A message from Pete McPartland on Sentry’s response to COVID-19

March 20, 2020

As coronavirus cases continue to escalate around the world and here at home, we’re taking extraordinary precautions to protect the health and safety of our employees, while ensuring we continue to provide a high level of service to our customers and business partners nationwide. 

Over the past several weeks, we’ve introduced several measures to promote social distancing, including clarifying essential versus nonessential travel, implementing new meeting protocols that create greater dispersion of people, and deploying work-from-home capabilities where possible.

By March 23, well over half of our employees will be working from home, with increasing numbers doing so over time. In addition, some of those who are working in the office will be beginning to move to alternate available locations, including Sentry’s former headquarters on Strongs Avenue in Stevens Point, creating greater spatial distancing throughout our offices and further limiting the potential of exposure.

This is a challenging situation and we’re fortunate to be able to leverage the vast square-footage throughout our facilities. By doing so, we can create a healthy and safe social distancing environment, where we can protect our people while continuing to serve our business partners and communities when they need us most.

In additional to enhanced social distancing measures, we’ve responded to the coronavirus pandemic in numerous other ways:

• Increasing efforts and resources to go beyond our normally high standard of cleanliness at all our facilities
• Providing ongoing guidance to employees on how to stay healthy and minimize the spread of germs
• Providing support for employees who can’t work because they or a family member are sick from the coronavirus, so they’re able to stay home and become healthy
• Offering additional paid time off for associates who need to adjust their schedule to care for minor children who are home due to school closures
• Making every effort to provide work-from-home options for associates who are higher risk or have a pre-existing condition that makes them more vulnerable 

We understand that a situation like this can be very worrying for employees, and their financial wellness is top of mind. We’re doing everything we can to provide interim workplace flexibility and an environment in which our employees feel healthy and safe.

In addition to the precautions we’ve taken at our Sentry office locations, we’ve also closed all our SentryWorld (our hospitality business) properties until further notice. While it was certainly difficult to close SentryWorld*, it’s the right thing to do in doing our part to assist with our nation’s efforts around the coronavirus. We’re humbled by the loyalty of our great patrons and grateful for the very special relationship we have with the Stevens Point community. To all of them, we say: Please stay healthy, and we look forward to seeing you soon.

Lastly, we wish good health to all of you, your families, and work colleagues as the country navigates through the pandemic situation. As we respond to COVID-19, the health and safety of our employees and customers remains our top priority. We’re committed and prepared to serve our customers while keeping our people safe.

I truly believe that together we can help slow the spread of the coronavirus and lessen its impact. And once we do, it’s only a matter of time before we get our communities back to normal. I look forward to that day.

Pete McPartland
Chairman, President, and CEO
Sentry Insurance

^*If you’d like more information specifically about how we’re handling business at our hospitality businesses, please visit the SentryWorld website.