16 Mar A Message to Our Clients and Friends About COVID-19
As we monitor and learn more about the spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19, we want to share what CUBE 3 is doing to protect you and your families while ensuring we continue to deliver for our clients and partners. Although it is too early to know the full impact this virus could have on our communities, CUBE 3 has a business continuity plan in place to address scenarios that could impact our CUBE 3 family and disrupt our business.
With the coronavirus (COVID-19) affecting communities and families around the world, this is a difficult time for all of us. CUBE 3’s priority remains the health and well-being of our employees, clients, consultants, contractors, partners and friends. It is important to CUBE 3 to support how we continue to do business during this time of uncertainty. CUBE 3 is committed to supporting our employees and our clients as we adjust to these challenging and changing circumstances. We are committed to minimizing the disruption to our clients, and we are undertaking the following temporary changes to our business operations.
Exercising an abundance of caution, CUBE 3 has decided to direct our employees to work from home starting Monday March 16th. However, our Lawrence, Boston & Miami office will continue to have very minimal staffing to coordinate our efforts of design and project delivery for our clients.
Several years ago CUBE 3 developed our computer infrastructure with the virtual world in mind and put in place a remote desktop system that allows our employees to work through their office computers with the same software and tools that they would have had if our employees were physically working in our offices. We do not expect this change to have an impact on deadlines or deliverables for our clients.
Furthermore, CUBE 3 has the technology and communication tools to allow teams – our clients, contractors, workers, and consultants – to collaborate online at any stage of a project from conceptual design, construction documents, through to construction. We have been working this way for many years, so this is not a dramatic change from our present system of project delivery. We already have highly efficient teams that were sometimes working in different offices and our employees working from home is not a big change. Many of our projects across the country have design team members from numerous states where online collaboration and coordination is the norm.
Like you, we will be watching the situation closely and making any key decisions based on guidance from health professionals and officials in the cities in which we operate. The one area where there will be a change to the way CUBE 3 delivers projects will be a reduction in face-to-face meetings. Per the current guidance of health officials and the CDC, to stop or slow the spread of COVID-19, online meetings need to be utilized to maximize social distancing and keep our employees and clients safe and productive. Therefore, we are addressing in-person client meetings and site visits on a case-by-case basis and will continue to work with you to ensure we are doing what is best for everyone on the project team. If we need to adjust our operations in any capacity or make changes that could impact our work together, we will communicate that information immediately.
Finally, this is a challenging and difficult time. There will be many tough days ahead as we all try to recover from this awful world-historic pandemic that no one alive has every experienced before. CUBE 3 will continue to deliver high-quality design projects to our clients and we look forward to the day when we can return to a more normalized design and construction process.
As always, it is a privilege to be your partner. We are sure you will all have a lot of questions in this very fluid situation. If we can assist in any way—whether by sharing our experiences design protocols for health environments, social distancing and virtual working, or by helping you modify your facility plans, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Finally, we applaud our A/E/C industry peers and our internal CUBE 3 team who are making critical decisions and giving their all to uphold both design excellence and group morale in a time when it is most challenging, and most needed
Your Project Executive and/or Project Manager for your project will shortly be contacting you by phone in order to talk through the plan to deliver your project and keep your project on-schedule.
If you have questions please contact Nik Middleton, Brian O’Connor, Jon Cardello or Doug Carr.
Regards,
Nik Middleton, RIBA
Founding & Senior Partner/CEO