‘Virus has made people more aware about hygiene, immunity’

As more malls and office complexes reopen, ensuring a safe and sanitised environment has become top priority. Here, the Tenon Group, specialists in private security and facility management, is prepared for every eventuality. “If today somebody has been tested positive for Covid-19 in my facility, and I have to open my office tomorrow morning, I need to have it absolutely sterilised,” insists Major Manjit Rajain, the group’s founder and global chairman. Late last year, Tenon acquired a UK-based firm specialising and excelling in sanitisation and deep cleaning — services that are now obligatory for business continuity. “Because, there’s one level of cleaning that you do daily, which includes mopping, vacuuming, etc. Then there’s deep cleaning, which doesn’t happen every day,” he reminds.
Battle ready
The army always teaches you to have a backup plan, and for us, because we saw the pandemic coming — maybe not to this extent, but on the basis of what we predicted — we did make a battle plan. Also, the army’s planning and preparation taught me that you must have standard operating procedures (SoPs) for everything. I can say with conviction that we are putting in much more hard work now than we’ve ever done, given the unprecedented demand for our services. Every work plan is being redrawn to face this pandemic, and that is something we learn to do well in the army.
Managing a crisis
We witnessed a sudden spike in the demand for safety and sanitisation services. We could predict this will be the case within the early days of the pandemic and took learnings from our businesses in Singapore and the UK to be well equipped here. In India, when the first phase of the lockdown was imposed, Peregrine Guarding — Tenon Group’s security business — was flooded with client requests asking for more security personnel at workplaces and factory premises. We have a huge mobile workforce, we have people everywhere on the ground, but despite having more than 75,000 employees on our rolls, we still needed to ramp up to meet the surge in demand.
Informed & alert
The pandemic has taught us a lot, and we have probably become a little more disciplined than what we were earlier. And as people hear stories and they see casualties around them, they are getting a little more educated and aware about basic issues like hygiene and immunity. But I would say we are just about 50 per cent there. I think the other 50 per cent is going to be a little more difficult because that involves going down to the last level, to the masses. People like you and me were always a little careful; now we’ve become more careful. What we would call the lower-middle class is the one that has actually become the most educated in this global pandemic.
Future proofing
This is a long haul, it is not going away in a hurry. In the first week of March, I was on a call with my senior management and I told them, ‘This is here to stay, it will be here for at least one year, and the peak will come somewhere in August’. So far, sadly, my predictions have come true but they were not my predictions — you just have to read enough and research enough from genuine sources. Now we know that, till a vaccine comes, there is no other way out. Maybe the vaccine will take one year or one-and-a-half years, maybe it will be a vaccine for a short duration or long duration — we don’t know. So, let us prepare to face the future, and that is what we’re doing. It is what we in the army would call ‘pivoting’.