Atlas All Access

Atlas MedStaff is working from home for you, through all of 2020 - Atlas All Access 128

Atlas MedStaff is working from home for you, through all of 2020 - Atlas All Access 128

We've decided to have our entire staff remain work-from-home through all of 2020. What does this mean for you?

This wasn't an easy decision, but it's the right thing to do.

We are incredibly focused on being the support structure to our traveling healthcare professionals. We are here working for you so that you can focus on your patients, on our loved ones, on getting us all through this.

Early on during "The-Year-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named" (that's 2020), we were one of the first travel nurse agencies to make the decision to send our team home to work fully remote.

Now we are committing even further to that effort. Our team will work-from-home throughout the rest of the year. Some of us haven't stepped foot in the office since early March! (It's been a weird year.)

It's important for us to take care of our team, and that includes our travelers along with our in-house staff. We want to be part of the solution. And if we are pushing to open our office HQ too soon, we run the risk of putting people in danger of contracting Covid-19 or taking up valuable beds that you need.

This is why our team will continue to work from home for you.

We're here, working for you. We just might be doing it in our pajamas with an ice-cold IPA next to us.

Rich Smith: Not the announcement that I thought it was going to be, but the announcement that we made and the one that we're most comfortable with. On this episode, we talk about how Atlas is going to handle the rest of this year from an internal office employee standpoint. Atlas All Access starts now.

Rich Smith: All right. So certainly not what I thought it was going to be back in March. I really, I guess I kind of believed that we were going to be in a different place, come August. Back in March when we closed the office, along with everyone else. When all of that kind of started we put a date out there of August 15th that we were going to start discussing how we'd reopened the office. I was tasked later with the plan to reopen the office and the closer we got to August, the more we thought this just isn't right. It just isn't. From our standpoint, it wasn't the right decision to have people come back into the office.

Rich Smith: There's two reasons for that, one, being the level of attention and care that has maintained fairly consistently, I would even say very consistently over these past few months with all of our travelers and our hospitals, and then through payroll and compliance, even though all of us are spread out in different parts of Omaha or all through the country as our remote staff is very used to working. I would say that we didn't miss a beat. We've always kind of been prepared for this. Early on eight years ago, we took the, going back to some of our first recruiters ever, the standpoint that you can work from anywhere at any time. Everything that we do is online. The database we work out of is online. We use Microsoft Teams, which is an online portal. I could push a button right now and talk to anyone in our office, no matter where they are.

Rich Smith: It's one of those things. We were always, always able to do this. It really was, it sounds cliche like a flip of the switch that day in March, it was kind of a flip of the switch and now you're going to work at home. The only thing that was different was not being around the people here in the office.

Rich Smith: So I hope that your experience, if you're watching this has been similar to that, that you haven't felt that because that's the idea. The idea is that you haven't been affected by us not being here in the office.

Rich Smith: So the second part of that is in order for us to maintain that, understanding that you're at there at the hospital, taking care of patients, of loved ones, our loved ones, someone's mom, grandma, dad, child, whatever, our job is to take care of you. And we can't do that if we get sick, if some of us get sick here, let's say we come back to the office too quickly two people get COVID and they spread it in the office. All of a sudden that consistent level of care that you're used to getting from us disappears. There's no replacing that. So what we decided to do was until the end of this year, stay where we are. You're staying at home, we're going to rotate, we're still rotating a number of probably seven to eight people through our office just to maintain the things here. Me, Steve, Steve Seitner, Kurt Chase, Keahna. The names that you're familiar with, the leadership here at Atlas has been rotating through the office and making sure that we say six feet apart from each other and all that. Even in meetings when we're arms length away, we're making sure that we're as careful as we possibly can be.

Rich Smith: So it's all so we can maintain that level of care for you, that you can then provide that level of care to your patients while you're on a contract and you're working in a facility. So nothing's more important to us than that, making sure that we take care of our own. So then we can take care of you. Both of those things are vital. So if you have noticed a disruption, I want to know about it because we have tried, like I said, very, very hard to make sure that that has not happened. Your recruiter was talking to you on his or her cell phone here in the office. Now they're just doing it at home. There shouldn't be that much of a disruption through the end of this year.

Rich Smith: Now we've seen jobs increase. We've gone, I believe we're over 6,500 jobs now, when just a couple of weeks ago, we broke a thousand and we thought that was party time. The jobs have gone up considerably. You've seen it across the country, you've seen censuses go up across the country and it's not just the hotspots anymore. It's not New York, Florida, Texas, California, it's everywhere. If you're not comfortable with ... and I get it, if you're not comfortable with taking COVID patients or that isn't your normal thing. I know there's places like New Mexico right now that doesn't have that high of a COVID patient load.

Rich Smith: Nebraska is one of them. I think we've actually seen a decrease here in COVID patient load. So there are still contracts out there that you can take one way or the other. But either way, we're still here to support you. Whether we're sitting in a seat here in our office, or we're sitting in a seat in a home office somewhere, we're still here to take care of you. So you can go and do your job. You should not see any kind of disruption whatsoever.

Rich Smith: Over the next couple of weeks. We're going to continue to talk about this. Like I said, if you have any questions at all, my email is always, always, always right here. RSmith@atlasmedstaff.com. You can message me through Facebook, god knows I'm on there enough during the day. Always getting messages there too and that's a place where a lot of us connect anyway. So either one of those two places I want to hear from you, there's a lot of stuff that we can still do together through the end of this year even though things are not normal. We'll see you next week.

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