Pandemic preparedness improves long-term workforce resilience and business continuity. From building community trust to investing in employee health and wellbeing, this conversation with Sarah Rauzin, Director and Lead of Research & Advisory at Meteorite, breaks down what business leaders must do to prepare for the next global health crisis — and why those same strategies strengthen your organization today. In this episode, you’ll learn: - What the next outbreak could look like, and why your COVID-19 plan likely won’t work. - How to build resilience by investing in disaster and emergency response infrastructure. - Practical steps to future-proof your workforce and business strategy.
Pandemic preparedness improves long-term workforce resilience and business continuity. From building community trust to investing in employee health and wellbeing, this conversation with Sarah Rauzin, Director and Lead of Research & Advisory at Meteorite, breaks down what business leaders must do to prepare for the next global health crisis — and why those same strategies strengthen your organization today.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
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Jerry: [00:00:00] Business leaders know the future is already here. The economy is shifting. Non-humans are entering the workforce. Nothing. Feel certain. SHRM understands those evolving challenges both in the workplace and the wider world. In this podcast, we'll bring together authors, researchers, executives, and non-traditional experts to help you take on the challenges others haven't yet considered.
Because you don't need to be a futurist. You need actionable insights. Now you need to be. Hey,
I am Jerry Won. Welcome to Tomorrows where we explore the trend shaping the future of work.
Jerry: we're here talking about the future of work, there's one lesson from recent past we can't afford to ignore. Five years ago after the CVID 19 pandemic upended every aspect of how we work.
One thing is clear. The next global health emergency isn't the question of if, but when.
yet
many organizations still treat pandemic preparedness as a one-time lesson rather than an ongoing business priority. Join me today is Sarah [00:01:00] Rauzin, a public health strategist Sarah, welcome to Tomorrowist.
Sarah: thank you so much.
Jerry: Been five years, we're here in the middle of 2025, often COVID and all the things that we went through seemed like a distant memory.
But also it seems like a very recent memory. Um, and so let's level set a little bit. It, it's hard to talk about the systemic risks of pandemic and sort of the aftermath and how we responded, um, without either overstating or understanding how imminent, uh, the danger is. So when you think about the risk of a future pandemic, how concerned are you?
Um, and, and what goes into the thought process?
Sarah: You know, Jerry, I think you said it in your intro that most public health experts agree it's not. If it is, when. I think the most conservative estimate I've seen on the risk of a pandemic is a 38% chance in our lifetime, more aggressive estimates, put it somewhere between 47 to 57% in the next 25 years.
So these are really substantial risk numbers. Um, but even if we're not faced at a global pandemic in our lifetime, at the severity or rate that COVID-19 [00:02:00] was, local outbreaks happen all the time. Other disease threats that maybe will be of a lower level, but still as pervasive might happen. And so trying to characterize the risk at only that severity and prevalence level is actually putting businesses at a disadvantage.
If you're only thinking about pandemic preparedness and health preparedness as this one instance of, um, what it means to really invest in business strategy that makes your organization more resilient,
Jerry: I mean, I think there's so much context and nuance that goes into that question, right? I mean, you answered it very well, but it's almost an impossible question to answer because you have to look at regional impact, the type of business. Are you an in-person operation, as we saw during the pandemic? Uh, those of us who could work from home did, but many industries could not.
And, and how we navigated those things still impact how we work today. Um, and, and so given all that, how should, preparing for the next pandemic be a priority for business leaders now?
Sarah: A lot of the issues and the things that you need [00:03:00] to be investing in for pandemic preparedness are things that will
support and help your workforce right now and support your business continuity plans right now. Uh, things like making sure that you have a robust business continuity plan and the event of an emergency, uh, or a disaster where your supply chains are disrupted.
Making sure that you know who your essential personnel on staff are, uh, and have those business continuity plans for operations of and redundancy across your workforce. Those are strategies that aren't just going to help you in the event of a pandemic, but if you have any type of disruption across your organization. Um, also the number one thing that businesses are focused on as an immediate concern right now is healthcare costs, right? And if you're wanting to reduce healthcare costs, you need to be investing in the health and wellbeing of your workforce and the communities where they live, and addressing a lot of the infrastructure that's making us more sick, but also more susceptible to these threats that we're facing when we're talking about pandemic [00:04:00] threats.
Jerry: I wanna put this next question in the context of so many things that are happening in our country and around the world here in the middle of 2025. Um, from your perspective, is there enough urgency or are we sort of over COVID and saying, Hey, you know, we, we just dealt with a big one. We're gonna take a step back and, and where should we be, uh, urgency wise?
Sarah: I think the unfortunate trend is that everyone is becoming more hands off about this from. Government sector to private sector. Uh, the pandemic became such a politicized and divisive event in our lives that it's not an issue that you see anyone wanting to take a stand on anymore.
And we're in this position currently where a lot of the institutions that would've been primarily we responsible for tracking and responding to disease threats have been severely cut. And their capacity to actually engage in these response measures are. Uh, non-existent to [00:05:00] practically non-existent based off the fund, the capacity of these organizations, and that's leaving the risk and responsibility on business leaders.
We see this as a really controversial and divisive issue, and primarily are in situations where they say, you know, I'd like to provide the information but ultimately leave it up to my workers. So we don't have responsible authorities right now at a systemic level, uh, to engage in these, uh, response efforts or even the tracking efforts to pay attention to when risks are starting to emerge that we could get ahead of,
Jerry: So the trend seems to be that the federal government and the agencies may lean towards leaving the decision on a state or a more localized level, uh, even in the preparedness and the response to the next pandemic. Um, businesses of many sizes exist and thrive in many jurisdictions. The context of work is different.
And so under those circumstances, how should be bus, how should business leaders be thinking about coming up with a plan? That is [00:06:00] sufficient, but yet fluid enough. Um, as, as you mentioned, if what we're seeing now in the federal agencies, uh, continue, then there might not be an overarching command or a directive, which leads then that leads to local governments and individual organizations like businesses.
Sarah: I wanna add some context to your question before we go in. Businesses aren't just operating at national levels, they're also operating at international levels,
Jerry: Right?
Sarah: and we're reducing aid there too, where we were making investments in. Public health infrastructure at other companies. That was actually increasing security for our own country in our ability to respond to and contain localized outbreaks.
So that way they don't reach the United States. So with this lease for businesses and absence in creating a plan that can be really fluid and responsive, um, I wanna add a little bit more color there too, that we don't know what the next pandemic will look like. Experts tend to agree it's probably going to look similar to COVID with us upper respiratory infections that spread easily, uh, person to person.[00:07:00]
Uh, but we're also seeing increased risk with, uh, global warming from zoonotic diseases, uh, with mosquitoes and warm climates as an example. Uh, we're seeing increased risk of exposure from, uh, the miss and disinformation that's happening around vaccines, decreasing trust, and we're seeing the resurgence of vac, uh, diseases that were previously
eradicated. so we don't actually know what the pandemic is going to look like when it, when it happens next, and so. You can't rely on the exact same plan that you did during COVID, but fundamentally, what you can be investing in our strategies are ultimately gonna strengthen your entire business. Uh, we have a pandemic preparedness plan at the Health Action Alliance, um, that goes over four strategies, starting with investing in the health and wellbeing of your workforce, making sure that a healthy person is going to be able to, uh, recover from, uh.
Getting a disease transmission in someone [00:08:00] who has already, uh, have their immune system compromised in some way. Uh, people who are vaccinated are going to, uh, be less susceptible to the disease or recover faster. So making sure that there's trust in your workforce and engaging in these public health efforts, making sure that you have robust, uh. Disaster and emergency response plans and teams that are responsible for implementing them, but don't leave those plans with those teams. Make sure that you're routinely communicating with your workforce and building trust before an emergency happens and getting your workforce engaged and familiar with these processes so it doesn't come as a surprise. Uh, as well as building, uh, not just trust with your employees, but also trusted relationships within your communities, with your public health departments, with other employers, and making sure that you understand what community organizations can offer to your business that make it a two-way street. Also, identify where your business can help support in these continuity plans for your own community.
And our [00:09:00] last tip that we offer is, um. Invest in your community, invest in community health, invest in the infrastructure, uh, that will prevent pandemics from being quite as disruptive as they were during the last pandemic. We saw school disruptions that made it impossible for caregivers to come to work.
We saw hospitals completely understaffed and overwhelmed, which meant that people weren't just, um, dying from COVID. They were also not getting the care that they needed for other. Uh, health conditions during that time. So look at how your organization can be supporting the overall infrastructure that we need to, um, have upheld in the event of another pandemic.
Jerry: There's so many lessons that we learned as individuals, as communities, as, as a country. Um, what are some of the, and, and actually, you know, one, one of the things I think it ex we, we learned was, um, our ability or vote or inability to deal with organizational crisis and, and workforce resilience. Um, what are the some lessons that we should have learned and [00:10:00] what are the learns?
What are the lessons that we should revisit on how we did and what we should do better or differently next time?
Sarah: So I think time and time again, the organizations that we spoke to that said that they were able to. Better navigate or be more adaptable in their responses. Or the ones that weren't just thinking about this before the, or when the pandemic happened, these were the organizations that had their response teams in place that regularly engaged their workforce and had those two-way communications.
Um, as part of the infrastructure. They were building those trusted relationships ahead of time, and they saw this as part of their core business strategy, not just a survival tactic. Um, they incorporated this into their ESG, their CSR and made it, they, they understood the connection between investments in community infrastructure and health.
As that core business [00:11:00] operation, and I think that's the mindset shift, that this isn't just something that's going to help you survive in the event of an emergency. This is something that ultimately makes your business stronger and more competitive and more adaptive. When you are investing these strategies that make you more resilient to a pandemic in whatever shape it comes.
Jerry: What are some practical tips to build that mindset of resilience into organizations and to the people as the workforce turns over? Um, they're getting younger. We're gonna, if, if not already, we're gonna have a workforce that may not have experienced COVID. Uh. As a professional and soon we're gonna have people in leadership positions making decisions who were maybe too young to be in the workforce, and so they experienced it differently.
But how do we build that mindset change to to build that real strong resilience within the workforce?
Sarah: So I think. Communication strategies that continuously keep people engaged with those trusted relationships. Maintaining the authority that businesses have as a institution that people go to and trust for health information. Continue to rely on that, [00:12:00] but also continue practicing. Bring up the lessons that you learn in COVID.
Look at your response plan. Review that with new workers as they come in. Let them dissect it. What, what do they think went well? What would they come and improve? Because they're also going to have new ideas. We have new technologies that can allow us to really hone in and track and be a part of your own company's response plan in examining your data and examining your own threats and thinking about your response strategy as it emerges, um, and do tabletop exercises with your company's designated crisis response team, but also across your workforce.
And you can make these fun too, I think. One of my favorite campaigns I saw when I was in college was the CD. C had put out a zombie apocalypse preparedness plan about pandemics, but it was a fantastic campaign in kind of its relevance of what do you need to have in place for disaster preparedness and continuity of like societal continuity
Jerry: You know, in addition to the physical wellbeing and the [00:13:00] physical health impacts of COVID, you know, we saw a lot of impact through the mental health, right. Of people not only dealing with, uh, separation, loneliness, but just how to deal with this. Right. And as you mentioned, a lot of that was impacted by how different people view the pandemic and.
The politicization of the topic and also just the conversations that happened. How do we tackle and best prepare our organizations to deal with the mental health aspect when not if the next pandemic comes
Sarah: So I also wanna be clear on something that the mental health crisis predated COVID. I think COVID did exacerbate this. The positive thing that came out of COVID was it also put a spotlight on the mental health crisis, and it got organizations talking about it in a way that they never had before. Um, pre 2020, most organizations did not talk about mental health and their employee engagement surveys.
You didn't have leaders talking about mental health, and I think. If there's any lesson [00:14:00] that we learned positively from the pandemic, it's that you have to invest in the mental wellbeing of your workforce. In order for people to feel like they belong to, uh, to be productive on the job, to, um, collaborate and innovate and engage.
You have to have that underlying psychological safety. And I think that is a lesson that we have positively maintained even beyond the pandemic. Um, and I think as long as you are. Continuing to make those investments in mental health and think about that outside of the pandemic response, and you're supporting caregivers and their needs, you are making sure that you have psychological safety for people to bring up their concerns about other health conditions.
I was here talking about migraine today and attacking the stigma around some of these things. You'll establish the trust that you need for people to, um, be able to engage positively with your company's response plan during a pandemic. I also wanna say that again. The companies that did really well in this, just a few that came to mind.
General Motors [00:15:00] talked to us about their plans. Mars Jacobs we're all companies that had paid attention to mental health before the pandemic and had such robust. Uh, strategies in place and how they engaged their employees and kept in touch with them that they were able to see their, uh, mental health data maintained, if not improved during some points in the pandemic because they, they were already thinking about this.
It wasn't an after the fact thought of something that's a repercussion of a crisis, but inherently baked into the company's culture.
Jerry: You gave us some good examples of companies who are treating the next pandemic and, and the impacts of it from an extremely proactive lens, but yet many organizations are still banking on this being a or or have reacted much more than being proactive about it. And perhaps they're looking at some of the statistics that you mentioned earlier saying, yes, it's 57%, but chances are over the next three years it may not happen.
And so we'll just deal with it when we get there. How do we talk about this and continue the conversation so that more leaders adopt a proactive mindset and [00:16:00] how what, what part of the organization, um, all the way up to the C-suite or different departments should be adopting this new proactive mindset to help us deal with it better next time.
Sarah: So I think some of it is when you talk about pandemic preparedness and you're isolating it to this one threat, that may or may not happen in our lifetime, though I think most experts say, yes, this is something very likely to happen in our lifetime, and the risks just keep getting higher. Um, versus contextualizing the outcome, which is business resilience.
And how are you looking at these things that make you more prepared for a pandemic and it's. Cross section with things that make you more resilient and adaptable to, as a company to other types of business disruptions. Um, a good example of that, during the pandemic, we saw massive global supply chains, uh, disruptions and businesses didn't have continuity plans in place or, uh, you know, repetitive or repetition in their supply chains. Tariffs happened very recently, and we're seeing similarly disruptions in business continuity in [00:17:00] supply chains that are gonna create disruptions to business' ability to keep inventory on the floor. Uh, so when you're engaging in these exercises around pandemic preparedness, what you're really thinking about is your business resilient to external threats.
in whatever form that they may come. And are you making your strategic investments in your most important asset, which is your workforce? And what does that look like from holistically all of their needs? from chronic conditions to acute respiratory illnesses, which are recurring year to year.
Uh, and COVID itself has not gone away, uh, along with flu, RSV, all of these diseases that continue to impact and disrupt businesses right now.
Uh, so I think if we can adopt a mindset that this is not just preparation for a future threat, that this is actually skills and muscle memory that can ultimately benefit your business.
Bottom line today, if you're implementing these practices, that's a [00:18:00] much stronger reframe on the benefits of some of these exercises and practices companies can be adopting.
Jerry: You know, I think what you're sharing is, you know, a definition of a pandemic is not a binary thing. Sometimes it can feel like it. There's a gradient level of things that we are seeing every day, right? So we're, we're hearing about different types of outbreaks in different parts of the country, and at what point is it considered a technical pandemic and how do we respond?
And, um, and, and I think that is important to think about, that it's not this, you know, uh, an earthquake over a certain magnitude to use a parallel that classifies as a disaster. But even small shakes or small incidents can help. And, and being prepared doesn't only pay off when something bad happens.
Being prepared is a good thing, even if nothing happens.
You know, as, as a grown up in California as children, we did earthquake drills. It's something that you never hope to have to do, but we do it in case it does. But if it doesn't happen, it doesn't mean that the prepare, the preparation [00:19:00] wasn't a waste, right?
And so, sort of how we think about auto insurance or things like that, right? If you never use it, that's a good thing. Um, and
so,
yeah, go ahead.
Sarah: Well, and I think sometimes you are using the things that you don't realize are going well. Like you don't think about, uh, your air conditioner when it's working. You just take it for granted that your house feels good. Yeah. When it's broken, you sure notice and you're calling the, your plumber or your, uh, your maintenance person right away. but. I think we take a, for granted a lot of the systems and infrastructure that support the health and wellbeing of our communities when we don't see, or when we, when they are going well and we're not seeing the negative repercussions. Um, and when we don't feel the impact of, of these community systems that we all rely on, we take them for granted and we're less likely to invest in them or think of them as
important until the crisis happens.
Jerry: Uh, you expect toilet paper to be on the shelf of the store. And then when it wasn't there, then people [00:20:00] panicked
and they bought All the toilet paper.
So we saw that real life. Um, what, what are some of the core components of an effective agile crisis response plan for organizations to adopt?
Sarah: so our pandemic preparedness playbook goes through, again, those four steps, which is. Invest in the wellbeing of your workforce upfront.
Your healthier worker is going to be more resilient as an individual than a worker whose immune system has already been compromised. So look at things like chronic diseases, uh, the social determinants of health in which your worker is living and working, um, and spending time with their families and investing in the infrastructure for your workers to, uh, engage.
Productively and positively so that way they have a safe place to go if there's a pandemic and they need to shift to work at home. Uh, look at your business's, uh, response and continuity plan. Make sure that you know who your essential workers are and that they know who they are and what their role is in the event of a pandemic and what it is that they're [00:21:00] supposed to do, uh, a pandemic or any other type of workplace disruption. again, have those tabletop scenarios practice for a variety of different disasters
or, uh, or ways that the pandemic may shape, take shape. Don't just have a one andone response plan because again, it's not going to look the way it did during COVID. Look at the ways that your business can also.
Contribute back to the community. Are there things that your business can do to adapt your own mission and strategy, uh, for income generation? In the event of a pandemic, we saw Uber did this. They actually made that part of their business plan of providing ride sharing services for people to make it to appointments.
Some people actually baked pandemic response into, uh, business strategy and operations, investing in new, uh, technologies or platforms to connect people remotely. Um, and we saw real innovation from some companies and how they [00:22:00] adapted or maybe diverted resources into things like, uh, supporting the development of PPE.
Um, so think about in the event of an emergency, does your business have the capability or technology or resources to dive. Whatever it is that your business is offering, uh, to be restructured in the event of a pandemic. Another great example is restaurants. The restaurants that survived quickly adapted and started offering curbside and changed the way that they operate to keep not only their employees safe, but also their consumers safe.
Uh, so start thinking about how can your business be flexible in its offerings and it's, um, ultimately it's delivery of your services
Jerry: So in the last five years since the breakout of COVID-19, uh, in 2020, the work world changes has changed. Introduction of new technologies. Um, tenure is getting shorter. The dynamics of a younger workforce is changing how we work. Even in that short time, five year period, what are some of [00:23:00] the macro macroeconomic shifts that have happened that.
May change how we respond. You know, how does, you know, we, we, we, um, we went 20 some odd minutes without talking about ai, but AI is here. It's changing how we work. Um, folks are changing their jobs, uh, more frequently. Um, and that's for a multitude of reasons. But how does that, so if an organization is supposed to have plans, but you're dealing with the challenge of a, uh, workforce that turns over faster, may not be all in one place, um, AI might be doing some of the work.
How does all of this. How should some of this, uh, factor into how organizations prepare for the next pandemic?
Sarah: That is a fantastic question, and I think you're right. AI is here. And in theory, AI should give us some tremendous advantages to how we're responding, uh, to future threats and our ability to track, monitor, uh, be able to model occurrences and disease threat, be able to scale and send out responses faster than it ever we ever could [00:24:00] before.
But AI is only as good as the data that we're able to give it. And right now we have, uh, a lack of our ability to collect data at the federal level. And businesses for the reasons that you listed are disadvantaged when they have workplace turnover and they can't engage in long-term tracking of someone's personal health status, for example, during or for their full duration of a company because they're looking at really rapid turnover and change, um, versus kind of that long term. Data support for, for how you are thinking about the health and wellbeing of your workforce. So this is where I would say it's really important for businesses to not, I think a lot of businesses are only thinking about short term outcomes in health right now. They're looking at, um, their health investments on, is is this going to improve my bottom line in the next year, the next quarter, the next month?
And they're no longer thinking about is this gonna help my employees stay healthier and reduce our long-term health costs over the course of this employee's lifetime. And that shift [00:25:00] is still putting companies at a disadvantage because you're going to that same worker pool of people who still have their entire longevity ahead of them.
And if you are one of the businesses that's not investing in their health over the long term, you are pulling from that same worker pool that's not being invested in. So I think if businesses can shift and maintain that mindset that you're still in it for the long term. 'cause you're making an investment not just in networker, but in your overall talent pool.
Every time you are investing in the long-term strategy of someone's health, that's going to be a really key component of how businesses can think and adapt to this new workforce. And also, don't just think about the investments that you're making your employees. Think about the community investments because when you're making investments in your schools, in healthy streets, healthy neighborhoods, access to nutrition, uh, that's all the talent pool that you'll continue to be pulling from, from your local community.
Throughout the duration of your business, even if the individual workers are turning over,
Jerry: So we, we, we've talked about a lot and I've learned a lot [00:26:00] in our short conversation, and I hope that our audience has, uh, not only re uh, been, been re-energized to continue to think about this and then come up with innovative ways. Um, what is one thing that our leaders can think about today, those who are watching or listening to this, to build resilience into their operations, workforce strategy, in preparation for the next pandemic ahead.
Sarah: Start today and engage your entire workforce. Um, I think the biggest threat that we are facing. To an upcoming pandemic and really to all health right now is the growing mistrust that we have in institutions across the board and business leaders are maintaining trust right now. Uh, we've seen with Edelman reports, my employer continues to be the most trusted.
Authority on health, even more so than people's own doctors. Uh, so if employers can really hone in on that responsibility that they have to be, uh, that trusted agent that can start to restore trust in, [00:27:00] uh, science and evidence-based health strategies. That's right now one of the most critical roles an employer can play and keep that communication going.
Now, don't just talk about the things that are controversial. Talk about all types of health. Uh, talk about, um, things from, uh, talk about mental health. Talk about women's health and menopause. Uh, talk about chronic conditions in the workplace. Engage people in the non-controversial topics, and build trust and get those easy wins.
So that way when you have to talk about those harder, more controversial topics. You have established relationships in place and established protocols in place. You have communities in place with ERGs that, uh, your employees will go to and believe during times of crisis.
Jerry: Sarah, thank you so much for all your insights, your, uh, knowledge and, and frankly inspiration to continue to talk about this topic and to make sure that we're all gonna be better prepared tomorrow. you for joining us.
Sarah: thank you so much, Jerry. It's been a pleasure.
Jerry: That wraps it for this week's episode. Thank you for joining [00:28:00] us and see you on the next episode of Tomorrows.