Bad Days Made Better for Bayer Employees
Sean Colvin, Manager, U.S. Corporate Travel Management, Bayer U.S.
One of the things that I’ve always admired about my wife, beyond just being infinitely smarter than I am, is her dedication to helping people and making a difference in people’s lives. She is a nurse practitioner in the cardiac unit at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. In contrast, the majority of my life’s work, within the “Managed Corporate Travel” space, has largely been consumed with airlines, hotels, credit cards and expense reports…..needless to say our respective “good” and “bad” days and the way we make an impact are different. For me, the 2017 hurricane season moved our U.S. Travel Management team into the arena of helping others in need in a way that is really unique to our typical role within corporations.
Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria have recently caused a lot of bad days for millions of people in the affected areas of the southern U.S. And Caribbean, including many of our fellow Bayer colleagues. Given our group’s role within Bayer, and the various relationships we oversee with hotel/transportation providers, we offered to provide whatever support we could.
As the various storms passed, our team began working with the internal Bayer Crisis Management Team on assessing the whereabouts and conditions of our employees. Contact information for the travel team was sent out to all employees in the affected areas, with instructions to reach out to us, should they need assistance with temporary housing and/or transportation. As we began to receive calls, we quickly learned about Bayer employees who were left without food, water, power, or worse yet, had their homes either completely destroyed or damaged to the extent that they were no longer safe to inhabit. We talked with employees who were recovering in shelters, sleeping on bare floors within their home, or were completely flooded inquiring about places to go for the night.
We focused our efforts on those in the most need, working with our various hotel partners and temporary housing partners, and in some instances, securing a hotel room for a few nights, or even apartments for 30 nights, as employees’ homes were being cleaned up and repaired. In many instances that offer alone and just talking to us, spending time on the phone and being able to share their story of the ordeal made things a little bit better. Many of the employees expressed gratitude that the company went so far to reach out and check on them to make sure they were safe and ok.
The further in time we got from the storms, some of the contact with employees continued, as a few reached out via email, just to say “thanks for checking on us” and “appreciated your efforts during that difficult time.” Given the human factors and conditions of the recent hurricanes, I would never say that they provided an “opportunity” to experience something, I will say that it was good to know that our team was able to assist and, even in some small part, better the circumstances of just a few of the people that were directly affected by the storms.
