as a distribution business our front-line workers also include material handlers and drivers who don’t have the option of working remotely. Product has to get onto the trucks, and the drivers have to deliver to our customers. The workers show-
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ing up every day on site to handle these key tasks are the heroes of our organization, and we owed it to them to make sure they were safer here than anywhere else. Not only that, we knew it was important to keep them in the loop as to what Snavely was doing to achieve that goal—what protocols were being put into place, and why. Even today, when the world has largely settled into its “new normal,” our COO provides a quarterly update on what’s going on and what’s been done in response. But our overarching goal at the onset of the pandemic was to communicate, even over-communi-
cate, to our people. Because of the CDC-recommended procedures and processes implemented, and because of all the internal discussion surrounding those actions, we got to a point very quickly where the fear of the unknown started to die down. And that was good. With a workforce that was reassured of their safety on the job, we were free to focus on business even as we stayed on top of all of the requirements.
Improving for the Future At the same time that one team— consisting of our director of safety,
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