Hatch Ltd. issued the following announcement on March 26.

The COVID-19 pandemic is rapidly changing our world and our way of life. It has disrupted how we conduct business, how we manage our operations, and how we deliver value to our investors and communities. At Hatch, we recognize that your business, like most of our clients, has been amongst the most severely impacted. This note is an update on how Hatch is responding to the pandemic, how we are ensuring continuity of our clients’ work, and an offer to help you during these turbulent times.

From the early onset of the outbreak, our entrenched corporate culture guided us to take proactive steps to ensure the health and well-being of our people, our clients, our suppliers, and our communities while ensuring business continuity to provide uninterrupted service to our clients. As an early responder to this epidemic, we have been practicing both mitigation (e.g. monitoring symptoms in all offices, restricting travel, physical distancing in offices, non-contact rules), and segregation methods (e.g. self-isolation of symptomatic individuals and recent travelers, rostering or platooning of project teams) to keep our people safe and productive on your assignments.

We have tested and upgraded our IT systems both those specific to your projects, as well as our global corporate infrastructure, in anticipation of a transition to remote work. Most importantly, we have asked our project leadership teams to prepare COVID-19 preparedness plans well ahead of time. These plans are now in place and include our revised project workflows, methodologies, procedures and communication protocols for remote work in addition to our IT strategy.

Over the past few weeks, we have transitioned our organization, with our clients’ cooperation, to mostly remote work mainly to comply with government requests. As we were ready, this transition was completed on Wednesday, March 25th. Our office buildings remain open wherever possible with essential services so that our employees and your team can get ready access to support as needed. We continue to closely monitor our performance on your projects, and we are maintaining our work team efficiencies. We will continue to monitor and adapt to maintain productivity and efficiency.

Our current situation is not new for Hatch. Many of you know us as having a “flat and connected organization”. For decades, our global teams have collaborated and worked remotely, and we have been working on your assignments from multiple offices as part of our normal project execution. Our past attention and investment allow us to connect top talent to tackle your toughest challenges, regardless of where they reside. We have made a few modifications to this operating model which was brought on by the pandemic, but it has been a natural transition as all of our 9,000 experts have been collaborating on remote teams to deliver our clients’ assignments for many, many years.

One of our key corporate values is to “live our commitments with integrity”. We remain fully prepared to deliver on the work that has been entrusted to us from our clients while keeping our teams safe and healthy. We believe that we are in a unique position to help our clients with their emerging challenges due to the breadth of expertise within our global team, and our familiarity with your facilities and operations. As new challenges emerge for you in the coming weeks, think of your colleagues at Hatch.

We are poised to assist in many ways: helping with contingency planning in your office or site operations, advising you on enhancing your digital platforms, taking on new engineering scopes as needed, assisting with the local expediting of procurement, planning for remote monitoring of your operations, and operational readiness for the restart of operations are just a few examples. In the meantime, please look out for emails regarding our online seminars which will span a variety of topics that may interest you.

We trust that your teams remain safe and as an important element in the nation’s economy, that your business continues to deliver for your customers and communities in these difficult times. We remain committed to supporting you.

John Bianchini

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Original source: https://www.hatch.com/en/About-Us/News-And-Media/2020/03/How-Hatch-is-responding-to-the-COVID-19-pandemic