Coronavirus What has been your managements response?
There has been threads about the economic impact of coronavirus, but I was curious if the leadership at any firms have been proactive?
Our company has banned all travel to the hot countries (including pacific nw), require HR approval for all travel (domestic and International).
Told all employees to test out their ability to work from home, make sure their vpn connection works, start bringing your laptops home every day.
More discussions on how Coronavirus may affect recruiting and internships
How Coronavirus may affect IB recruiting.
I work in Stamford CT. Our floor has about approx 600 people. We’re actually going through a disaster recovery mode... told people to work from home or disaster recovery site.
I'm assuming you're in AM/trading/something that can't go offline ever?
Trading can't... Half are staying in Stamford and half are going to the recovery site. BAML just sent their traders to our Stamford office.
Canceled all travel. Cheering the treasury decline
I work in downtown Seattle - did a property inspection about a mile away from the senior living facility. Just avoiding public transit for now, but still driving into work. My office is allowing us to work from home if we choose to
Bank in London DCM Team
International travels banned (which is kind of a mess for the roadshows, meetings... )
Split of the team in a disaster recovery mode (my boss is working in a kind of bunker near the coast ahah)
One of my bosses said "It'll go away naturally by April."
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[Get educated yo](
). Love this YouTube channel that explains a lot of stuff. But truth is nobody knows where we are exactly on the curve.
Edit: wasn’t saying your boss was correct by any means. Just thought this video was very educational and helps change a conversation towards facts.
I'm in the southeast. They made sure we all had some Purell on our desk. That's pretty much it. I'm sure I could work from home if I wanted to, but I'd probably get some eye rolls.
That being said, we're a company of fewer than 10 people, so we don't really have an HR department or anyone that would establish 'best practices'.
In Hong Kong right now, everything is fucked
How so? I'm just curious
Management sends out blasts about once a week with various updates, like travel restrictions. The Beijing office is closed til further notice, HK office staff has been working remotely since early February and our Singapore office is also doing the remote deal.
Yesterday's staff meeting, we all had to confirm that our laptops were able to do wifi/VPN/access all our vendor products/etc in case we need to work remotely. Boss told us to stay home if we start coming down with fever and any of the other symptoms, it's just better to be safe than sorry.
Today a co-worker took a personal day. He commutes from Connecticut and his kids' school is closed today to sanitize the classrooms as a precaution.
Our office building lobby has had hand sanitizer dispensers for years, but they're getting a workout now.
A couple of schools near my home have closed out of an "abundance of precaution" - a father with kids in each of the schools is one of the confirmed NYC cases, he's in serious condition, but that's likely due to him apparently having a pre-existing condition.
Stoking panic. My company has sent out endless emails warning people about coronavirus and giving instructions about what to do blah blah blah. Their behavior, frankly, has been terrible.
Companies are not the only ones panicking. I received an email from a religious organization, instructing people to avoid: shaking hands, hugging or kissing people.
I’m Catholic - we have been instructed to fist bump each other instead of shaking hands. I’m not joking.
My firm has had our HK office work remotely since late January. Each spring we have an annual conference and all employees from global offices meet in a location for a few days of conferences and boozing. At first, certain Asian offices were disinvited but days before the event, it was canceled entirely.
They also announced we will have a mandatory WFH day next week as a test of our emergency preparedness.
Personally, I am going about my life as usual.
Deleted.
Our firm has been sending weekly updates on the situation with guidelines on travel. For now they have banned travel to the highly infected areas (China, Northern Italy, etc) and they have discouraged domestic travel unless absolutely necessary. Events/conferences have been cancelled too. There is now hand sanitizer everywhere haha. Other than that everything is business as usual.
Business as usual. We agreed in my office that anybody that takes an trip to an infected area self-quarantine themselves (work from home) for 2 weeks before returning to office
HK here. Working from home until further notice. Some companies have started to resume work this week, many on a rotational basis (i.e. splits team into 2 groups, each go into office at different days). Schools closed till early april. In Beijing, work is starting to resume. Traffic jams in city are starting to come back. Shanghai as well, gradually work is resuming this week. Some of our portfolio companies in logistics in China are showing slow signs of recovery already, roughly at 20% of the volumes in the same period last year. China is recovering already except hubei, other cities seems pretty well contained (not sure if numbers are real lol)
NYC MF - business travel "technically" banned though still happens all the time
Complete shambles of epic proportions Split of trading floors. Sending half staff to some BS offsite with shitty food and 70min commute. Was initially supposed to be "equally strong" teams on both sites, but all the MDs bailed when they trialed the offsite. So it's now full of juniors that got the short end of the stick and that wouldnt be able to cover anyway if main office is impacted. They keep asking people if all hardware is fine but people just want to know if food will get better and Ubers covered.
Travel restricted, some HR running around like a headless chicken on the floor asking who was in contact with someone from some list of random countries that keeps changing and sending people home on the spot then reversing the decision after some senior MD's override. Hearing in the space of 15min that this "situation" will only last 2 weeks, then hearing from the snacks delivery dude that he's been booked for 2 months.
And in the middle of all this you get headlines like : "Heathrow luggage handlers test positive to coronavirus" It's like this virus is trolling us.
Management hasn't said anything and doesn't want to respond. Know a girl who just packed up her stuff and said she is not coming in for the next two weeks.
All senior people are working from home but juniors still have to come to the office. It's fucked up. This is in NYC.
We're told anyone that is sick should stay home, anyone that may have been around someone with the virus should wfh for at least 2-3 weeks.
That makes sense. The funny thing is if the seniors are WFH then how are they going to know if the juniors are WFH? Just WFH and do your job decently well and they won't notice.
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It's tough for management especially when traveling is a critical portion of getting a deal done whether its a negotiation or diligence. Like I said above, my firm has taken a no travel stance but honestly, no one really follows it. Couple guys got the flu couple weeks ago but didn't test pos for COVID. Lot of subjective risk here
i think this is only the start. The US is completely unprepared for whats coming. And what's coming is beds at full capacity and broken health system by April-May. By summer potentially hundreds of thousands of dead if not low 7 figure. Unless some drastic measures are imposed to restrict movement (which will make the economy implode), base case is an epic clusterfuck. Worst case i don't even want to think.
If this were actually a deadly disease, imagine what would happen
Lmao, some people don't wanna hear the truth throwing MS at him
Can't say I get this either. The R0 well above 1 and this virus is very good at killing people with chronic illnesses that are very common in the USA (diabetes and heart disease to name a couple). Add on our aging demographic and the healthcare system could get swamped. Also consider this: SARS, MERS and the common cold are all types of coronavirus and we have known about them since the 1960s yet there hasn't been a single vaccine for any of them. Also another not so great fact is after getting a coronavirus you typically aren't immune for very long. This means you could get it again.
Europe is getting raked over the coals right now. Over 10k cases in Italy (>600 deaths there), France and Germany are headed in that direction as well.
The USA has 27 dead over 849 cases. All of these active cases aren't recovered so we have a long way to go.
Unless they can get the R0 below 1 this shit isn't going anywhere. And I am no expert but these are facts of the matter.
My bet is this will be like the H1N1 of 2009-2010 but with a higher mortality rate. I would say the mortality will be a lot higher than the 2009 H1N1 outbreak.
What is really scary is if the genetics of MERS and COVID-19 created one of the most deadly and easily spread diseases. All I can say is I hope I never see it.
On the positive side, South Korea seems to be controlling the spread. I don't really trust China so SK is the best example of control.
Bruh I don't think we're even going to get much more than 100,000 cases
Well, this will certainly age like milk.
Quoted for posterity though.
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The US probably already has more than that... People are not getting tested...
All non-necessary business events cancelled. Same for travel. One entire floor worked from home for a few days but it turned out to be a false alarm.
HR is spamming emails and we had a few short meetings. In a sense it's amazing that once in those meetings, everyone discounts the possibility they might get it.
Business as usual with the exception of recruiting activities.
My firm is encouraging all of us to work from home. Everyone senior stayed home. Everyone junior has been coming into the office because none of us are concerned about the virus yet. I'll keep going to the office until the city is quarantined or until the bank officially shuts the office down.
What management response?
Management deployed an "emergency preparedness drill" at 10:45pm Sunday night, telling us to wfh on Monday and to test vpn/file drives, etc.
Didn't really help as several employees came into the office yesterday thinking it was business as usual until they opened up their email... Not sure who the dumb ones are since it semi-backfired, but at least I got to chill on my couch all day rewatching Succession.
business travel has been suspended. people can work from home ( always been a policy). but they are requiring us to report personal travel and the travel of people we live with
Work at big AM firm in NYC. We're wfh. rumors are 1-3 months (until June)
Working from home. Still in college as well, so our spring break will be extended and online classes thereafter. It’s a shit show
Investment banking was given option to work from home. Everyone associate and up is doing just that, analysts occasionally make it into the office if they have too much to do from their laptop/home setup.
Can’t go offline so we’ve been shifted around twice. We’ve all been kind of waiting for someone to catch it, as it seems inevitable at this point. Not sure what we’ll do when/if that happens.
Illiquidity is rising. Firms aren’t picking up the phone. Models are useless. NO ONE knows what to do. Idk. Good luck guys
This. This friday i wanted to ask for some unwind price from a counterpary. There was no coverage at their office. What can you do about that ?
I honestly don't understand why SPX is still at these levels. Situation is dire. I know 2 friends who have businesses that are about to stop paying their suppliers / rents etc unless they get massive reductions because they literally have ZERO clients.
It's like the economy is underwater and holding its breath. If this goes on for a few more weeks brain damage will be irreversible.
What we need to realise, is that we are already in the middle of the tailrisk as defined 2 months ago. So now our new tail risk is basically chaos and untold damage with unraveling of economies. Entire sectors going bust, i will let you imagine the rest.
We stopped all travel (business & personal) last week. Today it was announced that the office is closed to any non-employees going forward. It is “strongly encouraged” to work from home. A few seniors are working from their cabins in the mountains
Purell everywhere, Lysol spray and wipes near common areas, optional work-from-home, only critical travel permitted, and stay the fuck home if you have the sniffles.
This is in Philly where we only have one confirmed case so far. Years of living in filth have built some badass immune systems.
Working from home for “up to a month” effective tomorrow
My consulting company is a bunch of hypocrites. They are sending out almost daily updates reminding how much they care about employees but did only the most obvious things: banned "non-essential business travel" to countries like China, Korea, the Schengen zone -- basically where the threat is real.
Those who work in the US offices and "feel uncomfortable to come to the offices or to clients' sites" should reach out to their resource managers and work out an alternative plan. Needless to say that every request like that will be noted down and will come up when/if needed and won't play in an employee's favor.
I understand that the plausibility to get infected in the office isn't through the roof but if every finance/tech/consulting company has already done more, my employer continues to squeeze every dollar from the situation.
And, nevertheless, they cancelled bagel Fridays. Will see what happens with other food next week.
We had a Travel Ban 2 weeks ago to all hot spots. This was expanded to all travel late last week. Everything is being done virtually now. In terms of WFH, on Monday, we got an email stating that anyone who commutes to the NYC office is advised to work from home. I'm surprised at the delay in the response over this, but not the steps being taken to prevent it from spredding.
Management just approved WFH and has stated our office is closed for the next two weeks starting Monday. NYC
Frankfurt - home work everyone.
northern VA - i brought up WFH - the response was “good thing we are a small company we don’t have much to worry about in here” meanwhile everyone and their mother is home for the next unforseeable future
Did a dry run this week with 50% of the company working from home one day, the other 50% another day just to figure out if we're even technologically set up for WFH... yeah, we are not.... We're being encouraged to take off or work from home if we feel sick or worried, but most people are still coming in. Also being asked to self-quarantine if we've been to hot spot cities/countries, and to delay/cancel business travel.
On the plus side, my commute home has gotten noticeably shorter I guess because other people are staying home?
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