How did your company respond in COVID-19 crisis? A view of what can be done to improve.

27 October 2020
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In a nutshell, you will read about:

Company activity during pandemic, and consequences;
Way to improve.

COVID-19 outbreak became pandemic along with social distancing, restrictions, lockdowns, and a fear about the virus as well the financial impact is our new reality.

All of us either as individuals or as part of a family we thought about ways to reduce exposure and to make our day-to-day life as normal as possible. In this effort we have appreciated a lot the companies that find ways to help us in this respect.

It is inevitable this crisis brought a number of changes which have positive or negative impact to the business. And this pandemic could build trust between consumers and companies which should be transformed to a long term relationship.

Therefore, it is very important to see how your company has handled its customers during this period and what would be a way to approach the future.

Some of the companies manage to have a fast reaction and properly serving their customers, some others they didn’t. And even for the ones properly responded a number of companies are not yet in a position to have a sustainable model, still working ad-hoc.

Let’s consider a “normal” company prior to pandemic.

It is organized, with workflows, processes, documentation, and trained personnel.

And then COVID-19 appeared.

People start to work from home, having “meetings” via net, schools to have on-line lessons, etc. Companies responded to this challenge by enhancing their call centers, improving their web pages or creating new ones, focus on delivery etc.

But how actually companies work?

Companies are people, and indeed people seemed to be engaged in the beginning of this pandemic trying to do the ”extra mile”. But the way of working during the pandemic cannot be the new standard way of working.

There are several reasons for this:

Currently the actual work is performed by following workarounds invented by the employees since existing workflows, processes, even BCP do not cover the situation;

There are teams of employees overloaded when at the same time others have a reduction in their activity since the old strategy, budget, and priorities are followed;

As a result employees are getting tired, workload is totally unbalanced, risk becomes higher, time and money are wasted.

Way to improve

This is the time to make a step back, to see the big picture through the lenses of the new reality and the correlated estimations.

Based on this you can/must review your strategy and business model.

Based on this you have to:

go to the detailed level in order to define a new budget,
re-design your operations together with the relevant processes and procedures,
re-shape your organizational structure.

This looks to be a complex project (covering money, processes and human resources) with a number of sub-projects, some of them have to be in parallel where others have to be in sequence. However everything starts with the very first step; to realize the need, to approach it as a project and to plan for it.

There is no time to waste, instead you need to use the current time to invest for your future.

This new normality is already here and it will remain, there is no way to go back.

Customers and employees learn new practices and adopt them; companies have to adapt as soon possible and in the most efficient and effective way.