When Adrienne Harrison’s manager at Bayer Inc. walked through the office on a Thursday afternoon in March to tell employees they’d have to work for two weeks from home, she grabbed her laptop and some other items and left the building.
“We all wondered how we would navigate remote work for two weeks,” says Harrison, senior manager, commercial operations, in Bayer’s consumer health division in Mississauga.
“But as time passed, we knew we had to adjust,” she says. “I haven’t been back since March 13.”
To make the transition as easy as possible, Bayer’s senior management formed a committee to address the needs of employees at home. They allowed people to return once to the office at an appointed time to retrieve personal items and to take their ergonomically designed office chairs with them.
If necessary, they shipped monitors and other computer equipment to employees’ homes or helped with purchasing new ones.
“We also had to make sure our IT network could handle the increased traffic created by virtual meetings and video calls,” says Shurjeel Choudhri, head of medical and scientific affairs and senior vice president of Bayer Inc. “Through it all, I’ve been impressed by how well the organization has continued to function during the pandemic.”
Providing internal customer service support for Bayer’s operating divisions, Harrison and her five-person team have depended on the company’s IT network to conduct daily meetings and to interact virtually with sales, operations and other divisional staff.
“The IT team has been amazing,” she says. “We’ve relied on them for everything from showing us how new apps work to explaining new hardware set-up.”
cAs they addressed the company’s first priority of employee safety, Bayer’s management turned their attention to other concerns. Employees in its divisions like crop science and radiology still had to provide their services to customers. Patients who depend on the company’s pharmaceuticals needed an uninterrupted supply, and supply chains had to be monitored so they could operate without delays.
Bayer also took steps to support the community through donations to foodbank programs and initiatives to inform medical specialists about advances in COVID-19 research.
Some of that research is being conducted by Bayer itself, including a major collaboration with the Population Health Research Institute at McMaster University to identify potential COVID-19 treatments.
Under ordinary conditions, says Choudhri, it takes a year to put such a study into practice.
“But this was urgent,” he says. “We needed to find out if any existing treatments could be re-purposed for COVID-19.”
Dozens of people, all working virtually, put everything else aside to get the study up and running.
“Together with PHRI, we finalized the study protocol, obtained approvals from Health Canada, the research ethics board and our global organization, obtained study drug supply and enrolled the first patient in just 29 days,” says Choudhri. “It was unprecedented.”
The study now involves researchers in 14 countries, and the team expects results by early 2021. “Everybody’s passionate about this work,” he says. “I’m so proud of the team.”
For Choudhri and Harrison alike, the pandemic has required an immediate adjustment to a rapidly changing world. For Choudhri, “that means being resilient and learning quickly.”
For Harrison, who has two daughters, five and seven, it means “a re-prioritization of people and family and a more balanced view of work and life,” she says.
“A lot of organizations talk about putting family first. Well, this is family first.”
It may also be the silver lining in the cloud of COVID-19, she adds. “Until the pandemic sent everyone home, I’d never walked my kids to school.”
