Reopen Your Business Safely during the Coronavirus

The push to reopen our economy is on. In Alberta, we're expecting that in 2 days, the government is letting some of the businesses start to slowly open, which means that they have a lot of work to do between now and then. Businesses need to start making money now. Employees need to be earning an income. And we are just aching to get back to normal. But what's normal? Hi, my name is Marc Haine. I am a Service Expert and Master of Experiences. I work with organizations who want to drive organizational excellence and dare people to lead with love and kindness first. Welcome to Marc Haine Live! You know, human beings have been always, have always been Disease-carrying mammals that transport pathogens and disease from one place to another. It used to be that it used to be from one village to another. But now, we've become more adept at transporting bacteria and viruses from all around the world, from every corner of the globe. Until COVID-19, we didn't really worry too much about that whole situation. Our biology is really well suited to stave off most bacteria and viruses that are out there. And whatever we couldn't handle, medical intervention was right around the corner to help us. Bless my doctor and the nurses who serve us. Until now, we really never had to think about the surfaces and products that we touch each and every day. If you watch the movie Contagion, they plot through The transfer of the disease from everybody touching everything, right? We're touching glassware, we're touching doors, we're touching handles, and so on. And so, it was really interesting to see that in a movie that was made in 2011. But you know what makes it worse is that by our very nature, we are sharing animals. On a daily basis, we are sharing things like Shopping carts in grocery stores. And we share chairs and magazines in waiting rooms. We share tables and chairs in restaurants, as well as dishes, cutlery, and glassware. In every single business, we share common doorways. We pull on handles. We push on doors to get in or out of the buildings. We use handrails on escalators and stairs and push buttons on elevators. We share VLTs, Slot machines, cards, dice in casinos. And we share bathrooms everywhere we go. We share bathrooms. And that's because we are not only mammals but we're poopy animals as well. You know, I remember when SARS was an issue. I was working in a casino and the big conversation was how to keep our patrons and our employees safe if the disease actually came to Alberta. We had over 600 slot machines, all with buttons and touchscreens. Some of them still had the old handles. The layout of the machines were designed in such a way that it really kept patrons playing literally shoulder to shoulder with each other. And literally, they moved from one machine to another. Imagine the hundreds of people handling chips and black to handle the poker chips, or the blackjack chips, or handling the chips at craps tables or roulette tables. Now, imagine that some of them don't wash their hands after using the washroom, or after blowing their nose, or picking their noses, or wiping their mouths, or just sneezing and coughing. Okay. You know what? I should have said that we are really gross disease-carrying animals. But with the help of regular cleaning and trust that we all wash our hands, We are pretty secure that our environments were safe. That is up until COVID-19. Now, we have to question everything. As business owners, we have the daunting task of supporting society's well-being as well as trying to balance our social moral responsibility with the needs of generating profits and revenues. But let's face it. If we were really good at that, we wouldn't need Things like occupational health and safety regulations, food safety regulations, the myriad of rules, policies, and laws designed to keep unscrupulous operators at bay. And trying to do all this while keeping our customers and employees safe. Now, as business owners, we have our work cut out for us. Reopening our business is going to be tough and it is going to be costly. Don't be under the illusion that when you open your doors, it's going to be business as usual because it's not. Right now, grocery stores, pharmacies, and some retail operations have already set a new standard for securing the health and safety of their employees and their customers. If you are in retail, you really have some great examples to model for your reopening. But other types of businesses will really have to think about how they will mitigate the health risks while meeting the demands of service and of course, their bottom line. I think about my barber, for instance. Yeah, I call him a barber because he's a barber. He's not a hairdresser. But he's a one-man operation. And he has 6 chairs in his waiting area, all with armrests. He's got stacks and stacks of outdated magazines on a coffee table with a handful of plastic toys to keep the little ones happy just before their traumatic turn In the barber's chair. Most times, when he's finished a cut, he carefully unclips his styling cape. Did you know that's what it was called, a styling cape? It's a thing. Look it up. He removes that San-X strip, that white strip that goes around your neck, right? It acts as a sanitation barrier between his cape and your skin. And he takes a soft brush and removes all the little loose hairs before removing the cape. Of course, he's got to take it off in such a way not to spill all the hair all over the customer. And then, he escorts the newly-dewed customer to the cash. He collects the money. Then while brushing off the chair, he invites the next patient— the next patron over for their makeover using the same clippers. Maybe they get a quick brush off before reuse. But he uses the same clippers, the same scissors, and the same combs, which of course is placed on the blue liquid magic stuff. I don't know what that is. And then, he gets back to work. He repeats the same process hour after hour, day after day, really only to stop to sweep up when the buildup of the hair gets to be too bothersome. He really has a lineup literally from one minute to the next of customers. If we think about his reopening during COVID what will he have to do differently? How will he balance the demands of his clients who are of course just looking at him going, hurry up! Hurry up! I'm in a rush! And looking at their watch thinking, I have to wait how long? Damn! Right? How does he balance that with the health and safety of himself and his patrons? And of course, his need to drive revenues and his profitability. In food service, what service standards will have to be compromised in order to ensure safety? Will place settings, the cutlery in my favorite Chinese restaurant or my favorite morning breakfast diner now be wrapped up in some sanitary way rather than just plunked into a cup on the corner of the table for the patrons to help themselves? What about things like salt and pepper shakers, ketchup, condiment bottles? Will they have to be sanitized between uses? Will they have to change out completely and maybe go to packets? Well, my server now requires me to pour my own wine when I go to my favorite restaurant, Chez Francois. Okay, I made that up. It's not Chez Francois. But you know what I'm saying. What about nightclubs? Nightclubs, the nightclub environment has the very nature and is designed to create human collisions. What will they do? Gyms, tool rental shops, jewelry stores, your ophthalmologist. I mean, how many people have tried on those frames before you did? Anyway, the list is long. And let's face it, the biggest post-COVID change that we will see is going to be of course, in seniors facilities. It's been such a schmozzle, this whole thing. It's just been absolutely horrendous. And again, the need of course, to balance profitability with service. And of course, whenever profitability weighs in, profitability usually wins when stakeholders want their dividends. As a business operator, we will have to be very purposeful during our relaunch. And we need to come to grips that we will not be opening our doors the way we did before. We need to work now with our teams to define the various different customer touch points and do a risk assessment. So, what I've created for you is I've created— and I'll just share my screen here for you. I have shared. I have created this worksheet. And the worksheet is designed to outline for you different kinds of tasks. So, on the worksheet, you would fit in. You would fill in the the work areas. You would fill in the the jobs that need to be done, like all the tasks. that a particular employee has to do. And I encourage you to get your staff involved in doing this. Like literally make copies of this handout and give them to your employees and ask them to sit down and think about every single touchpoint that they have. Everything. Because the more information you have as an owner-operator, you don't necessarily have all the information. I hate to tell you. But your employees will have the information that relies to them. And so, they can go through their job tasks. They can put through everything that they need to do and go through. In this particular case, number 2 was handling cash. Is maintaining distancing an issue? Yes or no? So, if you have a cash counter, maybe you need to consider social distancing in some form or fashion. Then, you have the potential hazard here is the debit or credit card payments from customers. Right? So, the customer's coming up. So, what is the procedure? Didn't you like that as a word? Procedure. What is the procedure for handling the thing? So, in this particular case, I put in use only tap machines to accept credit cards and debit cards. Customers handle the cards. The employees don't touch it at all. But what else do you have to do? Sometimes, customers will want to pay with cash. So, you either say no, no cash at all, which I think that's And in this day and age, I think people will accept that. But if you do, what is the process to be able to mitigate the hazards of handling cash? And then further down into the thing, I put types of control measures. So maybe for handling cash, maybe you need gloves is an optional thing. I'm saying, do you have to hand wash? You're required before a task and after a task. And I think if we again clarify, that sets the standard that your employees are going to have to live by. Right? And then, are there any residual risks? So residual risk really is what happens afterwards. Is there a secondary risk happening? So in the case of handling the credit card machine, the machine can get contaminated from one user to the next. So even though you have different employees working, and I know I've worked in bars where the employees share all the different debit machines. What is the process to make sure that That if somebody is infected, it's not going to contaminate from one person to the next. And then, what do they have to do here? What is the likelihood? I put a likelihood rating here and that can be seen up here. 1 is it's likely. It's sorry, it's unlikely. 2, it's likely to happen. 3, it's highly likely. And so, the more highly likely it is, the more you have to really make sure that you have a process in place to be able to make sure that your customers are staying safe. So, this is a free worksheet. It's down below on the link here on YouTube. You can go to the link and you can download your own Excel spreadsheet. You can change it for whatever your needs are. Please feel free to do whatever you need to to ensure that you can use this tool to help protect the well-being of you and your staff. If you have any questions about this, please Don't hesitate to reach out. You can email me at marc@marchaine.com. I'd be more than happy to give you any or even change it up for you if you think that there's something that's missing from it. But like I mentioned, this is not business as usual at all. We must take whatever steps we can in order to make sure that you can open up in a way that's going to be responsible. But then, at the same token, we want to make sure that you have the ability to rebound and to open properly and open up in such a way that you're secure that you're doing everything humanly possible that you could do while you try to make some money. So, go ahead, use that worksheet, assess it. Take every task that you have within your operation. I know in some operations, you're going to look at me and go, there's got to be a million tasks that we do each and every day. Think of what a bartender does in a day or a server does in a day. Or think about your retail clerks moving stock from the back room and putting them on shelves. There's all sorts. But I encourage you, if you split up the work and you give it to all your staff and you say, please bring in your feedback. And do a couple of people per positions because some people will think of things other people won't have done. So, I encourage you. To download the free worksheet. Make multiple copies. Have the members of your team provide the input. And again, it is really important to outline every single touchpoint. Like who's going to be responsible for wiping down door handles? Who's going to be responsible for cleaning the push plates on the bathroom doors? Whatever it takes, find out. Just get as detailed as you possibly can because the minute you have those worksheets, you then can put processes and procedures in place to protect yourself, your employees, and your customers. Reopening, as I mentioned, is not going to be easy. The more time you invest today, the quicker you'll be up and running safely. Our reality has changed. It is my prayer that your business can weather this storm. As always, I am at your service. If you would like to schedule a free 30-minute brainstorming session, please, please, please click the link below. There's a link there that takes you to my schedule and you can schedule in a free 30-minute session with me. And I encourage you to get together with you. I'd love to do it with you and your team so that we can brainstorm different solutions and different challenges that you might have. My name is Marc Haine. Please, dare to be the exception.