Name: ‘Better Together’: Why Abbott Kept an In-Person Workforce During Pandemic
Uploaded: 2026-03-26T22:55:00Z
Duration: 2 min 46 s
Description: Abbott executives Mary Moreland and John Frels discuss how aligning office staff with the realities of manufacturing and sales workers during the Covid-19 pandemic built a company culture that continues to attract new talent.

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Abbott executives Mary Moreland and John Frels discuss how aligning office staff with the realities of manufacturing and sales workers during the Covid-19 pandemic built a company culture that continues to attract new talent. Photo: WSJ Leadership Institute

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260326/dc139327-ca22-46d7-8d52-0337c244f1da/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Abbott executives Mary Moreland and John Frels discuss how aligning office staff with the realities of manufacturing and sales workers during the Covid-19 pandemic built a company culture that continues to attract new talent.

‘Better Together’: Why Abbott Kept an In-Person Workforce During Pandemic

One of the things we just talked about in our last session was going back to the office, right? Return to work and how controversial it is and how it's something that, you know, the people, leaders in this room hear more about from their employees. You know, are we going to four days a week? Are we going to five days a week? But in the moment where most people were at home, you guys were in the office and not just people who had to be in the office, right?

That's right. That's right. Our workforce is about a third of the people make, develop, test our products. A third of the people sell our products, and a third of us work in offices. So from the beginning of the pandemic, we said we have to be equitable. The third who make products have to still go into the office. The third who sell products are gonna have to go into the office. And some of our businesses, they're actually in the hospital in the operating theater with a doctor. So the rest of us should come to the office as well. So we were remote only when we had to be, as soon as we could bring people back, particularly as soon as we could bring people back with our testing, we brought people back to the office. We had an extensive employee testing program. We operated it all in of our facilities around the world. And so, we just were very committed from the beginning that we are better together and it's only fair that the people who are doing the work come to work in the factories, in selling to our customers and for us in the office. And we really stayed true to that, and that helped us when we said, okay, we're going to, you know, for those of you who aren't back yet, everyone's going to be back. The pandemic has ended. That's the only reason that we were remote.

Yeah, it's the most like kind of connective tissue I've ever heard about values and purpose and mission. Then aligning to culture and then aligning to actually what people do in the moment. So it's a great learning for me personally. And you know, John, I wonder, do you have two groups of people in the company now in R&D, I ask either of you this, but people who were there and who lived it in the moment and the new people you hire who weren't there, and how do you make the new people kind of understand what you went through together, you know, even though they weren't there? Because that's rippling across the organization.

Yeah. Yeah. One of the things we observed in the first couple years that followed was new people that would come in, new scientists, new engineers, it may have been the first time that they heard and really understood what Abbott was all about, was what we did in the pandemic. So in some ways it kind of sold itself that they wanted to be part of this.