Page 9 - BusinessWest March 3, 2021
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 I think we’re down to $70 million, which allows me to start breathing again, and most of that $70 million is in the hospitality industry — trans- portation, restaurants — which is still struggling. I’m not sure where the light is at the end of the tunnel for those industries, because they’re hanging by a thread, and I’m not sure how they’re going to come back. From our banking perspective, we’re operating in a differ- ent world; we had to pivot, we had to send 180 people home, and that’s hard to do in retail banking. And if any of you have done your banking, I apolo- gize for us — and I know our competi- tors are the same way — that the drive- ups are ridiculously backed up. Overall, things are going OK, but it doesn’t feel very good.
Stelzer: At Appleton, we’ve morphed from emergency-response protocols in March to highly organized COVID-19 protocols in our elderly/senior/multi- family apartment communities and in our commercial portfolio that we man- age, which is about 2 million square feet. In short, we’re operating at high levels; we’re able to do that even with a chunk of the workforce being remote. All of our employees have had to
learn a new COVID language and new COVID protocols amid all the impor- tant tasks they already do.
Overall, there’s a lot of good news coming out, but how we’re doing is still a daily question; while the vaccine rollout is encouraging, it’s still going to take some time. But, yes, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
BusinessWest: During the pandem- ic, people have worked remotely, and successfully. As we all look toward the day when something approaching nor- mal returns, how will, or should, com- panies approach work and the question of bringing people back to the office?
Senecal: We have 350 employees, and about half of them are working from home. I’ve flip-flopped on this throughout the year, but, yeah, we’re coming back. The social-interaction part of this is lost with people work- ing at home; you can’t create a corpo- rate culture from a remote location. Beyond that, there’s the human con- nection — staying home is not good for mental health. But I’m for some sort
of balance; if your job allows it, you can work from home — we’ve proven that. I do think the outcome of this
is that there will be a balance. From
a workforce perspective, we’ve had a hard time recruiting people for some key positions, and we’ve re-evaluated to say, ‘no, you don’t have to be in the office.’ We’re interviewing someone today who lives in Florida who may be able to work from home for us; we’ve never, ever considered that before, and we are.
Cooper: When it comes to students ... there were some questions pre-
“
people is huge, and we have to give our employees some time to breathe when this is all said and done.”
never wanted to work at home, and now some of those same people want to stay where they are. That’s a risk to our business model; we need to have the interaction between students
and mentors that shape them mov- ing forward to be strong employees in the fields we have represented
on this panel. The synergy of having people together, the opportunity to come up with ideas and piggyback on them together, and just the joy of being in the workplace, it’s difficult to
get all of that on a call or on Zoom.
One Year Later
Continued on page 10
ROBERT JOHNSON
pandemic about the value of higher education. And I would say to you that our students are saying loud and clear that they want to be in person, face
to face, they want to play sports, they
want to interact with mentors like fac- ulty members and staff members. We’re studying this ... we’re looking at what the future will look like and how we bring people back safely. Some people
The human toll that this is taking on
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     FEATURE
MARCH 3, 2021 9
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