During the COVID-19 pandemic, Everest team members are safe and healthy. Our commitment, high performance, and level of customer service remains as high as before the pandemic.
Everest has been fortunate to be nominally impacted by the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic as employees are able to work seamlessly from home. During 2020, we persevered with our clients to update clinical trial execution plans to ensure the sponsors, regulatory agencies, clinical sites, partners, and delivery team’s changing needs are met. Despite the slowdowns in patient enrollment and data accrual for our ongoing clinical trials as well as delays on the start up of new trials during the pandemic, Everest has remained a growing company as we continued to onboard new clients, new hires, and achieved new heights for our clients and projects throughout the pandemic period of time.
Everest is closely monitoring the development of the COVID-19 pandemic using information from the World Health Organization (WHO), Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and local health authorities and we are updating our business continuity plans regularly based on the most up-to-date information available.
We remain committed to ensure business continuity by implementing effective practices to protect our employees and their families, our clients and partners, and the communities in which we work. While we recognize the COVID-19 situation continues to evolve, we continue to adapt and take ongoing steps to minimize risk while enabling business continuity and high performance of our teams.
The following is a summary of how we have adjusted to the pandemic environment.
In North America:
- All employees are working from home with no interruption to service delivery, performance, or productivity.
- All meetings are now held virtually using a myriad of meeting and collaboration tools. This includes client meetings, investigator meetings, and internal Everest project and community meetings, among others.
- Access to our Markham, Ontario, Canada and Little Falls, New Jersey, USA offices are restricted and are only accessed on an as-needed basis. The Everest Leadership team approval is required to access either office.
- We have suspended on-site visitor access to our offices, however, we have established effective virtual meeting practices for clients, hiring interviews, and remote audits.
- All company travel has been restricted to only those that are necessary to support business continuity.
In Shanghai, China:
- All employees were working remotely at the onset of the pandemic in China, and have returned to our Shanghai office since April 2020.
- We have continued to take other operational precautions as necessary to ensure the health and well-being of our employees and their families, our customers and the communities in which we work.
We will continue to work closely with appropriate health authorities and fully comply with all Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and applicable local government regulations and protocols.
We encourage all of our colleagues to stay home, remain highly diligent in minimizing infection risk, and remain in good health. Everest is working hard to support impactful research to progress COVID-19 vaccine and treatment development and take seriously our responsibility in such critical trials. We look forward to the roll out of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines so that our teams, clients and partners may celebrate the end of this unprecedented pandemic together in the very near future!
– Everest Senior Management Team