Adapting to Change During a Business Crisis

RCS Influencer Ro Lewis says that the pandemic crisis gave Tremco a great learning opportunity on how to adapt to major change.

Editor's note: The following is a transcript between Coffee Shops' Multimedia Manger Megan Ellsworth, and Tremco's Safety Leader Ro Lewis.

Megan Ellsworth: Hello, everyone, back again for an April influencer response and I'm here with Ro Lewis. Hi Ro, how you doing?

Ro Lewis: I'm doing good, Megan. How are you?

Megan Ellsworth: Doing well. This month's topic is: "What are important resources for contractors when they experience business crisis?" So, let's dive right in. What do you have to say about this topic?

Ro Lewis: Well, thank you for having me and allowing me to kind of weigh in on the topic for the month. The enormity of a business crisis due to all of the societal things that we deal with, even in the business world day-to-day is pretty significant, at least from my experience with our organization here at Tremco CPG. From the field services perspective, of course, I guess the first thing that comes to mind that created a major business interruption and still have those shockwaves thereafter now is the COVID response or the COVID issue stemming from 2020. And here three years later, we are still experiencing what it's like to pivot in the aftermath of what that looks like.

So for me, corporately across the board, it is really twofold. It extends to our employee base and just personal interaction where the company had to make smart decisions and the employees had to buy into those smart decisions because of the health of the organization. It may have dealt with pay cuts, it may have dealt with temporary pay cuts, and all of us experienced that. So, not only do we have to learn how to pivot, but the employees have to shift in kind with the pivot and just work together and synergize and strategize as to how we make our company, and know this I say our company work for the betterment of us individually.

And then, of course, as it relates to our clients, the supply chain issue is still prevalent for us. We are not only a construction operation, but we are manufacturer. So, raw materials and getting the raw materials from the various places in the world, having canister steels, stuck on ships out in the sea and ocean, it really caused issues. And what we had to do to combat that was to figure out how to strategically outfit the most robust clients we had and get materials to those very important jobs and then figure out how we can negotiate and navigate the rest of our responsibilities.

Thank God, we were able to do it successfully, but it was a learning experience with a very, very short learning curve, even after three years. I think from my wheelhouse dealing with safety, we tremendously had to figure out how to shift because shift happens. So, you have to figure out how to shift our programming, our interface, and our interaction because we were considered essential employees. So, because we worked on hospitals, we worked on schools that were still maybe in session or out of session, or the school districts figured that this would be the most optimal time while students weren't in the building to do repairs. But we still had to interface and deal with each other, work with each other. We had to devise all of these policies and protocols.

Not unlike many other companies, but the difference for us was that with safety, you have a heavy training base. We have a large continual education program and process within our organization, which is quite sophisticated. So, we became one of the only companies that OSHA allowed to have a running live remote continual education process with the construction outreach program. So, we didn't skip a beat with providing OSHA 10-hour courses, OSHA 30-hour courses, which are typically in-person live sessions outside of the traditional check-the-box type deal. Ours is very much interactive and that's how we thrived and that's what we were used to.

So, it really made sense for us to figure out how to still keep that a tangible entity in the organization because it was necessary because work didn't stop for us. So, that's one of the ways or multiple ways that we had to shift as far as dealing with crisis and the most prevalent here recently.

Megan Ellsworth: Wow. So well said. Yes, I completely agree with that. I didn't know that you all were one of the only companies that you did with the OSHA. That's really cool. That's very fascinating.

Ro Lewis: Yeah. And I won't purport to make it sound like we were the only, but I know that the allowance to do that was very few slim.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah. Interesting. Awesome. Well, that was great. Any last words on this?

Ro Lewis: No, I guess if I would sum it up, I think it's all predicated upon and relegated to culture, right?

Megan Ellsworth: Right.

Ro Lewis: What culture does a business set up for their employees to trust the management infrastructure and the corporate leadership to shift with them and not feel that it's only self-interest for the business, it's also a communal interest for the family members of the organization. And that's one of the things that Tremco CPG has from the business culture, the corporate culture, and certainly the safety culture. I think our people know that we have their best interests at heart, and so it made it easy for us, easier, I should say, for us to be able to navigate those tough waters.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah. I have really enjoyed your response today because a lot of the influencers I've interviewed already this month have talked about having an accountant during business crisis or kind of talked about all the same similar things. And I love that you touched on having a steady culture in a strong culture and that will help you get through a business crisis because that's so true. So really well said.

Ro Lewis: Absolutely. Thank you.

Ro Lewis is the safety leader at Tremco. See his full bio here.