 Yeah, we're back. We're live for The Noon Show. I'm Jay Fiedel. This is ThinkTech. More specifically, this is Community Matters because community does matter. We're talking to Pro Service, Janina Abiles. Again, we talked to her in April. We want to update what Pro Service is finding and doing and recommending. They're an important service organization, and we are looking at how the workplace has changed. And Janina told us about how it had changed up to April 24th. We want to find out how it has changed after April 24th and what's happened with them and the workplace and see where we're going. So important when you're trying so hard to reopen. Hi, Janina. Hi, Jay. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, great to see you again. So very important that we have a window. I really appreciate that. Into the workplace, into the reopening, because as we discussed last time, it's not easy. It's like which end do you tack down first? Where do you start rebuilding an economy? You know, it took hundreds of years to build the economy such as it was. You can't just snap your fingers and make a comeback together so you have to be as smart as you possibly can be. So since April 24th, what have you noticed in the workplace? Well, it's definitely complex. So, you know, it's hard to believe that we spoke last time April 24th because it certainly seems longer than that. What's I think been happening from our perspective and with our clients is the first thing that happened is many of our clients took out and applied for and received the PPP funds, which you're probably familiar with, so the paycheck protection program that was funded through the SBA and through many of the local banks. That gave many of our clients the cash to stay afloat for several more weeks, even though essentially their doors were shuttered. So we have many clients whose businesses I think honestly probably survived on the back of those loans and are now with, you know, I think end of May was when some of the retailers were able to start opening. Forget what the date was, but somewhere around May 14th or so, May 20th. So retailers started opening, then I think it was June 3rd was sort of that next phase of restaurants and other businesses with limited capacity. So we started to see that reopening process slowly happening and it still continues. I mean, there are lots of businesses that still aren't open, as I'm sure everybody notices driving around. Well, I think at the end of the day, an economy and for that matter, a marketplace is only dependent on public confidence. And people have to be confident that when they go to a particular business, especially one that involves proximity and, you know, close distancing, they got to be confident that place isn't going to infect them. And they got to be confident that that organization is paying appropriate attention to protecting them. And if they're not completely convinced, they're just not going to go back. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you know, one of the things, and that's a really great point, one of the things we've been trying to do as we've been helping in trying to guide our clients through this reopening process is giving them, you know, appropriate guidance based on their industry for that, I guess, disinfection and patient and hygiene type of process, everything from how you're assuring that your employees are healthy to come to work and that they haven't been exposed, self certification type of process to having the appropriate signage to follow. Of course, the government mandates on the six foot rules and the limited group gatherings. But also to your point, that confidence level, I think in many cases comes from just visibly people cleaning. So, you know, when I think about the pre COVID world, you oftentimes had cleaning crews coming in during the nighttime in many businesses, grocery stores, restaurants, etc. And nobody saw them. It just happened. And now people want to see a person with a cleaning badge or a vest. True. Yeah. They want to physically see things being disinfected. That's a really good point. Yeah. We're guiding our clients to, you know, even if you're, you know, a small, you know, specialty retailer to physically show your employees wiping down the register before they ring someone up, you know, those kinds of things are important to people right now. Yeah. Well, you know, it strikes me that you talk about certification. You know, a couple of three years ago, maybe it was four or five, the Department of Health initiated a restaurant certification program. You know, this is this one is passed and this one is not passed. I actually think I actually think that's a clumsy program. They want to revise the whole program. It doesn't tell you enough, you know, to know where the Department of Health really stands on this. And whether a given restaurant is really all that clean or good or healthy. But seems to me that the notion of a third party coming in, we've talked about this with other people on the show. And I know that it doesn't exist right now. But what about somebody coming in and inspecting the place or, you know, being a shopper, so to speak, and seeing how it operates and seeing how they handle social distancing and wiping the register, whatever it is, you know, protective gear and saying, oh, this place gets an A, this place gets a B. And having having the various businesses try to get a better rating and then publicizing that, what do you think? Yeah, yeah. And you know, there are even, and this isn't so much about certification, but just in terms of services available, there are third party companies that are now providing things like onsite rapid testing or even just doing the certification process of temperature taking and having people sign waivers. There are parties that are now offering that almost as you would have like a security guard at your door, but in a health security type of setting and not just for healthcare companies. I've heard of organizations that are doing it if you want it for your restaurant or your hotel or your office building. Yeah, what about waivers now? What is that? So I guess maybe waiver isn't the right term, but we are, you know, advising our clients that having their employees, and it doesn't have to necessarily be in writing, but it certainly could be if they want it to be self certified, basically following a checklist to say, hey, before I'm walking in the door at this office, this, you know, dental office, this healthcare facility, this restaurant to work, I am sort of self certifying, if you will, that I don't have any of the following symptoms. I haven't had temperature. I don't believe I've been exposed. I haven't left the state in the last 14 days, like that type of almost, you know, just your your commitment to showing up healthy and staying home if you're not healthy or if there's any risk. Yeah, well, you know, this funny thing is that this is the kind of thing I think should be done, not by government, but by business, this certification idea. And you know what just occurs to me, we haven't discussed this before, but pro service is a perfect organization to do that, because you're going to show them, you're going to study it. You're going to work with them. At the same time, you could probably give them a grade. And if you give them a grade, I am very interested, because I and my wife right now, we are, we are, we haven't gone back, we haven't gone back to the restaurants. We do no shopping. We only go for medical appointments when we need to. That's it. And somebody is going to have to convince us. Well, I tell you the truth. If if you said that restaurant A had had met your requirements, you know, you can't promise, but at least they've checked off all the boxes and you're satisfied. That would that would push me a long way to going to that place. Now I know it may not work. It could be you have certified restaurants that actually made people sick, in which case all this has to be re re re re imagined. But it probably would boost public confidence for a while. I'm just throwing this at you in the middle of our show. Just make a note. Make a note. I think pro service would be a great organization. But let's let's talk about, let's talk about what you are doing, you know, to educate yourself and to educate others about what's in the kit bag. What a given business has available to it to make things safer than, you know, a free market. Yeah, you know, reimagining is exactly a great word for it. You do have to sort of reimagine the workplace. I mean, it's it's changing. And I think from from the beginning, we were looking at things like, you know, remote working, right? So how do you create a remote work plan? We are still guiding clients as they look to reopening. Do you have to bring everybody physically back into your workspace? If you have somebody, you know, let's say, for example, that works in a dental office that just does billing and they don't normally interact with clients, do they have to come physically to the workplace? Or can they do that from home? Because you are potentially protecting somebody by not having additional folks, you know, in your workspace, it helps you to manage the social distancing. But it's different for every single business and every single industry. So in addition to, you know, we've created certainly some guidance that's generally guidance on how do you we're calling it, how do you make a comeback, right? Like how do you you don't just reopen your doors and everything works the same. You have to give people confidence, you have to entice them to come back in some cases, especially if your service isn't a necessity, like you've got to go to the dentist at some point, but you don't have to go buy those new shoes, right? So in addition to that sort of reopening guidance for general businesses, we're also providing it to clients into the general public by industry. So if you're in healthcare, if you're in education, if you're in retail, if you're in restaurant, if you're in construction, what does it look like? I mean, you work in, for example, a construction site, maybe you didn't think before about sharing tools or wiping down your tools, because you're already in maybe a kind of a dirty dusty outdoor environment, you might not have thought about those things before, where folks that work in healthcare are used to taking extraordinary precaution, because they're used to managing around viruses and bloodborne illnesses and all those kinds of things. But every industry has to make adaptations and adjustments. And the term new normal has come up many times and I roll my eyes when I hear it now because it's this phrase that everybody's using, but the world is a different place now. So we do have to take all those precautions as individuals in the community and also as business owners. Yeah, and I would add to that that we don't know when, if at all, we're going to be able to beat this per se. We don't know if we'll have therapeutics. We don't know if we'll have vaccines. We don't know when or whether. And this may be the new condition, get used to it, or a horrible thought, but we have to adapt because we're survival means being adaptable and recognizing the change. And you guys are at the forefront of that. So, you know, the thing about it is that we have to go back. But it has to be measured going back because the more you go back, the quicker you go back, the riskier it is on the disease side. So there's an equilibrium, a balance there somewhere. Who knows where it is? We'll find out. But what are your thoughts about that? And you know, another thing that to your point, we don't know if the virus will ever really go away. I mean, the flu doesn't go away. We have new strands every year, right? And I get that this is a different beast. But one of the things that we've also been trying to provide to folks is just making sure that you do have a plan in place because what happens if you reopen, and then you find out that one of your employees is infected, you've got to have a plan to respond and react to that. And what are the steps you have to take? So in addition to the reopening guidance around how to try to prevent the spread in your workplace, you've got to have a plan for what happens if there is somebody that tests positive, or maybe someone in their household tests positive. So we also have provided, and again, available to the public, we of course create it for clients and then we're sharing it out to everybody because it's important to the community, is just the positive response plan. And what are the steps you need to take? Yeah, and then is the degrade factor, the complacency factor. You know, the more we hear from Donald Trump where he says, oh no, this is all resolved. No problem. We don't even need testing anymore. The more we hear from that, and the more we hear from public officials in general, that it's under control, the more complacent we feel. And so I might have worn a mask a couple of weeks ago. Maybe now it's not so important. We seem to have put this behind us. I may have respected social distancing a few weeks ago, but now it seems to be under control. So I'm not going to do that. And I think you get this backsliding thing where people don't realize that it's just as much a threat, if not more of a threat, because there's more of it in the community. It's still that a spike is going up, not only in Hawaii, but in several states on the mainland, they're hitting record sales on the coronavirus. So that's got to be part of the program to instill a sense of discipline, to instill the sense of let's avoid backsliding because backsliding is really dangerous. If we gave you some rules to follow, you better follow them. Yeah, and we are still in all of our reopening guidance that we've been providing, regardless of industry, we're still recommending that folks who have contact with the general public, front of the house restaurant, retailers, the front desk at an office setting, that those books are all still following the Hawaii mandate for wearing, even if it's just a cloth mask. Obviously, if you work in certain industries, certain high risk settings, maybe you're working with the elderly or vulnerable populations, then you might need a higher grade, the N95 mask. But we are recommending at minimum that people are still following the cloth mask guidance for public settings and having the signage to let your visitor, customers, clients, if you're in a setting where you're going to have people coming in and out, so that they understand that that's your expectation for your workplace too. And quite frankly, it is also about protecting your own employees, and that is your responsibility as an employer. So we're trying to get our clients and anybody who's using our materials to see it as your expectation or your responsibility, your Kuliana as an employer. I totally agree. Your employers are the most employees are the most important asset you have really, and you can't lose them because you didn't protect them. So you have to take steps, always have to keep them in mind. The other thing I want to mention, just a free association, while you were talking, is that a lot of people wear masks on their throats. I find that, you know, I'm talking about complacency. I find that more and more to be the case. It's lip service, except it's not over your lips. It's not over your nose. They slide down them, I'm serious, you see it all the time. You slide down the mask, you wear it on your throat, everybody says, oh, he's a good boy, he's wearing the mask, but he's not. He's kidding himself and he's kidding us. That's why the certification thing would be so interesting. In other words, I walk in there, I'm a shopper, I'm not disclosed, I'm not identified, and I go to this restaurant and I see people wearing masks on their throats. I say, ah, you're not going to get an A from me. You're going to get a C from me in a letter. So it's all a matter of maintaining the discipline. Okay, so you study these things, and it's really good that you're doing that, very important. And then you take these things back to your clientele and I gather from what you say, take them to the public. How do you deliver them to your clientele and the public? Yeah, so we essentially what we do is we have a team of experts. So we've got folks who have, you know, back, you know, law degrees. We have folks who have many years experience in safety. So with OSHA and high ash regulations, we have folks with healthcare experience. We're talking to our clients that work in those, you know, all across different industries as well. And then we're packaging those things into guides that are essentially PDFs that you can download from our website and, you know, print them off if you like the hard copy in your paper person or just flip through them on your laptop or your phone even. Again, we have the general guide that's kind of for everybody, but then we have the industry specifics. We've also provided just some checklists. You know, we know not everybody wants to read the five page guide. So if all you want is the one page checklist of here's the key things I need to do. It's making sure that my employees have masks. It's making sure that we have signage. It's making sure we have X marks the spots where we want people to be standing indoors. We've removed the extra tables and chairs, you know, those kinds of things. So we've also just got the sort of shortened checklist version, if that's helpful for folks. We've been doing some webinars, I think probably since the last time I've talked to you, we were doing them on a fairly regular basis through this whole crisis. And we've continued to bring those in different formats, different topics, whether it's a variety of different leaders, whether it's expertise, we've done a couple of our own one-on-one interviews with folks to get their feedback and share those with, again, clients and general public. Everything's on our website, basically. So it's proservice.com slash coronavirus. Everything is there. And again, it's if you want to watch it in a video format, and you're a video person, great. If you just want a quick checklist to download, those things are available to do. So it's available in a variety of different formats. That's great. That's good of you. It's a public service. It's a community service, for sure. I wanted to ask you also, are you covering these ancillary issues, issues that go beyond how you run your business? I mean, for example, and I guess you also include within that framework, you include what happens in this scenario, that scenario, for example, somebody gets sick, your staff gets sick, a customer gets sick, what to do. This is very important advice because people do panic about this, and they think the worst. And if you do that, then the worst could happen. But are you covering other issues that might affect your people? For example, do you cover whether you should have a thermometer when they enter the room? Because that could be very discouraging for some. If I go to a restaurant, somebody takes my temperature, I'm saying, wow, this is a special environment. I'm not sure I like this. They think it's dangerous. It must be dangerous. Cover that. We have addressed those in our how to make a comeback plan guide. I think it's in there. I don't know if it's not one or maybe one of the reopening guides, but we do talk about and address things like, should you be taking temperatures? And just to give you an example, I have been to, I think, two places now, kind of out in public. So one of them was I went for a massage, and they did take my temperature at that particular location. And I think that is one of the businesses that's, it's a little iffy because it's not a healthcare business, but it's obviously a business with physical personal touch involved. So I think it could arguably be considered a higher risk business. Generally speaking, for your average every day, you know, we don't expect that if you run a retail store, you can take the temperatures of the 400 people that are going to walk in and out every day. And that's not necessarily a high risk business. But certainly if you work with vulnerable populations, if you work in a senior living, being that those are the types of businesses where we would definitely recommend that people are, you know, doing something like taking a temperature. Nobody's taking my temperature at the grocery store. And I don't anticipate that they would. Yeah. But I, you know, you touch on a very important point. Every business is different. And for the, for the thoughtful analysts, you have to look at how that business operates, who the staff is, what the flow of traffic is, who's coming in, are they exposed or not, and then calculate your, your suggestions based on that. I think that's really avant garde. I mean, that is where we have to go on this, assuming it takes a long time to solve it, or we can't solve the disease in general, we have to learn to moderate and diversify our, our strategic strategies from business to business. Yeah. And you know, Jay, you were asking, are we addressing other ancillary issues? And I think there are so many of them. It's so complex. I mean, we have clients who have had trouble bringing people back to work because unemployment is really lucrative right now. We have clients who, you know, laid off people and they want to rehire better people because they're going, oh, all of a sudden there's all this really great talent on the market. So we're providing them with guidance on, you know, behavioral interviewing, for example. We have clients who are dealing with the whole, you know, testing, should I be putting up plastic barriers in my office? Should I not? We don't really deal with the public. So there's so many different scenarios. A lot of our clients, I will say, that are operating and reopening aren't necessarily on full capacity or full hours yet. So many of them are still affected by, you know, lack of tourism. We're just wanting to manage their own costs and staffing and things like that. So I don't think every business is fully 100% back to where it was. And I think it's going to be a really long time. Yeah. One of the things that I think has to be done, and I imagine you're at least touching on this, is reimagining the financial statements for the business. In other words, how much traffic do I need to be sustainable? If I was a restaurant operating and the average of say 90%, I'm making that up, you know, last year. Now I'm only getting 10 or 15%, is that sustainable or should I consider closing my doors or chapter 11 or bankruptcy or whatever? And where is the sweet spot on that? How do I make that analysis? And I think that's really important because sometimes as a practical matter, you find you can't do it or you have to work harder to get to a level where you can do it. Have you covered that? Yeah. So, you know, myself, I'm not a financial expert. But in webinars that we've done, that's a question that we asked many of the business owners themselves and said, how are you planning for this? And the answer that I got time and time again when I was talking to folks is the best practice would be to model multiple scenarios. So model what it would be like to operate at 25%, 50%, 75%, because you don't know if you're going to have 25% revenue or maybe only 10% revenue or maybe you're going to open your doors and there's going to be a high pent up demand for whatever your service is. People are desperate to get out of their houses. And maybe you're going to operate at 80% the first week and then it's going to dip back down. So the guidance that I'm hearing and that I think would be a good recommendation is to have multiple scenarios modeled and then to, you know, flex your staffing and your supply orders and all those things based on what the actual data tells you. And I think you have to re-look at it. The plan you put in place on, you know, June 3rd could be very different from today 21 days later because in three weeks a lot has changed. Well, we talk about reimagining. We talk about, you know, what do you do when you like to reimagine the quality of your staff? What do you do when you find your people staying home for the unemployment compensation, which is going to end soon enough? Aren't they going to have a surprise? And then, you know, it makes me think of the government because the government doesn't have this kind of analysis of this kind of advice. And I wonder if you, you know, deal at all with government offices because they really need to have this advice. They really need to have this thought process. And there have been things that happen to the government that are really totally inefficient and wasteful in the time of COVID. Do you know about this? Have you had any contact with the government? I myself have not. I do know that some of our executive team has been in contact with various departments within, you know, the state and local government. Certainly on the unemployment front, our team that handles unemployment claims because we're helping so many clients through that process has been in contact, has been in conversations related to everything from the processing to the fraud that you're seeing in the media and all of that. I personally have not. But there's, again, it's really complex because there's so much at stake with the economy, with the public health system and, you know, the mandates around wearing masks and, you know, people feeling like their civil liberties are at, you know, play. I mean, there's just, there's so much complexity. There isn't any one simple solution to any of these problems. Yeah. Our whole society has to be reimagined, actually. And little by little, we're going to find that out. And I compliment you. I compliment pro-service and the fact that you figured that out pretty early. Thank you. And that you know that it's going to have to be evaluated and suggestions are going to have to be made. So where do you think it goes? I mean, you guys are really important. What you're doing is leadership stuff for the business community, because a lot of small firms, they have no clue. They need advice. They need leadership. Where is it going to go? Can you give me a look into the future, Janina? Well, if I took my crystal ball out, you know, I think I, I think, you know, the unfortunate reality is we are probably in for an economic downturn that will last a while. It's not going to change overnight dramatically. I think there's still a lot to be figured out. I know everybody's waiting on regulations from Department of Education and what that's going to look like and whether or not children are in school full-time hours is going to affect everybody because all of your employees have children and then it's going to impact their need to work from home or to have more flexible hours. And then I think, you know, the regulation around the tourism industry, I think everybody's waiting to see what happens there and whether or not we can find ways to safely bring tourists back into Hawaii because we have so many businesses that are heavily reliant on that. So it's a lot of wait and see and then adapt to what reality we're given. A lot of businesses are going to be, you know, under pressure to change. Some of the changes they will have made, perhaps, at your advice, will be permanent changes. I mean, temporary things turn permanent if they work well. For example, we're working at home and a lot of people are going to stay working at home and we have to perfect that model so, you know, they actually work at home. You know, it's, you know, it happens. Another possibility is that restaurants are going to, you know, close up their big spaces and let you pick up your food or deliver. And that'll be the model for that restaurant in the future and it'll be very good and you'll pay prices for it and you'll love it and you go pick it up. You know, I think some of that would become permanent. Maybe it already is. But one thing that interests me is a lot of retail, including retail that spend thousands of dollars, you know, for their space and even places like Alamoana and what have you, that retail could emulate Amazon. That retail could go online and improve their back office technique, improve their ability to, you know, to provide the delivery and so forth. And I think the probably local businesses ought to consider that if they're in a business where they could do that. Are you seeing that? Are you recommending that? Where do you feel that fits in the future? Yeah, you know, we are definitely encouraging clients to what we're calling act like a startup, right? Have that entrepreneurial spirit. Think if you were starting a business today from scratch, what would you do to be successful? And digitization, it is certainly one of those things, whether it is online ordering, whether it's online ordering with curbside pickup, whether it is, you know, being able to order and have, you know, retail products even delivered or picked up without having to have the in-store shopping experience. And to your point, I mean, I think, you know, many of us would certainly be happy if we could get the delivery faster than even because Amazon doesn't just take a day or two to get to Hawaii. I think many of us would be really happy if these things came a little faster. So we are definitely encouraging clients to be innovative. And quite frankly, we have already seen clients and just folks in the community that have done some innovative things from, you know, things like selling masks or producing hand sanitizer or rebranding themselves to your point to do more delivery or pickup or just to have a completely different service. We have a client that, as an example, does kind of, let me call it kind of construction and maintenance. And during this time period, they decided to start launching a disinfecting service. You know, that's something that everybody's going to want. So it seems like a really obvious place to find innovation. And, you know, I think necessity is always the mother of invention. So hopefully we'll see more innovative things coming from our local community. Yeah. And sometimes you think the innovation is temporary, but think again, it could be, it could be your future completely. Thank you, Janina. Janina Abiles from Pro Service. We greatly appreciate you coming around. Greatly appreciate what you're doing for the community. Thank you. Thank you for having me, Jay.