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MD Message | COVID-19, Safety is Our Priority

MD Message | COVID-19, Safety is Our Priority

EN|TH

MD Message | COVID-19, Safety is Our Priority

Good evening to everyone,

I hope you all have been keeping safe and healthy in this fast changing and challenging time. I am writing to you all to share with you how Aware Group is addressing the current situation in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak and the proactive steps we are taking and have been taking since February as we work to ensure the safety of our employees, our clients and all our business partners.

Our two highest priorities right now are maintaining the safety and well-being of our employees while providing continued and uninterrupted service to our customers. To ensure that our people remain healthy, safe and fully functional in support of our customers and our business, we have taken the following actions:

We have created a COVID-19 Response Team, led by our Group HR Director Khun Poungthong, with team members from both our Bangkok and Chiang Mai offices. Khun Poungthong and I have a daily COVID-19 update call or meeting every evening and have been doing so since the beginning of March. We are ensuring information is being shared amongst our offices, and we are reacting to the rapidly changing situation as required on a daily basis.

Launched 3 weeks ago at all Aware offices, we have made hand sanitizer available and easily accessible, and alcohol for cleaning desks and other office equipment has been provided. We have also ensured that once an hour our housekeepers clean door handles and other hard surfaces in the high-traffic areas and common spaces. We also are ensuring that the meeting rooms are being sanitized after every use, and we have implemented a “whole office full cleaning” for all offices on a monthly basis.

Also launched in February was our COVID-19 travel policy, which is being updated to include any travel outside of Thailand for the next 30 days or in the past 14 days. If anyone plans to travel outside of Thailand or has traveled outside of Thailand in the past 14 days, we request they inform their manager and/or HR, and that they self-quarantine at home for 14 days upon their return to Thailand. We will do our best to support what is needed to work from home for those who can in the case of self-quarantine.

Last week, as part of our Business Continuity Plan, we have set up a new VPN and tested our Bangkok office infrastructure, systems, and processes in case there is the situation where we must switch to remote work. VPN and access authorization have been granted to those that may need it, so that should a work from home situation arise, those of you that you can work from home can create an efficient and connected workspace at your home. A similar VPN set up for our Chiang Mai offices will be launched in a few days, so that we will be able to support work from home scenarios from all of our locations if required.

In an effort to practice social distancing, we have already had several teams begin working from home since March 16th, we have closed our new True Digital Park office until March 31st in an effort to reduce the number of locations we need to monitor and manage, and we will begin work from home rotating shifts for some of our Phaholyothin Place office staff from March 23rd to April 12th.

Today, we are announcing a new dedicated COVID-19 email communication channel. You will receive news and updates on Aware Group policies in response to the COVID-19 situation via your Aware email and we encourage you to ask us questions or raise any concerns regarding the situation by sending emails to COVID-19HotLine@aware.co.th. We are committing to responding within 2 hours (and faster when possible) during the business day to all incoming emails to this new dedicated email address for COVID-19 topics.

This coming week, you will also be able to receive COVID-19 news and announcements from the company by connecting with us through our soon to launch Line Official Account. We will send out an announcement on this as soon as Line confirms it is live next week.

For those of you who work at client sites, please strictly conform to the clients’ policies and please communicate updates, policy changes, comments or concerns with your site’s Account Manager and/or our HR team. If you have any questions, or important information to share, we are just an email or a phone call away. We recognize that this is a fast-changing situation, so any news you can share from a client site is valuable for us all, and helps us ensure everyone across our group of companies has the most up-to-date accurate information.

These are challenging times for everyone, but we will stand together and support one another, and we will get through this together!

Stay safe, everyone!

Steven Prussky

21/03/2020

MD Message | COVID-19, Safety is Our Priority

About Poungthong Thipdang

Poungthong Thipdang is the HR Director at Aware Group and leader of the COVID-19 Response team.