NOTE: This article pertains to activities that took place from March 2020 to April 2022.

Continuing our care with additional health and safety protocols to keep our clients, partners & employees safe

As a client-facing organization providing an essential service to people with unique mobility and accessibility needs, our teams had to adapt quickly to overcoming physical distancing barriers, helping everyone stay safe and healthy both physically and mentally, and pivoting our employee experience to keep operations running effectively.

Our business has been built on caring for and enriching the lives of others. This core focus has become even more important during this pandemic and while team-building and client support look a bit different now, we have adapted quickly to ensure that our employees have what they need to continue to make life accessible for Canadians.

Making balance a priority 

Helping our clients is mission-critical to us all at Motion. To achieve this, we needed to emphasize the ongoing and dedicated support of our employees. During these unprecedented times, we worked to reinforce and prioritize the health and wellbeing of our employees first and foremost, so that they in turn could best serve our clients. We’re not operating under normal circumstances, so if you need to take a day, take a day, we’ve got you.

The importance of mental and physical health

Stress levels are real and on the rise and as fatigue continues to set in with the long-term effects of COVID-19 lockdowns, we continue to work in tandem with our Employee Assistance Program (EAP) provider Lifeworks/Morneau. As an HR and Leadership team, we are making the most of and encouraging all our team members to leverage helpful webinars on mental and physical health and the one-on-one support that these partners provide.

Our new “Workplace”

Since the beginning of the pandemic, like most organizations, we’ve been virtually welcoming each other into our homes by encouraging our teams to share their remote workstations, new “co-workers” and anecdotes around adapting to a remote working environment. This was new for many Motion employees, especially as we are accustomed to being client-facing and hands-on. While we miss our offices and in-person interactions, we continue to make efforts to stay connected by hosting video meetings, virtual coffee breaks, lunches, and game breaks as a way to unwind during and after the workday. Workplace from Meta has been an incredible tool to help keep our teams connected in this regard, in addition to providing the ability to widely share rapidly changing business updates, COVID-19 tools and resources, personal achievements and client success stories during this time.

Beyond the PPE (Personal Protective Equipment)

While we already had protective best practices in place prior to the pandemic, we’ve had to make adjustments to our protocols to meet new safety measures pertaining to in-store/in-home/long-term care visits and repairs. Safety is our top priority, and that means protecting both our employees and clients beyond just providing the right equipment. We conduct pre-screenings and consultations ahead of welcoming visitors and entering any client’s home or partner facility, recommend virtual appointments where possible, and have made PPE a crucial and mandatory part of our “uniform.” Technicians and other client-facing employees are not just provided with masks, gloves, gowns, face shields, hand sanitizer, booties, no-contact thermal thermometers, and proper sanitizing products, but are also trained on the proper use of this equipment as well as how to clean it and remove it safely. Peace of mind is critical to all our employees, partners and clients at Motion.

Supporting our leaders with rapid communication

At Motion, we operate under an HR business partner model. Our goal is to provide ongoing support aligned with achieving our people and client objectives under any circumstance. To continue to support our leaders during the pandemic, our HR team, internally known as our People team, organizes daily huddles to address ongoing concerns and challenges in real-time. Our goal is to create an agile model to support our leadership team, their employees and their own mental health during this crisis. Things are, and continue to, change daily and this effort to deploy rapid communications among teams has been critical to our ability to address the needs of the business, continue to provide much-needed support to our clients, and has resulted in a positive outlook as we forge ahead.

Giving back to our partners and communities

In these times of need, giving back has never been more important. Not just to the Motion family, but to the people on the front lines during this pandemic. We are making regular donations to our local food banks, helping healthcare workers and assisting our local partners in getting supplies. With Canadian charities most hard hit during the pandemic, many of which are our partners in providing critical equipment and funding to clients, we have also ensured that we’re doing our part through social media to help them spread the word about their fundraising activities and the COVID-19 resources that they have to offer to our shared client base.

In these times, there are no perfect answers or formulas for success and we are all learning one day at a time. What this pandemic has shown us at Motion is that we can all adapt and make changes for the better and that we will do whatever we can to support our mission of caring for others. Many of these changes will remain part of our business model long after the pandemic has ended.

Caring is what our business is built on, and the pandemic has only reinforced how important this is to our employees, partners and clients, and we will work to look for new and relevant ways to continue to bring this to life. We will come out of this crisis a better team, with more ideas on how we can continue to make life accessible, no matter the situation.

We might be physically distant, but we have never been closer as a team.