During this unprecedented time, Swan–The Watering Company has taken extraordinary measures to manage the crisis throughout our organization. We’ve implemented new systems to protect the health and wellbeing of our employees and their families, while at the same time, limiting disruptions to our product supply to best serve our customers.
One of our initial steps was to close all of our offices and make arrangements for most of our employees to work from home to prevent the further spread of the virus. We also distributed face masks to our employees to help them reduce their exposure to the virus whether at work or in their daily lives.
We also closed our manufacturing plants in Waco, Texas, and Sparks, Nevada, for three weeks. Employees at these locations were sent home with pay while we converted their workstations to accommodate social distancing requirements and use of personal protective equipment (or PPE).
“The overwhelming focus at Swan when this pandemic hit was the health and safety of our employees and their families,” says Ben Williams, vice president of product development at Swan. “We immediately began shutting down offices and plants to convert them to operate in a safe and healthy manner.”
To avoid laying off any employees while the plants were closed, Swan decided instead to reduce their pay by 5 percent to 15 percent for about five weeks, depending on their earnings. We’re happy to report that we’ve since returned all of our employees to their regular pay, with the exception of our chief executive officer and senior staff.
Similarly, we reopened our manufacturing plants on May 4 with PPE for all employees, as well as workstations spaced at least six feet apart in accordance with guidelines administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to Williams, Swan is proud to be a company in the garden hose industry that took such dramatic, decisive action in the face of the pandemic.
“We ignored the financial cost to the business and focused solely on our employees’ wellbeing,” Williams says.
According to a May 13 article on the Good Housekeeping magazine website, gardening has exploded in recent months because of increasing anxiety over food supply due to the coronavirus. In late March, “interest in gardening hit an all-time high,” says Google Trends, while searches for “growing vegetables from scraps” was up 4,650 percent from year’s past.
Meanwhile, George Ball, chairman of the long-standing Burpee Seeds, told Reuters they’ve sold more seeds in March 2020 than in any time in their 144-year history.
Have you been gardening more because of the coronavirus? Let us know in the comments below. We’d love to hear about it! And remember to stay safe and shop at Swan for all of your garden’s watering needs!
