NBCUniversal Manufactured Its Own Products for Employee Welcome Back Kits After 'Unreliable Deliveries'

NBCUniversal is planning to reopen its 400 acre Los Angeles studio lot for the first time since it shut down March 13. As part of its reopening plan, the company began running drills with volunteer staff, applied floor and seating signage to demarcate safe distances, and supplied employee welcome back kits, per Deadline.

We recently covered how the pandemic is transforming employee welcome kits, with businesses replacing the usual desk items and drinkware with face masks, hand sanitizer and other protective items. NBCUniversal is going this route, providing kits for returning workers that include two masks, two bottles of hand sanitizer, mini sanitizer bottles, door hangers (for housekeeping to clean or not clean areas) and a multipurpose "clean key" type tool, all in tote bag.

According to Deadline, though, NBCUniversal ended up manufacturing some of those items itself. After experiencing "too many unreliable deliveries," the company repurposed its Facilities and Administration (F&A) department—which oversees design, construction, facility operations, engineering and office services, among other areas—to produce the masks and hand sanitizer in-house.

Deadline didn't specify which of the other items, if any, NBCUniversal manufactured itself, but it offered the following breakdown, seemingly indicating that the clean key tools were also produced in-house:

Consequently, with the added bonus of keeping staff on the job, the F&A unit quickly repurposed its workrooms and jet printers into an assembly line of sort on a variety of products. The result is that 19,000 masks have been sewn, more than 2,000 gallons of the 75 percent alcohol sanitizer has been shipped to NBCU locations in the Tri-State area and Florida, and over 2,000 copies of the multi-purpose tool have been delivered to NYC facilities as well as those designed for West Coast use, sources confirm.

It's also not specified exactly what "unreliable deliveries" means, but based on what we know about the state of the market for PPE and, especially, hand sanitizer, we can guess it was a case of NBCUniversal being unable to find those items in the necessary quantities due to massive demand and unreliable supply at the time of order.

Aside from the return-to-work kits, NBCUniversal also placed a wide variety of signage around its facilities, including social distancing decals for floors, elevators and table seats. It also installed hand sanitizing stations.

Check out an image of the welcome back kits in Deadline's story.