U.S. lawmakers agreed late last night to move a $2 trillion coronavirus backstop program–aiming with shock-and-awe proportions to stabilize an economy battling the impact of COVID-19’s daily geometric spread–through to the President’s desk as we speak.
Already, the magnum force and widely-cast breadth of the fiscal, monetary, human resources, and expertise commitments addressed in the stimulus package, have worked wonders to calm investors around the world, walking them back from the “castrophizing” levels of panic that laid siege to the financial markets through the end of last week. A best-case scenario calls for a big, robust resumption of recovery following a relatively short-term “unparalleled shock.”
Now, it’s down to the business of making the dizzying array of programs work in the real world, even as the novel coronavirus pandemic continues to exact a yet-to-be-calculable toll on life as we knew it. The circle of those directly affected–and infected–both widens and nears each of us on an hourly basis. Not to mention, the upward intensification of shock, confusion, scarcity, stress, exhaustion, sadness, and misery inundating health systems in the world’s and nation’s hard-hit areas. Plus, there’s no certainty these conditions can nor will be contained to the present-day hot-zones, or jump to geographies everywhere.
The upheaval–especially as it relates to the spiraling public health crisis–will continue, and then, eventually, it will begin to settle. Important terms we hear used, overused, and even weaponized these days are “anxiety,” “fear,” and “panic.”
Today, we–in the housing design, development, construction, distribution, technology, and investment business–need to accept anxiety. It is table stakes, a given. We need to address fear, head-on, with character, leadership, and calm. And we need to ward off, ban, and crush panic. Panic is a no-go; it is an entirely destructive type of contagion in and of itself. The only way to do that is to say things that are evidence-based, factual, and that we mean and stand by. Otherwise, we can only expect the epidemic of panic to continue to ravage us from inside out, $2 trillion rescue package or no.
In some cases, saying things that are evidence-based, factual, and what we stand by may not be what others want to hear right then and there. However, if others learn to trust what they hear, even when it’s not “happy talk,” they won’t panic. They’ll learn to live with anxiety and address fear. Leaders and panic do not mix. Leaders overcome panic.
Here’s a statistic that worries me this morning, even as the encouraging ripple effect of Congress’s bipartisan efforts to quash financial panic in its tracks plays out.
One in four.
That is, 25% of the COVID-19 deaths in New York–67 of the 271 deaths as of this writing–have been individuals in the 45 to 60 year-old age group. Now, of course, 50% of the morbidity is in the 80-year-old and older age group.
But a quarter of the deaths–and who knows, yet, what percentage of the people who get very sick from the infection?–are among an age-segment near and dear to us here at BUILDER. What we’re also quite troubled by is the tight correlation between deaths and males who become sick with COVID-19. We know–demographically speaking–that almost 90% of our residential construction ecosystem, and that same disproportionate share of the BUILDER audiences, are males between the ages of 45 and 60.
This is why we’re particularly sensitive–maybe even overly so–to how this industry moves to protect all the people in the value stream of construction, repair, community development, etc., we gratefully see deemed as “essential” services in a skeletal economic environment.
We can’t help but to think of builders, contractors, subcontractors, building and community managers, superintendents, customer-facing, supervising, all the people in the two- or three-dozen areas of skill, expertise, brute force, canny logistical chops, technical problem-solving, and next-big-idea-generating that all add up to–for millions upon millions of us right now–these sanctuaries we’re spending so much time in these days as family.
One of the gratifying developments we took note of in the past three or four or five years of the economic and housing recovery stands us in particularly good stead now. It’s a starkly clear recognition of a single mathematical equation: doing well by doing good. For businesses of any kind or sector or value proposition, this simple equation means something you’ve all seen in the infinite feed of communications from every firm we’ve ever so much as blinked at in the past 20 years: “The health and safety of our customers and our employees.”
At no time has the urgency–from a life, an economic, and a business viewpoint–of that single phrase meant more to us in the BUILDER, Hanley Wood, Meyers Research, and Metrostudy family.
The big question for many of us starts with this understanding. Given the fact that local, state, federal officials and jurisdictions are up to their clavicles in dealing with COVID-19’s public health threat, very likely the private sector will need to play an unprecedented role in its commitments, investments, process mapping, and operational behaviors to protect people in building’s lifecycle and value stream. Those commitments, investments, process changes, and operational action items may come at some initial cost. Every company leadership needs to ensure health and safety for his or her team members, which means gaining visibility up and down and across the critical path of all projects and ongoing operations, and 100% securing health and safety at the sub-task level.
Is that a problem? As decision-makers faced with tough, harrowing trade-offs right now, will we regard people as expendable even as we claim that our services are essential?
Time will tell. Whether your local, or county, or state, or regional jurisdictions determine whether your outfit is essential, not, exempt, not, excepted, not, your people are essential. Their lives; their capacity to experience well-being; their physical ability to support their families and be supported by them. That’s what counts now.
Presumably, along with big corporate rescues, financial liquidity, small business lending and capital access programs, individual household support, platforms for borrowers, lenders, investors, and stakeholders, the $2 trillion initiative will kick wartime-style mobilization programs into gear, where construction, infrastructure, logistics, materials and products distribution will serve as critical revitalization components.
America already sorely needed more housing. What better time than now than to bend all the cost obstacles in favor of a massive new housing construction and development era?
We need all the healthy hands on deck we can possibly imagine for the kind of mobilization we may expect to follow the “unparalleled shock” we’re undergoing now. This is a call to action for every organization, deemed essential or not, to use the next two-to-four weeks to–barring emergency services– #hitpause on your operations long enough to secure “health and safety” of our human resource, up and down the building value stream. The relationship between project owner and contractor, vendor and customer, builder and supplier, pro dealer to builder, distributors to dealers, up and down the chain, should leverage technology, data, process mapping, design thinking, and trust as never before.
That commitment and investment will, no doubt, create a direct pathway to doing well by doing good.
