I started my career
at Verizon as a customer service rep,
and that lives within my DNA and always will
because the privilege to serve customers
is what we do and why we do it.
And yet, at the end of the day,
the single most important component for us at Verizon
as we faced the COVID crisis was protecting our employees
so that they could serve.
I think one of the challenges early on in the crisis onset
was for us as leaders
to realize that we weren't really going to be in control.
And so, we had to get really good at these are the facts,
this is what we have to react to,
and so you wind up as a leadership team
quickly coalescing around guiding principles
and what are the ultimate objectives
that you're aiming at?
So that every day when you have to triage
against the new facts that are presenting themselves to you,
you have some way to filter those,
make decisions from a guided set of values,
and that served us really well
for our communication with our employees.
We're focused right now with every customer
that we serve on doing the right thing,
so that when the business comes back,
and it will come back,
that we will be known as the partner
that customers can trust.
And you think about our brand,
our brand is anchored on two things:
trust and innovation.
And building that trust
and innovating on behalf of our customers
during this COVID period has been particularly important.
For us, the values were very simple.
We said, we're gonna be guided by our values,
which are our Verizon credo,
and we gonna focus on two things:
keeping the world connected
and keeping our employees safe.
And so, we've been able to just keep
those two things in front of us
every time as we've worked our way
through how to respond to the facts
and the situations that the crisis has presented us with.
I'm talking about collaboration quite a bit
because it's one of our values,
relationships matter,
you know, partnerships matter, and the people matter.
Especially at the very beginning of COVID-19,
every minute counted,
and it was not lost on me
the valued relationships within our community.
One of the things that we did,
I heard that we needed,
all of us heard, we needed more PPE and masks.
And so I remember, as I was visiting
all of our regional hospitals,
I was also texting leaders of businesses
in our community saying, "Can you make masks for us?
Can you make face shields for us?
We need hand sanitizer.
Can you make hand sanitizer?"
and everyone came back and said, "Yes.
How much do you need?"
My takeaway is that the relationships that we've formed
and all the day-to-day things that we have,
everyone came together to help
our community, to help us serve those that were vulnerable,
and I am forever grateful for them.