When your business is moving people, what do you do when the world stops moving? This week, Michelle is joined by our client, Mark Scullion, president of Suddath Workplace Solutions, a company that went from moving employees and students from place to place to moving everyone back home. Listen in as they discuss the future of the office spaces post-pandemic.

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Get to know Mark Scullion

Google tells more than 100,000 North American employees to stay home amid coronavirus fears.

Microsoft updates work from home policy, lets employees work remotely through October.

Since recording our podcast, Twitter has announced it will make working remote permanent for some.

Transcript

Hello, and thank you for joining Ubben Talkin’. I’m your host, Michelle Ubben, and today we’re discussing the nationwide relocation of students and workers as thousands of people retreated to the safety of their homes in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. As states reopen, they will return to changed workplaces with new safety protocols. Later we’ll speak with Mark Scullion, president of Suddath Workplace Solutions — the powerhouse behind many of these university and business moves.

When a hurricane threatens to rip through a community, many must leave their homes for the sake of their safety. But with a pandemic, the safest place you can be is your home. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, almost overnight, the world sheltered in place, and our jobs, schools, exercise and hobbies had to coexist in our living rooms, forever changing the way we operate our daily lives.

While the idea of working remotely is not new, until the past few months, its application had been limited. Many used to think it was only suited for technology-focused jobs, or only needed when an employee was facing extenuating circumstances. But the COVID-19 pandemic has shattered our previous conceptions of working remote and now is showing us that many more jobs are suited for this type of work than we previously thought.

Giant corporations like Google, Twitter, and AT&T are leading the change, letting hundreds of thousands of employees work remotely during the pandemic. Microsoft is even extending this period out as far as October.

Public schools and major universities had a similar overhaul in operations as they rescheduled their curricula to suit online courses. Many college students across the country left for spring break without realizing they were leaving their college experience – and belongings – behind for the foreseeable future.

These companies and institutions didn’t have weeks of planning to enact this transition to the online world. They depended on quick action and strategic planning by experts in the logistics field. Homes needed to be outfitted with the proper technology for work tasks, millions of students needed to be reunited with their sealed off personal possessions, and those still at work needed to remodel their workplaces with an eye for social distancing.

As many states begin the first phase of reopening plans this month, many schools and workplaces will begin to transition back to in-person working and learning. It’s essential for them to take a step back and learn from the past few months. Whether it’s incorporating social distancing into their operations long-term, or incorporating remote working as a continuing part of their work plan, we need to look at this as an evolution of the workplace, rather than a response to a problem that has come and gone.

Join me as I talk with Mark Scullion, president of Suddath Workplace Solutions, about the forces behind a transition to remote work and schooling and how companies will need to adapt as we move toward the new normal.

Michelle: Mark, thank you for joining me on Ubben Talkin’ Today.

Mark: Happy to be here. Thank you.

Michelle: So like about every business, Suddath has experienced some disruption from the incredible changes that we’ve all suffered from COVID-19. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Mark: Absolutely. You know, talk about something you think will never happen, you know, hitting you from out of left field. Our business has gone from robust and growing to less than 50 percent business volume and you know, many of our customers have just ceased operations, so our service opportunities are significantly limited.

Michelle: But what I find so impressive is that you’ve been able to pivot so effectively and provide news services.

Mark: Yeah I mean, the logistics around sending, you know, hundreds of employees home with very short notice, you know, that was reality across many of our customers. College campuses, where thousands of students were sent home without their belongings and you know, how do the logistics happen around the students getting their belongings. And for companies that are staying open, you know, the environment had to change from a distancing standpoint, from a, you know, personal protection equipment stand point. It’s just massive changes in a very short period of time and we did rally our resources and we were able to help customers with all of those challenges and actually soften some of the revenue impact on our company by keeping our workers busy with those services that were sort of focused around the crisis.

Michelle: Some people might think it’s no big deal to move employees to home, you know, pack up their laptops and their day planner and find a quiet part of the house to work. But for large companies that are moving lots of employees and need equipment, need a work space set up, times a hundred or a thousand, there’s a lot to it. And then, keeping track of all of those business items that need to come back and knowing where they are, knowing that they get back when we return to some semblance of normal is a big undertaking.

Mark: Well you know, an employee disconnecting their work station and moving it in their car or home, how do you hook it up on the other end? How were the cables configured to the docking station? How come I can’t get it to work? Fortunately, those are all things we know how to do very well. You know, before we move a computer set up, we inventory it, we take a photo of it, we mark which monitor was right, which monitor was left, if there’s a middle, we mark middle. We tag the cable ends so that it’s clear where they go on the other side. You know, an employee just grabbing stuff and running and trying to set it up on the other end could be an awful employee experience, whereas having an experienced partner that knows how to do that can be a much different employee experience. And I’ll tell you, a complicating factor has been many companies sent people home to work but then they furloughed them. So the additional logistics need around harvesting assets from furloughed employees, you know, so you’ve got another level of complexity there and that’s really where that inventory of what did the employee have, comes in handy.

Michelle: You also mentioned colleges and we both have college student children that have had to leave their campuses and come home. Every university is struggling with empty dorms that are still full of student possessions. How have you been able to provide a solution to universities and how is that going to work when students return to campus eventually?

Mark: It’s kind of mind numbing. How do you process 6,000 credit card transactions? How do you gather 6,000 room numbers and 6,000 destinations and 6,000 cell phone numbers for the students and 6,000 email addresses for the students? So what we did in a very short period of time, is we spun up a version of our customer portal where the students could sign into a web-based platform, they could give us all of their critical information and we could have a consistent workflow from that point forward versus the traditional methods of an email or a phone call. So that really streamlined the process for the students, it gave the colleges and universities confidence and it definitely streamlined information for us on our end.

Michelle: And it’s the way that students are confident of sharing information and checking on the status of things anyway.

Mark: No doubt about it.

Michelle: And that wasn’t a service you provided before all of this came up, right?

Mark: We do provide logistic support when students, especially in large colleges and universities, show up to their dorms on the first day and leave their dorms on the last day. A lot of these students don’t have proper handling equipment, many times there are stairs and small elevators. So some colleges will have us bring, you know, 20 men to a location and just provide general support to the students as they move in and out. But this is really the first time we’ve ever gone in and removed student belongings and shipped them to the students.

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Michelle: So besides the workplaces that were able to relocate their employees to home, you’ve got essential workers who really have to remain in the workspace but they can’t have the same layout perhaps or function in the same way they did before because they still have to observe social distancing. How have you played a role to help those essential workers continue to function in the workplace?

Mark: We’ve seen a wave of what we