Imagines’ Covid Nightmare

(How to survive an outbreak in your business or how to avoid one in the first place)

Imagine Watford was recently the hub of a fairly severe Covid outbreak – an experience that provided undoubtedly my most challenging fortnight of business ownership in my 25 years of experience. The lessons learned I believe could help save other businesses and business owners from a similar nightmare scenario. This blog, our story, is offered up in total transparency, our good points and our bad points, to give you all the info you could need to avoid the same scenario. These are real facts, genuine experience, not conspiracy theories or dramatization.

Imagine employ 50 people of whom 27 are based at our Watford Head Office. 12 of those staff tested positive. I should start by stressing all have fully recovered.

Our outbreak began with one of our team fell ill with nasty flu like symptoms. They insisted it was nothing more than a cold, but as we had with three previous staff who had felt ill in the weeks before, we banned him from the office and sent him for a test. The previous ones had all came back negative and truthfully we expected the same again.

While we awaited his result a second employee felt unwell. We gave all admin staff the option to work from home at this point, which they took. Front line sales and letting staff remained in. On the third day the first test came back as positive. We closed the office and sent everyone to home working. We reported the incident to Environmental Health (a requirement with even 1 Covid case) and asked all our employees across the whole company to get a test taken.

From them, 9 tested positive. All based at Head Office, but some of those staff also worked in our satellite office in WD25 on occasion and so we had that branch closed too. Both were chemically cleaned.

The matter became more protracted as three of our negative tests had symptoms in the days ahead and were retested as positive. We had no idea this could happen. We thought negative meant negative, but in fact negative could mean the virus was in you but not yet showing up on a test. That incubation period could be several days.

So 12 people had picked up the virus in one office, in a matter of 4 days where the branch was an infectious site, going back to a couple of days before the first guy showed symptoms.

The stress levels as this took hold, speaking as someone who luckily copes with stress very comfortably as a rule, were off the scale and for multiple good reasons;

You worry about your staff health first and foremost. The guilt complex as every day it felt like a new positive test was coming in and that this happened under your watch and therefore you are responsible is impossible not to take extremely personally. The chances of one of your young people being seriously ill is remote. But that won’t make the fear they could have some underlying issue you weren’t aware of that makes them vulnerable any easier to handle.
Secondly you then worry for any of the nearest and dearest of your staff, who may be more susceptible to a higher level of illness. Again the burden of responsibility weighs heavy. Even as I type this it makes me very tense again thinking back to those two / three weeks.
And then there are the clients who may have been exposed by coming in the office during that tainted period or meeting an affected employee on a viewing / valuation. I was less concerned about this in the knowledge the staff were adhering strictly to guidelines when public facing, but of course you are concerned someone may have lapsed. Calling your clients who affected staff had come in to contact with, to explain you had this problem is not a fun task. Although I have to say we didn’t have single person getting upset with us – although this in large part to the fact our staff had adhered to PPE and other policy when meeting them.
Then there’s the impact on the running of the business. Clearly we were not able to go and do viewings or valuations, so our trading capacity was harmed. The financial cost to your business being out of action, both because your office is down and because your staff are ill or isolating over two or three weeks will be substantial.
There is also the fear this becomes public before we had time to control the narrative and have full facts and the risk this could blight the business as a whole and our other branches who had been unaffected would then take a hit too.
Environmental Health were all over us like a rash, totally understandably, but not pleasant. The burden of working with EH and other parties is hugely time consuming and again comes at a cost.

Environmental Health have a responsibility to stop the outbreak and understand exactly what had gone on. The investigation into our outbreak concluded that the virus was picked up by one of our valuers who had been to the home of a family where someone had been infectious and unaware they had it. Our valuer was asymptomatic and had therefore unwittingly brought it in our office while feeling perfectly fine themselves. Something must have gone wrong with the fact it took out half the people in that office in just a few days. Our guidelines for how we set up the office to manage Covid risks were rightly under scrutiny.

The nub for those of you reading this is no doubt “what would you have done differently and what are you doing differently now to ensure no repeat?” We re-opened those branches today with full sign off from Environmental Health for the record. (21^st October)

My first advice is most relevant to sales business owners and other estate agency owners. I had 3 criteria by which I was making decisions around how we managed our business during the pandemic. a) The welfare of staff and clients. b) The financial welfare of the business and protecting all staff jobs. c) Retaining the team spirit of the business.

It was this last one that caused me the problem predominantly. And to non-sales businesses you may wonder why this is a consideration of similar scale to the first two points. My logic was that if you had spent many years shaping a team and a culture that you felt was part of your company DNA and was a key ingredient in the success of your business, to then watch that potentially unfold with a level of home or remote working where it is so much harder to retain that team spirit, is soul destroying.

That said it is that third criteria I would tell you to swallow and accept. Had we had far fewer people working in the same office, it would naturally have made distancing easier and almost certainly resulted in fewer people contracting it. The impact on the business would have been less and mine and my business partners stress levels would have been a good deal more manageable.

My 4 key pieces of advice would be;

Have the minimum number of people in a branch / office you can survive on. We have ended up with ALL admin home working and those sales staff based close to the office also homeworking. Only those with travel distances that make it impractical to come back and forward for viewings and valuations are in office (14 out of 50 across the company).

Make sure you have a person with overall responsibility for your Covid guidelines in this business. Make sure you have a detailed Covid risk assessment for your offices. I had both these in place, without them I’d have been in deep, deep trouble. Most of the business owners I have spoken to since this happened have neither. I’d implore you to get this done immediately. It shows a level of seriousness had been taken by your business and without that, defending you genuinely cared or met the necessary legal requirements would be hard to justify and ratchet up the pressure on you. The business has to move quickly on handling an outbreak so having a process outlined in advance to follow is vital and include things like RIDDOR.

The guidelines you have in place at your office have to be managed. Even with just a few people in each office now, cleaning down of surfaces and door handles, making sure people stay sat in the same desk with the same pc and observing distancing are not optional, but essential. All have had training and signed off their full understanding of their obligations. We’ve made our processes company policy as opposed to be guidelines so that failure to follow them can be treated differently.

Finally, call it good luck or good planning, but we had only two weeks prior to this, completed a project to convert the whole company to laptops with built-in phone software. This gave us total flexibility for every single employee to be able to fully function from any location. In truth, it had been done for other reasons than Covid protection. But the fact was it was the difference between us being completely up the proverbial creek and being able to function to a reasonable degree during this period. Undoubtedly worth any business considering this option and I would happily recommend our IT company Storm and their MD Warren Lipman if you wanted to discuss the options available – warren@storm-it.com

It’s probably appropriate to say I was and still am one of the people who believes there is a strong case for the young and healthy to be out working and keeping the economy in motion, while we do everything to support the more vulnerable groups, rather than full lockdowns and having to financially support most of the workforce. These lockdowns are so staggeringly impactful on the entire population when the percentage at serious risk is such a tiny number.

That said I do appreciate it must be extraordinarily difficult weighing up the options, protecting the NHS and you are to some extent damned if you do and damned if you don’t, no matter what decision you make. What I can say, on the basis of the current tactics in place by the Government that don’t look likely to change anytime soon, is if the key tips I have offered up here are taken on board, then you will be working to the system in the best way to avoid a nightmare scenario in your business.

Finally I must mention my incredible staff who have stuck with us through this drama without a single dissenting voice, with a preparedness to change and adapt our working ways and a desire to get back on track as quickly as possible that has made me unbelievably proud. It’s sometimes in adversity when you see the very best of people and that has been exactly what my Partners and I at Imagine have witnessed.

If anyone does want to discuss our experience in any more detail or ask me any questions, I will be very happy to respond mike.cole@imagine-group.co.uk

Not getting your house in order really isn’t an option if you now know the risks.

Mike Cole

MD – Imagine Property Group