COVID-19: Managing the Ongoing Pandemic
Throughout 2021, we maintained an active role in controlling the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We remained focused on maintaining business continuity and protecting our employee community, while working on several COVID-19 projects with our customers.
Global COVID-19 Taskforce
As the pandemic continued to impact our business and the communities in which we operate, Lonza’s Global COVID-19 Taskforce and the associated working groups remained integral to our pandemic response. Comprising of representatives from a wide range of functions across the business, the Global Taskforce and working groups focused on addressing our most pressing challenges.
A priority of the Global Taskforce was to ensure that our employee community continued to be alert to the ongoing threat of the pandemic. We encouraged our employee community to be vaccinated to protect both the health of individual employees and broader society. The Global Taskforce endeavored to balance the need for a global approach with the local requirements of sites based in different locations with varying levels of infection or vaccination rates. Where possible, back-to-office plans were introduced to offer an opportunity to those employees who wished to return to the office. Remote working remained possible on a broad basis across Lonza for applicable employees.
Thanks to the collective efforts of our employee community, we continued to manage business continuity globally while fulfilling our responsibilities to our customers.
Leveraging Lessons Learned
Moving into the second year of the pandemic, we were able to benefit from the actions we took in 2020. This included our IT measures, which ensured our systems supported the increase in remote working and trainings to help employees make optimal use of our remote working technologies.
In some cases, our teams were able to turn the challenge of the pandemic into an opportunity to innovate and bring long-lasting benefits to the organization. Lonza’s Digital Transformation team started building a virtual reality (VR) training concept to remotely train large numbers of employees in critical operations across different sites on new manufacturing methods. This VR environment allowed users to gain digital experience performing critical operations such as cleanroom behavior and working in the biosafety cabinet.
Looking to the future, VR training platforms also provide tangible benefits beyond the pandemic. Users can be trained anywhere, at any time and often in a manner that does not interrupt commercial production and have also made remote support possible.
