#MidWeekMessage #7 — Cash flow and Health and Safety
Here’s the vid version of todays edition.
As ever, our #1 message to all CEOs, Founders and Leaders at this time is to focus on cash flow. Getting this right makes everything else possible, and we encourage you to take direct ownership of this each day, week and month during the Coronavirus pandemic.
To help with this, we’ve put together a webinar on Friday at 1pm, where we will get an expert lead session from Richard Wadman and he’ll take us through a template, the details and how to put together a 13 week cash flow forecast and keep it up to date.
Save your spot HERE
Our #2 topic for today is Health and Safety. As restrictions start to ease, there are huge implications for the work place in how we prepare and then take care of the employees, customers and visitors.
Today we spent some time with Murray James, the proprietor of The Tasting Room Exeter, a cafe which has had to shut down during the crisis. He reflects on the lack of clear guidance currently available to him in preparing for opening soon and talks about some of the things he has been doing in getting ready for the first phase of being a takeaway business rather than a cafe. Always so very useful to get this kind of real-life insight and reflection. It helps us to create a new perspective on our own unique situation, but look at Murrays.
Considering offices, where a great many of us will start to go back to over the next few weeks in the UK, there are a lot of simple things to think about and a lot of more difficult ones as well. Desk spacing is obvious. Arrival and departure times. Cleaning of the main spaces and contact surfaces include keyboard. Pinch points such as doorways, toilet facilities, common areas. Rotating staff or introducing shift patterns to decrease concurrency. What does a fire drill look like now? Additionally, how do track and trace link up with cases in the office and how can we use the 14-day window as an effective tool in the battle where we don’t yet have easy access for all to testing, where there is no sure fire treatment protocol, no vaccine and mortality figures around the 10% level for infections.
When looking at schools there are much clearer guidances available at the moment, but still, a way to go before it is clear how to make it all work. Within schools, the challenge is really how to bring pupils and staff together with the knowledge that there will in all likelihood be a case during the coming weeks that requires isolation for some to take place. Done badly a single case could wipe out the operational capacity of a school to deliver teaching effectively. The government in the UK have advised pods of 15. Norway I believe look at pods of 6. Learning, eating and playing together exclusively in these pods to minimize the risk of infection and reducing the potential levels of transmission.
Within our thinking we must also consider two very important things, against our hurry to get back to work, to get employees off of furlough and to make some revenues. We must consider our moral imperative to make a safe, and seen to be safe, place for people to work or visit. To be human about the way we put things together. Additionally, as business leaders we must also consider our operational risks and liabilities in putting things together.
We must look at what the government says is reasonable, and what it saying is not, and we must be ahead of the curve to avoid any potential lawsuits or fines that may be incurred if not following the advice or applying it appropriately.
I was heartened to see the recent article about a wearable trial in Lichenstein for 2000 Ava biometric devices. A pivot from a fertility monitoring device sees the principality being proactive in knowing the ‘medical strain’ their residences are feeling and in particular their skin temperature, and in so doing providing a sentinel-like early warning system on potential issues. I like this because it gives something to base your actions upon, and it is proactive and it is constantly available real time data.
There is so much to learn. So much to work out. Just as well we are #inthistogether so we can help each other and beat this like a #tribe
S.
