In the face of COVID-19, Canadian Viewpoint remains committed to the health and wellness of its employees and our community, as well as ensuring business continuity for our clients, vendors, and partners.
Canadian Viewpoint has multiple lines of business, each with its own considerations.
- Online research: Our online research has maintained the same high-quality service we’ve always delivered. Every member of our programming and project management team has been working from home since March 14th. We continue to use secure, robust, Canadian-hosted communication and collaboration tools, the same tools we were using before the pandemic. We have not noted a difference in overall response rates though we do believe the current environment impacts response.
- Telephone research: Our CATI research has also maintained the same high-quality service you expect from us. Canadian Viewpoint invested in remote interviewing capabilities years ago and has extensive experience executing, monitoring, recording, and managing remote CATI research. We have closed our in-person call centre to encourage physical distancing and have successfully transitioned our staff to a remote working environment.
- Face-to-face research: Some of our clients have asked about the in-person services we offer, including individual interviews, focus groups, shop-alongs, and mystery shopping. We are encouraging everyone to practice physical distancing. In many cases, we are helping our clients transition in-person methods to the most appropriate digital methods. In other cases, we are pleased to see projects that must use in-person methodologies being delayed. If face-to-face projects are absolutely essential, for instance, they have some bearing on health and welfare that could prove essential during this crisis, we have arranged for extra precautions including extra screening for travel and symptoms, staggered start times to create physical distance between people waiting to participate and to allow all surfaces to be sanitized, physical distancing during interviews, and use of hand sanitizer pre and post interviews. Our utmost goal is keep our employees and our community safe, and to flatten the curve.
Protecting our staff
The health and well-being of our employees, their families, and our community is a top concern. To that end, we have:
- Ensured all staff are aware of the symptoms of COVID-19 and the precautions that they need to take to help to limit and/or slow down the spread.
- Prohibited all people exhibiting cold or flu symptoms from entering any of our offices. Anyone who must visit the office must sign a travel and health declaration before entering.
- Posted signs throughout our office to serve as a frequent reminder to those who must be in the office to practice good hygiene and to stay home if they aren’t feeling well or think they might be sick.
- Prohibited all international travel and all in-person business meetings. We recognize that in-person meetings are important and, as such, have encouraged employees to take advantage of digital tools that offer video conferencing.
- Effective March 14th, 2020, requested employees to work from home. Reducing density within our office makes it safer for those who must perform critical services within our space.
Ensuring business continuity
The safe continuity of our client’s projects and our business is critical. We’ve weathered many storms throughout our 40-year history through careful planning. We have:
- Invested heavily in communication and collaboration tools over the years to allow our operations, management, and interviewing teams to work remotely effectively and securely.
- Ensured mission critical business systems are on distributed, secure, Canadian, cloud networks.
- Scheduled daily Management Pandemic Response Team meetings to ensure that everyone is managing well and staying healthy.
Together, we’ll get through these uncertain times.
If you have any concerns about your projects, please get in touch with us so we can help you find a solution you feel good about.
