Reflections ... Resilience

Resilience

Resilience is the ability to quickly recover from difficulties, it is the ability to get up quickly after you are knocked down, it is being tough throughout hardships. We must be resilient and be able to get up after any difficulties we face.

Friday we held a joint stand down with our GE Gas Power & Fieldcore teammates to re-energize our COVID expectations. Why? Observed behaviors from an early fall outage indicate potential lapses in the use of good judgment around COVID, even in instances away from work, and that is unacceptable. So we collectively needed a reminder of the potential severity of COVID and what we need to do to mitigate the risks while we work and live.

In our recent BOD meeting this week, it was stated that companies who can continue to work in a COVID environment have a competitive advantage. This spring we proved we could do it and do it well. Attached is the slide from our BOD meeting summarizing our spring performance. Note the volume of work we performed – 4383 craft working 2,043,964 hours on 790 jobs – while COVID was still new and increasing. I am very proud of our performance, and our BOD is too!

Now a few months later, we still have lots of work to do and we still have COVID. I appreciate that there are many opinions regarding COVID, probably as many as there are people. While I am always interested in knowing what you think, ultimately I am interested in two things:  1. Your health and safety.  2. The health and well-being of our APM.

To protect both you and our APM, I expect that we follow the COVID protocols with discipline and vigilance. No exceptions.

How do we maintain discipline and vigilance?  I encourage us to use the tools we already have in place to do so, borrowing from an equation we have used in the past: 

Discipline and Vigilance = (STA + CBS + STOP)

STA:  Each day we have a task to do, and we have COVID risks associated with that task that we must mitigate via action.

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CBS:  Identify for yourself the actions or commitments (no more than three) that you most need to focus on to mitigate the COVID risk and deliver the task safely.

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STOP:  If the task or the environment changes, or the STA plan is not working, avoid the urge to push through; rather STOP and make a new plan to mitigate the COVID risks.

I want to look back at this fall with the same pride I look at the spring. The pride of our APM executing essential work – we keep the lights on – with minimal disruption to customers. The pride of sending our teams home 100% safe after an essential job well done. The pride of knowing we sacrificed personal opinions and preferences, and achieved remarkable results as a team. To do that we need all of us to keep resilience in the face of the COVID environment. I am confident we will.

—Jake