Contributed by Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, disaster avoidance expert, speaker and author.
In light of the global COVID-19 pandemic, many companies are asking their employees to work from home. But are they considering the potential disasters that can occur as a result of this transition?
An example of what might occur comes from one of my coaching clients, from a few months before the pandemic hit. Pete is a mid-level manager in the software engineering unit of an entrepreneurial startup that quickly grew to 400 office-based employees doing electronic health records (EHRs). Due to rising rents on their office building, the company wanted to shift their employees to a work-from-home set-up.
Pete was assigned by senior management to lead the team transitioning all 400 employees to telework. He had previous experience in helping smaller teams to working from home in the past. However, this significantly higher number of people was proving to be a challenge—as was the short amount of time available, which was only four weeks, resulting from a failure in negotiation with the landlord of the office building.
