Today, fixate fanatically, obsessively, single-mindedly on one thing. The health and safety of your human chain of value–all the ones whose work produces our homes and communities.
100% participation in the National Association of Home Builders program, “Stand Down for Coronavirus Safety” today would mark a bright line in the sand toward an invaluable lesson-learned for recovery in the days, weeks, and months of better days ahead.
“On Thursday, April 16, we are urging members, and all residential construction companies, to halt work for at least 10 minutes for a COVID-19 Job Site Safety Stand Down to educate workers on what they should do to keep themselves safe from coronavirus and to help “flatten the curve” for everyone.”
If we plan, design, intend, and resolve to get to a “peak,” and a “bottom,” and a “level-set” in the multiple tides of crisis that threaten both lives and livelihoods, 10 minutes today to affirm–unconditionally–the health and safety of people in your work and value stream is not asking much, but is saying a lot.
You may or may not know this, and I certainly didn’t, but the word “aftermath” originally had nothing to do with math.
I’ve been thinking about that word a lot lately, imagining it, hoping for it, believing that, within its embrace, we’ll be able to start something anew.
Instinctively, and without much thought, the notion that “aftermath” meant something to do with the calculus and measures that characterize the wake of an important event seemed to make the most sense.
In fact, aftermath, as an English term arose in the 1520s, and referred specifically to fields of mown hay or grass, “originally a second crop of grass grown on the same land after the first had been harvested.”
Why does the term “aftermath” mean so much right now?
When we’re challenged by a crisis, our human minds struggle to close a critical gap–between things as they currently are, and the way we’d prefer them to be.
Some persuasive people describe two kinds of crisis–a public health one–Covid-19–and an economic one, the lockdowns, shutdowns, stoppages, and paralysis of up to a third of the business of life and the life of business.
Human minds and the struggle of human will to close the abyss that separates the current state of things from the way we want things to be, strive to “re-open” the economy, to reboot businesses, to restore balances of work and pay. We crave the moment of “aftermath” to start to retill and replant fields that have been mown down.
That time will come, wiser minds tell us, with milestones, not timelines.
One such milestone lies within the “what we control” bucket of every operator, manufacturer, business owner, project manager or supervisor, distribution channel manager, investor, and stakeholder in the construction lifecycle.
It’s the health and safety of your workers–the people in this people business.
Stand down–for 10 minutes–and stand up for the lives, as well as the livelihoods of the men and women who are part of this noble, essential business of making homes. Do that, and you will be assured–come what may–that we’ll come through this a stronger, better business.
