March 18, 2020
As news of the global coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak continues to unfold, I wanted to take this opportunity to share with you the steps The EMO Agency is taking to maintain our commitments to our clients, while protecting the health and safety of our employee-owners.
At the onset of the outbreak in January, we established a coronavirus response task force to help ensure high levels of coordination and response. This team, in conjunction with our senior management, quickly realized that we would need a much larger distributed and remote workforce soon.
Our existing 150 laptops in the field were clearly not enough. As the situation worsened over time, we began buying, configuring and distributing laptops at a rapid pace. An initial order of 20 was expanded to 48, then to 75, then to 190, then a final decision was made to order another 140 which assured us that every one of our 475 employees would have the ability to work remotely if required. As of today, we will have distributed all but 50 of those to employees with the balance getting delivered over the next few days.
Standing in front of a conference table covered in laptops, our dedicated Information Services Division staff working through the night to outfit our service professionals with remote systems.
As most of our employees are now working remotely, we encourage you to communicate your needs for service via E-mail as a first option. Employees will also be checking their office voice mail regularly. We will do our best to respond to your requests as quickly as possible, using best efforts to identify urgent and priority needs. Please try and refrain from visiting our offices to the greatest extent possible to reduce your risk of exposure and ours. If you must come in, please email or call us with your need and arrange a specific time so we can be prepared for your visit and limit your exposure time in our office to the greatest extent possible. We eventually may have to eliminate all office visits.
We are confident that the plans we have in place will enable us to continue to provide you with the level of service and support you have come to expect. On Monday, we faced our first COVID-19 contingency plan stress test in New York due to a direct exposure of one employee to a relative with confirmed infection. This exposure caused us to immediately close two offices based on employee contact patterns. I am proud to say that the staff in those two offices immediately adopted their contingency plans and are taking care of all clients from remote locations without missing a beat. We hope and pray that we will get through the 14-day quarantine without any further sickness or illness.
If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us. You can also visit our website at www.marshallsterling.com, and note at the top of each page a special "COVID-19 Update" banner. Here you can find valuable information and links to help with a host of different tasks from making E-check or online payments, claims reporting and other updates, tips and services.
We ask for your patience and understand and will do everything we can to continue serving you while also complying with increasing restrictions designed to limit the spread of this challenging disease. The next few weeks are critical.
Be safe, be well.