Terry Sobolewski, president of National Grid Rhode Island, said the company’s preparedness for emergencies, such as hurricanes or outages, helped it to rapidly adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic. Sobolewski, who was named president over a year ago and began his career with the company as vice president, sales & program operations in 2011, said that almost half of National Grid’s 1,000 or so employees have been working remotely.
“Across our service territories, we now have about 45 percent of our workforce working remotely,” he said. “Like most families, it’s been a real adjustment for all of us. I especially enjoy being able to interact with our team in person and in the field, so working from home more frequently has been pushing my comfort zone. But my wife, daughter, son, and I have been enjoying much more time together which we had probably been taking for granted for too long. Like many others, I really feel for those students who are in their final year of college or high school. My daughter is in that position and our hearts break for the many milestone’s she and her friends should really be enjoying this time of year. Those events can never fully be replaced, even virtually.”
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PBN is asking local business owners and leaders five questions in a survey designed to understand how the new coronavirus has affected them and their businesses and what they have learned from the unprecedented challenges. Here are Sobolewski’s responses:
How are you coping amid the COVID-19 crisis?
One of the most important parts of our work is preparing for emergencies. Whether it be for a hurricane or the potential for a global pandemic, we have in-depth emergency response plans and business continuity plans for almost every aspect of the company. We maintain these to help ensure we can get our customers the energy they need, no matter the crisis. With that in mind, I think we are managing well during these unprecedented times. Even before most of the communities we serve went on stay-at-home orders we began implementing our business continuity plans, activating our Incident Command Structure, and continuously refining our ways of working to stay ahead of the next set of challenges.
For example, we sequestered employees in our critical Gas and Electric Control Centers to preserve safe and reliable operations. Many of our call center agents are working remotely. We are working with local, state, and federal health agencies to ensure we are following all the local and federal safety guidelines for our men and women in the field. We also recognize that many customers are facing enormous financial pressure, so on March 13 we and our regulators temporarily suspended service shut offs for non-payment and other collections-related activities. And we are educating more customers about the various programs and flexible payment plans available to help them through the days ahead.
Have you found silver linings in these difficult times?
Absolutely yes. There are a number of lessons we will harness and make a part of our culture going forward. This includes moving at pace. We have seen great front-line leadership across our teams during this crisis and we will be working even harder to support those leaders going forward. We have reprioritized our capital workplans to adapt with the times, ensuring we can work safely, protect the communities we serve, and still deliver critical reliability projects.
Across our larger business, which encompasses roughly 17,000 employees in three states, we are also seeing momentum for changing some age-old paradigms to our previous workplace culture. There is a building consensus that we may not need to do as many large in-person meetings or travel as much as we did in the past. Those larger gatherings not only took a lot of time for people to travel to and from their place of work but they could take us away from our core work. I think there are more efficient ways to do a lot of that now, which we can really harness as more employees embrace the new technologies we have deployed.
We have also blown up any stigma that may have been associated with working from home. Obviously, many of our men and women will continue to work from the field to keep the lights on and gas flowing, but perhaps there are other opportunities for others to continue to work from home on a limited basis.
How are you maintaining your company culture?
Preparation is key in our businesses, and during these extraordinary times we are continuing to communicate frequently and personally with our employees when it matters most. Thousands of our employees are meeting virtually for calls and meetings during the day to get the necessary work done for our customers but we are also encouraging our many different teams to continue meeting virtually for a virtual coffee break or a wellness check. As we ensure that leaders are equipped to support their employees through any transition we make, we are also collecting many of the best practices that are being put in place across different teams with a new internal app called “HelpGridImprove.” This is proving to be an incredible resource that we can leverage across the entire company. And we are reaching our employees with internal channels of communication, including newsletters, Yammer, and videos from our U.S. President, Badar Khan, to give employees the regular insight they crave from our leaders regarding how they are approaching the pandemic. In fact, shortly before this all started we launched a #ThisIsMe employee video campaign on Yammer, which has taken off even more so in the days since this crisis, giving employees a very candid and personal view into our leaders’ lives at home.
Did your business continuity plan work or were there surprises?
We have been doing a lot of things right, leaning into our significant emergency planning expertise. And we have accomplished new things we never thought possible. In addition to sequestering our critical workers in the Gas and Electric Control Centers, we also shifted about 80% of our contact center agents to work from home. We implemented in record speed a remote working environment, which may have taken us much longer under what we call blue-sky or regular circumstances. Our IT infrastructure is holding up very well. Obviously, we had some concerns about rapidly shifting employees to a working from home scenario but there have not been any major challenges we couldn’t overcome. I really commend our IT team and others who have helped on that front. Many of us have learned first-hand that we can be just as productive at home with the right tools, technology, and employee engagement and keep providing our customers with the same quality service they deserve.
Do you have advice for other local companies?
I think everyone has seen a new range of risks to their business, which all of us have to acknowledge and intentionally plan around for the future. Here at National Grid, we are working from two very important points of guidance — government, including both state and federal parameters; and the guardrails we set for ourselves. We are being very thoughtful on how we approach this and the plans we put into place are all focused on employee and customer safety. Our intent is to ultimately create a flexible, resilient approach that enables us to plan for various scenarios, including a potential resurgence this fall. For those in or with military experience, they might be familiar with “force protection conditions.” By building our plans using this concept, I believe we will be able to move into and out of certain levels of readiness, constantly adapting to threats our business or our teams may face. Last, and on a more personal level, I would encourage executives to be more flexible with employees and colleagues than ever before. We need to remember our employees are adjusting to a new work life, and for many of them, a new environment at home. These are unchartered waters for all of us, and the best way to help is by offering support, flexibility, and a reminder, that we will get through it together.
Cassius Shuman is a PBN staff writer and researcher. He can be reached at shuman@pbn.com.
