Name: How to Reopen: CEOs weigh in
Uploaded: 2020-05-18
Duration: 5 min 24 s
Description: Fortune 500 CEOs discuss coming back to work after the coronavirus pandemic.

 SUSIE GHARIB: Some CEOs have told us at Fortune that the return to business is not a restart, it's a reset. It seems like the question that CEOs are asking is, what do we want to be when we come out of this crisis? And what sort of conversations have you been having along the same lines? TIGER TYAGARAJAN: I think the word reset is a great word. And restart versus reset, I think most CEOs are thinking about reset. What does reset mean would be different to different businesses. So for example, is there going to be a different ratio between online and physical when it comes to retail? Experiences, are all experiences meant to be physical altogether? Sports, I still am going to miss arena sports for some time, but am I going to change the amount that I'm going to spend in a sports arena versus in Esports? Are supply chains going to need to rapidly change? Where you buy services and products from, does that have to be more diverse in order to actually leverage talent pools and diversify risk much more? OK, and something as stupid as we think, for example, laptops are going to replace desktops significantly in offices. LYNN GOOD: When you're in the midst of something like this, a crisis, the priorities become very clear very quickly. And those priorities are, take care of your customers and take care of your employees. And then make sure that you're doing the essential services that go with that, and thinking about the scenarios and the outcomes that you might think about over the longer term. Things like financial results. Things like policy changes, whether it involves our employees or our customers. But we are in the early part of this event, and I think keeping that clear priority on essential service and safety of employees is where all of our focus is. And then we will run our business and run our business while responding to longer term economic impacts as we go forward, because we understand the importance of delivering certainty to our investors, as well. MARGARET KEANE: People are spending. I think the real test is going to be what happens-- and I am not an economist, but I would say I think the biggest test is going to be how long are the people out of work? So do we see a bounce back? And what worries me, if I think of what I lose sleep at night on a little bit is, we have an enormous amount of small businesses out there that are shut. And I do think we have to start opening some of those businesses up to get people back working. And I think for us the factor is really going to be how quickly can people get a paycheck and get back to work? JIM HACKETT: Our mindset going into this was that we were going to look at a V-shaped kind of curve. Now, that is up for intellectual debate. So I purposely tried to protect as many jobs as we could. At the top of the company we've all taken pay reductions, but the idea is to get everyone back to work. And as soon as we can consider this safe target, I suspect that you'll have a stepped approach to everyone getting back to work. Let me give you a quick example. One of our factories has 7,000 people in it. So they can't all show up at the door one day and be productive. So we have to turn it on in waves, so to speak. In addition to the consciousness of the safety and the stepping up, we need the economy to respond, from a demand perspective. So we're talking to various people in government that work on this and say, if you can create some sort of incentives at the end of this, that would be helpful to the whole industry. ED BASTIAN: Business is really bouncing along the bottom right now. There's not too much lower we can go, that's the good news. But we've got a lot to start to rebuild and hopefully regain confidence in the traveling public that it's safe to travel again. We're implementing all the social distancing standards that you could take. We've changed the entire boarding process. Typically the boarding process is the people is first class board first and they get a nice room and the luggage space, and the people gradually move to the back. Well, we thought about and said, well, that's not safe for the people sitting up front, to have people parading past them when you're supposed to be socially distant, right? So actually one of our employees sent me an email that said, shouldn't we be doing this the other way? And I thought about it and said, she's absolutely right. So we're now even boarding from the back of the plane to get people settled in the back moving. We've capped load factors so that we will not board a plane with more than 60% full in the main cabin or 50% full in first class. We're sanitizing, we're providing as much fogging and cleanliness. Our cleaning scores are through the ceiling. We take the opportunity to rethink about what the business is going to look like in the future. We're not going to be building back what we had necessarily. So we're building up a lot of cash to get through what will be a difficult winter, no question about it. Maybe it's going to be two years of difficulty. SUSIE GHARIB: Right. ED BASTIAN: We're going we're going to see it through by preserving our financial flexibility and building up a pretty big nest egg. 

Fortune 500 CEOs discuss coming back to work after the coronavirus pandemic.

How to Reopen: CEOs weigh in

Features

CEOs discuss coming back to work after the pandemic.

CEOs discuss coming back to work after the coronavirus pandemic.