Now for some good news. Here are a couple of great stories of corporations giving back to the community and employees. It also begs the question: What should be the focus of corporations post Virus? ...Aivars Lode
Looking around for more it could do, Xerox began to focus on ventilators. It found a small company in California, Vortran Medical Technology, which makes a $120 ventilator that’s meant to be used by patients who don’t need a full-blown $20,000 intensive care ventilator. (Most Covid-19 patients fall into that category.)
Xerox and Vortran struck up a partnership. Xerox has since put together a supply chain, obtained the equipment it needs to create a small ventilator plant and is devoting a portion of its factory floor near Rochester to the venture. The floor is being configured so that the workers will be 6 feet apart, and other social-distancing measures are being taken. The hope is that Vortran and Xerox will be able to produce 150,000 to 200,000 of these disposable ventilators a month.
Nobody asked Xerox to do this, which is part of the point. It saw a need — one that had nothing to do with its core business, and will never make much money — and decided to try to fill it. Hundreds of Xerox employees have been volunteering to join the project, which is another important aspect: Employees and management are aligned, something that hasn’t often been true in corporate America these past few decades.
My second example is Bank of America. As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Brian Chappatta noted in a column on Wednesday, the bank’s first-quarter profits were down 45%. But CEO Brian Moynihan seemed unperturbed.
“Just as important as our financial results this quarter is what we are doing to take care of our teammates and to help our clients and our communities impacted by the virus,” he said at the opening of the bank’s quarterly conference call. Curious, I asked a bank spokeswoman for some more details. A half-hour later, she sent me a long list.
It was impressive. For employees, the list included no layoffs in 2020 because of the coronavirus crisis; expanded benefits including no-cost coronavirus testing and $100 a day for backup child care; and a $20 an hour minimum pay rate. For customers, the bank has stopped foreclosures and allowed them to request payment deferrals on everything from auto loans to credit card late fees. There was more, including $100 million for communities to buy medical supplies and help for small businesses.
When was the last time you heard a CEO tell a group of Wall Street analysts that its treatment of employees was as important as its financial results? Maybe never. How often have companies used their core resources to tackle societal challenges that will never accrue to the bottom line?
That this is taking place across corporate America gives me hope. There is something about disease — and the prospect of death — that causes people to think hard about what truly matters. This may turn out to be naïve, but I believe that is happening in the executive suites of America’s big companies.
Shareholder value has been an insidious force inside U.S. businesses, creating incentives that have led to selfish and callous behavior. If this crisis brings about a new set of C-suite values — or, more accurately, a return to an old set of values — then at least one good thing will have come of it.
By Joe Nocera - Bloomberg Opinion Columnist
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