Open for Business - Virtually

Then the lights went out. On Saturday, March 21, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy ordered the closure of all non-essential businesses statewide in a bid to enforce social distancing guidelines to fight the spread of COVID-19. On Monday morning, countless businesses were entirely closed, many of their employees furloughed or laid off. Yet many businesses remained in operation, with employees working from home. The world of doing business virtually had begun. ​

“The first two weeks, a lot of people had never worked remotely and it was a whole new world for them,” said Mike Stanzilis, vice president of business development at the Morris County Chamber of Commerce. “It was a learning curve for a lot of people.” Including the chamber. “We had to pivot right away,” Stanzilis said.  “But there’s more to it than just working from home. There’s providing value to your members.” So the chamber shifted its activities, including committee meetings and networking events, to be done virtually. The chamber’s previous investment in technology allowed for a fairly smooth pivot.

“The first day we hosted a virtual information session with the county Office of Emergency Management,” said Wendy Long, the chamber’s director of member relations. “On day three we had a virtual Health & Wellness Forum meeting. Then we held a virtual open house and a Not-for-Profit Roundtable meeting.” As the weeks past, the process improved. While the March Business Connections event, the chamber’s signature networking experience, was held in five separate calls, the April session drew more than 80 participants to one virtual joint meeting. In addition, each week the chamber has been offering members a variety of virtual seminars, ranging in topics from digital marketing to understanding taxes to building immunity. These are videotaped and placed on YouTube and the chamber’s website.

Attendance has been as strong as or stronger than before COVID hit and some members also expressed pleasure at not having to get up early to travel to meetings, Long said. “We’re going to take lessons learned and take the best parts and adapt them,” Stanzilis added. “We’re not going to abandon our business model. We’re going to add to it.” Accounting, business consulting and professional services firm PwC made the shift to doing business virtually rather smoothly, according to B.J. Agugliaro, managing partner in New Jersey. The firm’s Florham Park office is home base for more than 1,500 employees, all of whom began working from home in mid-March. While New Jersey allowed accounting firms to remain open, PwC opted to have all employees work from home for their safety and wellbeing, according to Agugliaro. 

The firm was prepared to do business virtually because of its commitment to technology, he said.
“We call it our ‘Your Tomorrow Journey,’” he said. “It’s about looking at how we can use technology more efficiently and enable our employees with technology tools…to serve our clients in an effective and efficient manner. “It’s going surprisingly well,” he added.  “We work in a business where interaction with  our clients is very important. The technology supports that…Our business is also built on client relationships (and) it’s harder to build relationships virtually. We have to be empathetic to our clients, be sensitive to their needs…Working a little differently in a virtual world.” There have been challenges, Agugliaro admits. Not everyone has a spacious home with room for a separate work space, he said, noting some PwC’s employees live in studio apartments or have multiple roommates.

“The novelty wears off quickly,” he said. “The reality and stress of working in that environment takes a mental toll.” That will play a role in how PwC starts bringing employees back to the office, possibly sometime in June, according to Agugliaro. The firm will follow all CDC, state and local guidelines and will employ only 10 to 15 percent of its pre-COVID seating capacity. “We want to open the office for those people who truly have a need to be in the office,” he said. “It could be a client need or it could be a mental health need.” PwC also developed an automated contact tracing phone app it will require all returning employees to use to better ensure their safety. Lorena Sergent, owner of LW&H Business Solutions, saw a variety of results among her clients when they were required to shift to doing business virtually. Her firm provides productivity solutions for small and medium-sized businesses and nonprofits, focusing on standard operating procedures, workflow mapping and customer relationship management (CRM) tools. While Sergent found some of her clients were prepared to do business virtually, most were not. She cited a law firm where she previously set up their workflow systems as one that pivoted easily and a financial services firm that was paper-reliant as one that needed CRM assistance to communicate with their clients.

When COVID first hit, all of Sergent’s projects stopped but soon the phone started ringing again.
“People realized they were not set up to work at home,” she said. They needed assistance accessing vital data and communicating with their team members, Sergent said. She also has been helping businesses that provide continuing education to continue doing that virtually. In addition, with significant experience with Zoom, Sergent was very helpful in getting the chamber’s signature networking event, Business Connections, up and running virtually, according to Stanzilis and Long. She hosted the April Business Connections meeting that went so smoothly and has done so since.Sergent thinks how businesses functioned virtually during the COVID situation will greatly impact their future performance. “Those who thought they were dead in the water, it’s really just a matter of evolution,” Sergent said. “It’s a matter of thinking outside the box.”