It's Time To Hire A Chief Health Officer

Employee safety is taking centre stage, no matter what industry you’re in.

- Erika Fry

Adam Aron, CEO and president of AMC Theatres, the world’s largest chain of cinemas, remembers the early days of the pandemic as a blur. As the novel Coronavirus spread around the world, he and his team scrambled to talk with health officials—first in Milan, then in Spain, then pretty much everywhere else the company operated, trying to sort out what to do with its 1,000 or so theatres in the middle of a fast unfolding global health crisis.

The picture and the pace at which it was changing were dizzying. Over the course of a few days in midMarch, AMC announced plans to fill its theatres to only half capacity; then—prompted by an official’s remark on a Sunday morning talk show—AMC limited screenings to groups of 50 or fewer; and finally, on March 16, it closed cinemas altogether.

“We had no experts on retainer internally,” says Aron, who admits when it came to understanding epidemiology and infection control and how to factor it into business, he and AMC’s senior execs were amateurs. “We were trying to make the best and smartest decisions we could under the circumstances.”

Of course, AMC was hardly the only company confronted with big business decisions—and little public health expertise in the C-suite to help make them—when the Coronavirus hit.