Managing a Crisis

When the pandemic hit, demand for Clorox wipes went through the roof, right?

And you were dealing with that while supply chains were being disrupted as well. And then your roughly 9,000 employees started working from home, you as the leader were still in charge of keeping the company running. I imagine that must have been extremely stressful. So what strategies did you come up with to lead through all those massive changes happening all at once?

Yeah, we've got 9,000 employees, and actually about half of them worked onsite and have worked on site throughout this pandemic, because they work in manufacturing plants and in labs, and they really need it. I'm really grateful for them to put their health on the line every single day and show up. For that to be true, of course, what we needed to do was we needed to establish a set of principles by which we make decisions and what we would devote ourselves to. And for Clorox, there were three, the first thing is to keep people safe, no matter whether they're at home or working in an onsite environment, people's safety was critical. We've employed a ton of different tools and processes to enable that. I'm really proud to say that our plants are up and running and they're running 24/7, and we certainly had COVID cases like every company had but they were tied to people's personal lives and not their work environments, and we're really grateful for that. So safety is always priority number one. The second priority was for us to say we're going to do whatever it takes to improve supply. I talked earlier about the fact that some of our products, even though it's getting a lot better, are still in short supply. We said we're not sparing any expenses to give people the products when they really, really need them. And then lastly, we said how are we going to make decisions? You know, how are we going to decide to do A versus B? And what we said is that we're going to use one of our core values as a company, which is to do the right thing, because it's the only basis for the decision. So it's those three along with a change in operating routines, daily meetings, daily check-ins, quick meetings to make decisions, that I would say helped tremendously.