Thinking about the protection of life, business continuity and being able to help the communities in the territories of the 18 departments in which TGI has its infrastructure, in March 2020 we launched the Plan of Attention, Recovery, Reactivation and Stabilization vis-à-vis the pandemic.
“We understood that life comes first than anything else, that our most precious asset is our employees and that without them the business cannot continue. All of this while being faithful to our First Life cultural attribute,” says Ángela Rodríguez, Covid-19 Manager.
From the pandemic, we also learned that health is comprehensive: "Now, in accompanying our collaborators, we are including other risks to analyze, such as psychosocial and emotional, because we have colleagues who lost family members and we are creating support networks to feel close, even while being virtual," she added.
“We also learned how we can get ahead if we come together as a team, to rethink ourselves as a company and to get closer even from a distance, to be resilient and to generate awareness among our collaborators about care,” says the manager.
This is how TGI employees live the pandemic, from home or in the operation:
To take care of the lives of employees and their families, on March 16 we made an early and very sensible decision: approximately 80% of the company's employees started teleworking.
This implied a great challenge and also a new way of life: “I loved working from home. I was able to see my son day by day in his school activities. Of course, you miss every now and then that coffee you share with your peers. But teleworking allowed us to reduce travel times, and prioritize which meetings we attended. In addition, the company sent us from the office everything we need to work desk, double screen, fan, and chair”, says María Alexandra Bejarano, professional from the Integrity and Reliability Management.
In April 2020, this young and dynamic TGI worker and her family were infected with the virus: “At first, I refused to report the symptoms out of fear. But after a few days my husband could not breathe well and was admitted to the ICU on a Thursday. That same day, my father-in-law was also admitted in intensive care and died, while my husband was unconscious,” says María Alexandra.
“When I raised my hand and asked for help, everyone's warmth was surprising. TGI's support allowed me to cope with that moment the best way possible and to have a space to fully devote to my family and to my husband's recovery”, she added.
The first case of contagion within the operation occurred on September 3, when they reported to us that there were two positive people, relatives of a contractor of the Inemec firm, which is developing a project in Hatonuevo, La Guajira. We immediately made the epidemiological trace-back and analyzed the last close contacts of those infected.
“The possibility of having an outbreak was imminent: that's why we stopped the work and took tests from all the personnel. In total, 26 people from the first work front were infected. All of them were placed in isolation to prevent contagion among the rest of the Wayú indigenous community,” affirmed Jhon Carrillo, a TGI Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) professional.
We managed to contain the outbreak without major health complications for the workers, who were followed up daily with the company's and contractor's medical teams. In addition, with the help of the municipality's health secretary and the head of the indigenous council, we took extreme measures and strictly followed the isolation.
After that event, we made a field evaluation, a visit to the construction site to review the biosafety measures and the personnel disinfection protocols. In addition, we carried out PCR-type tests to make sure that workers were virus-free to return to their work.