Hi everyone,

I would like to publish an update. Joao Cardoso, CEO of Teleperformance Portugal, has responded to this letter with the email I will post below.

TP Portugal has also published a video on YouTube regarding the COVID-19 situation here.

"Dear Colleague Carolina Pereira,

I take this opportunity to reinforce what we discussed during our phone call just a while ago.

At Teleperformance Portugal we have been working 24x7 for the past 4 weeks in order to address the COVID-19 situation:

1. We decided already 4 weeks ago that we want to have the maximum possible number of people working from home.
2. Each and every client was involved in this process. As the systems vary from client from client, this implied a substantial engineering effort. Today, we have technical solutions for almost all the clients.
3. For an employee to work from home, we need to set up a virtual session through Citrix. We had already 2,500 licenses of Citrix, and these were put immediately to that service.
4. We need also substantial bandwidth, as we had enough for 300 remote employees only: It was immediately purchased and it was provisioned last Friday.
5. At the same time, we started deploying TP Portugal computers in our apartments. We have 200 people working from home now. We started by installing 30 workstations per day in our apartments. Starting today, we are now installing 300 workstations per day. Additionally, we are provisioning people to work with their own devices also – a process that is slightly more complex than with our own hardware.
6. In order to go beyond 2,500 employees working from home, we will need more server capacity. We are discussing delivery dates with three hardware providers in order to shorten them as much as possible – namely to secure that the servers will arrive before we reach the 2,500 remote workstations.
7. We have set up a dedicated help desk team to support the specific needs of the remote employees. We are now creating a first line for help desk with 45 people more, to be sure that everybody gets proper support from home.
    

Already three weeks ago we created a Crisis Management cell that I am managing directly and that meets 7 days a week at 6:00PM. Every day we have taken decisions to protect the health and safety of all the employees, that were immediately implemented:

1. Continuous sanitization of all the points of common contact: doors handlers, push buttons for elevators, etc
2. Cleaning tissues available in all working rooms of the company, so that every employee cleans up the keyboard and table every time before sitting. We thank all the colleagues for being part of this effort, in making our company more secure.
3. Creation of a protocol for immediate confinement for each and every colleague that presents any suspicious symptom. We’ve had already more than 40 such situations: The colleague is invited into a confinement room, interviewed by our health and safety and by a nurse from the national health system. The vast majority of the people were dismissed and given permission to work. More recently, the national health system became even more conservative and requested some people to test. They’ve sent then an ambulance to make the transportation to the hospital and perform the test. Up till now, no one tested positive.
4. We created also dedicated apartments for quarantine. Every time an employee is in quarantine, there is no other non-quarantined employee in the same apartment.
5. For the eventual case that we have someone who tests positive, we have already apartments for their confinement in total comfort. These apartments will be shared only with other people that test positive (in the eventual case that we have more than one person testing positive).
6. The growth of the virus in Italy shocked everybody, and the management of Teleperformance Portugal was no exception. We stopped immediately recruiting from Italy. Some new colleagues that were already arriving were put into quarantine in dedicated apartments and have been receiving the initial training from there. In the meanwhile we stopped also all the recruitment from abroad.
    

We are doing an over human effort in order to:

1. Accelerate the rate at which more and more people start working from home.
2. Secure all the most restrictive measures that we’ve seen from the reputed health organizations. Our number priority is to protect the health of each and every employee of the company.
3. We understand that we have a role in society. Everyday we serve close to one million customers from a variety of products and services. There are literally many hundreds of millions of people across Europe and beyond that ultimately rely on us. We can say that some of these services are not vital… I dispute that: telecommunications, banking services, health devices, power utilities, logistics companies, … all of these are quite vital. On top of that, for the elder who is confined at home and cannot access to some of the most well known brands in the world – even if we may think for services that are not vital – will but reinforce his anguish and feeling that the world is falling apart. The world is not falling apart – but we can make it fall apart if we all become part of the fear.
4. Secure the continuity of the company. We are a strong team, I believe the best team. Millions of people rely on us. If we fail on them now, we will not have a second opportunity as a company. So, I believe the way is to continue as a company. And at the same time move as many people, as fast as possible, to their homes.
    

Please keep in mind that if everybody in every different company decides to stop working tomorrow, there will be literally thousands of company that will go bankrupt. The financial system has proven in the past that it can be very conservative during these periods, meaning that it would start immediately reducing the credit to companies. Without cash, companies would have to close and generate a snow ball effect across the whole economy and society. It would be at least the same disaster as the financial crisis of 2008 after Lehman Brothers.

We know that we live in the Just in Time economy… For efficiency reasons, our cities have supplies for 2~3 days, not more (this is a mistake, but it is reality). After a few days without logistics, people would actually start starving in cities. We have seen that happening even in the richest country in the world, in the aftermath of events such as the Katrina hurricane. By shutting down the economy, we would be producing our own Katrina – with the same devastating consequences.

Nobody wants that – we need to protect us as much as possible from the virus, without actually killing ourselves in the process.

We will therefore follow the directions of the health Govern institutions. We need to realize that even in Italy today, factories keep working, call centers keep working and the government is doing everything to keep a functional society, while minimizing any risk of virus contagion.

I am sure that we will accomplish our role in society. Today, there is a high toll rate in Italy. Main reason is because the proportion of aged people that was infected is higher than in other countries. As a matter of fact, the average age of the Corona casualty is 81 years.  2,8% of the casualties are people between 50 and 60 years and the rest are people above 60 years. We need to protect these beloved people by allowing them to stay protected at home. This means that the rest of the society needs to keep functioning and providing them with the services – namely remote services – that will allow them to be well and comfortable at home. 

For me personally, you will see me in each one of our sites, in all the operations, just like always, doing my best to secure our great team at Teleperformance will accomplish our role.

I am very proud of Teleperformance Portugal and very proud of our team. I am sure that we will provide what society needs from us now.

Stay well,

João Cardoso

CEO, Teleperformance Portugal"