Panera CEO's COVID-19 Leadership: Protecting Employees During Crisis | Niren Chaudhary

When the pandemic happened, very tough time, business was obviously suffering and we had to protect the business and the brand. We had to furlough our employees just like many other companies did. So we had to furlough about 25,000 people at the front line. Now, you can imagine this is a tough action that you have to take, you must take because as leaders, you have to do the right thing for the company. But the question is, this is a pivotal point when you have yourself go back to your values and your behaviors and ask yourself, how can I role model in this difficult situation my care for people? Because that is what then defines culture. So what we did was we saw that CVS and Walmart were hiring 100,000 people. We reached out to those two companies and asked them to hire our furloughed employees. And cvs, in fact, set up a website for us, for our employees to apply and get a job with them.