With Coronavirus pandemic spread across the globe, the entire world economy is going through a significant downturn. But as we know the show must go on, this is the time when businesses need to start prioritizing their objectives to streamline the system for a sustainable existence. What the world is facing today needs serious disruption to change the game. The disruptions can be of any form and in any sphere. It can be incremental or a huge changeover. But it needs to be found out really fast so that things can be put back into its place.
To bring about disruption and changing priorities, it’s very important where a particular business currently lies and where does it want to see down the line. This necessarily means the three basic pillars may have to be redefined. Yes! We are talking about vision mission and goals. The core values should be intact but the triple baseline of business needs to be realigned. Some may want to scale up their existing capacities while others may embrace the scenario to find new opportunities to expand. Companies like Zoom, House-party are now the talk among the consumers while General Motors collaborating with formula one team Lotus to venture into making ventilators. Existing companies like Zendesk have started to realign their services and to enhance support, have come up with complimentary remote support bundles.
In this article, we are less focused on how to change and are more concerned about what to change or prioritize in order to stay in the game for long. Also, we understand that these changes may vary with small scale industries and the unorganized sector. We will discuss them soon. But not in this article. So here are the top 3 aspects that the current existing companies should be focusing on.
1. Moving Towards Digital Footprints
The current coronavirus pandemic has shown clearly that there is an increasing need for digitization in the operations of the business. It can be a digital transformation or digital-first strategy depending on the life cycle, needs, aligned objective of the business. But it has been proven that shifting towards digital footprint is the need of the hour. And when we talk about digitization, this corona pandemic has made us realize that businesses need to look for a robust digital framework. It includes digital products, channels, operations, robust IT infrastructure as well as a feasible cloud strategy as per requirement.
As per Sandy Shen, Director General, Gartner, “This is a wake-up call for organizations that have placed too much focus on daily operational needs at the expense of investing in digital business and long-term resilience. Businesses that can shift technology capacity and investments towards digital platforms will mitigate the impact of the outbreak and keep their companies running smoothly now, and over the long term.”
But the entire process isn’t that simple. There are quite a good number of aspects to look into it. First and foremost is expanding the resource base and workplaces. The knowledge, inventory as well as the human resource base needs to be put into a loosely coupled system. The system that’s robust yet capable of handling the uncertainties. For this ERP, CRM and other mediums come handy.
Keeping the entire ecosystem secured is another important dynamics to this entire change. With the world fighting against data theft, fake news, corruption in business, robust security is also the need of the hour. And these things combined make the entire environment pretty complex. This complexity needs to be solved and firms need to come up with mix and match of these tools to enhance their digital footprint and transform themselves into a robust secured scalable business.
Third, comes the cost. The entire process isn’t very cost-effective. As per the insights we got from a Business Technology Analyst, Deloitte USI, automation will be the key and that will come with a cost. Initially, it would take time but once it gets implemented things will be streamlined. This goes to show that there is a long term benefit to this entire process. Although the companies need to bear with the cost initially, they can reap the benefits as time passes by.
Hence, it’s up to the companies now if they want to bear the burden and reap benefits later or keep on gambling with the existing setup.
2. A new dawn in the HR policy
Next on the priority list for the businesses that need to be changed is the way it handles its most important resources i.e. the people. For any firm to grow, to sustain; employees, form the backbone. And it can’t wait for a crisis to change things to get going. The current corona epidemic has created a panic situation among the employees and their family members too.
Work from home has been the most common solution provided to take care of the employees in these difficult times. But what needs to be incorporated is more empathy. The more empathy in the organization the more flexible is the policies. The organizational structure needs to be made flatter and the power distance needs to be reduced. Communication should be very direct and benefits towards employees need to be recalibrated to tackle any unprecedented scenario. If possible the decision making capability needs to be made local and decentralized. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Let’s take a far closer view of the entire process.
Let’s look at HR aspects through the Talent Management Cycle and it’s 3 broad segments of talent acquisition, talent development, and talent engagement. Gradually HR has moved from routine functions to a more strategic role. As discussed above, one needs to rethink policies and practices in the organization.
2.1. Talent acquisition
This has changed a lot and more focus needs to be given on employer branding, employee value proposition. When it’s not possible to reach out and promote the organization and work culture physically anymore, social media platforms should be banked upon for employer branding. In times of virtual onboarding, one needs to take care of the touchpoints for a smoother transition. A candidate's journey map needs to be traced thoughtfully to ensure a great candidate experience. They ultimately become promoters of the organization and help attract the right talent. When a major chunk of graduates is anxious about job security, it is crucial to engage more extensively and intermittently. Skype sessions can accompany mails for on-boarding formalities. Getting the right candidate is also a challenge and when the world is mostly working from home, organizations need to extensively invest in the rabbit-hole strategy. Work on metrics, enhance and monitor them. Analytics will certainly smoothen the process.
2.2.Talent Development
This is one area that will see major initiatives from the employer. All this while it was necessary to stay on toes and upgrade oneself technologically to stay in the game. Now when the workforce has become remote, companies are providing training and workshops on technologies for the smooth functioning of work from home. The age-old practice of the clock-in period might vanish and focus will shift from hours spent to quality and productivity. Employees felt the “walk of shame” when leaving early, even though they had completed their tasks. Performance management has to be more judicious, letting go off the recency effect is vital.
With mental stress and crisis at hand, employers need to be considerate of productivity on some occasions. Employers might even promote remote working given the expenses on ergonomics and facility management. While in succession planning some competencies will be focused upon more for leadership roles. Competency mapping might have to be redesigned in some cases. Leadership models might have to be altered with more crisis handling skills at all levels. Looking at the compensation package, benefits should be flexible. Perquisites one enjoys can encompass more technological aids like data reimbursements, etc. for smoother remote working.
2.3. Talent Engagement
This is the last phase but is the need of the hour. Be it regular employees working remotely or new joiners, one needs to rethink Herzberg’s motivators and hygiene factors. When the employees are becoming anxious, mental well- being sessions and virtual water cooler sessions needs to become mandatory. There can be virtual clubs and discussion forums to help employees juggling family and work together. In-fact a typical persona mapping of the team can help managers assign and plan better. An employee with a kid and working simultaneously from home will need more breaks than young professionals, who might be anxious in idle hours (but be mindful not to cause burnout).
Hence it’s quite evident that digital transformation is going to play a key role here too as face to face meetings, communication needs to be replaced through more digital mediums like video conferencing and emails. Also, leave policies, travel policies should be changed according to the situation. Going forward, there has to be a clear set of expectations for communication and response times as well as there should be no ambiguity in defining the roles and responsibilities. While developing an impact analysis, they should define key business operations, key roles, and functions. Those areas need to be bolstered with enough strength in terms of manpower and if the above processes are followed effectively, an ecosystem can be developed that can handle unforeseen circumstances with ease.
3. Further calibration in the supply chain
If there is another sector that businesses should look into priority is to find ways to manage the supply chain. This Corona epidemic has hit the supply chain really hard. According to Sarah Watt, Senior Director Analyst, Supply Chain practice, “Supply has been impacted in three primary ways: limited access to employees due to quarantines, factory closures or manufacturing slowdowns and limited access to logistics to move goods. Most supply chain organizations are in crisis management, assess impacts and respond on a daily, if not hourly basis.”
As we move ahead to post this COVID-19 conundrum, two important areas in supply chain management that need to be calibrated. Firstly, managers need to start forecasting more accurately. Because in the coming days, consumer sentiment will be the key to choosing a good or service. Hence, that parameter needs to be incorporated and frequent analysis is to be made to maintain the supply-demand equation.
Secondly, in the changing scenario, there is a requirement of a significant amount of innovation in the logistics space to reduce time and supply uncertainty. This will need additional costs to be taken into consideration. If we look into the current situation, those few companies that have mapped their supply networks properly are still surviving. Hence, mapping the supply networks properly and decentralized decision making in procurement can be the way forward. But the resources required to map this supply network are very expensive and to go ahead with that essentially means incurring more costs. Also, some significant costs need to be considered for future uncertainties to keep things going. Now there will be an increased amount of exposure to risk and there should be resilience from the supply chain in the coming days. These costs need to be taken care of while strategizing the pricing of the services.
In terms of the supply chain going forward, there can be two different business practices. The first group will believe that no such pandemic will happen and it is fair enough to go ahead with the existing scenario. But that will call for excessive risk and can be a gamble. The other group will invest in mapping networks, plan the costs that they need to bear and bring about all the concerned stakeholders to rewrite their contracts as well as strategies to figure out solutions in case a future disruption occurs. And they will be initially costly, but winners in the long run.
Now, it's important to recognize that there are other dimensions to this entire ecosystem that we hope businesses will create and they will have their share of impact on remodeling the practices further. But it took a virus pandemic to shake existing practices and now the leaders are trying to find a way out.
Hopefully new inventions, innovations and reshuffling, remodeling will bring new lights of hope to the business world. We have the smartest tools, the brightest minds, the best of the sensitive people. It just needs all of them to put their thinking hats on and kaboom!! The business will start rising.
Till then let’s stay safe, let's break the chain and come out of this disaster together.
- Shreyasi Dewan & Kush.
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