Maintaining Business Continuity During a Crisis

In times of business uncertainty, it is more important than ever to ensure you can consistently deliver the products and services your customers need. Business leaders are facing countless questions about what the implications of COVID-19 will be on their workforce, their customers, and their corporate health. Many companies have been caught off guard by sudden shocks to the system, and the shift to a work-from-home model poses added challenges. As the coronavirus disrupts business as usual, companies around the world are quickly evolving their style of work and realizing the potential of remote work and the strategic advantage of remote partner teams. Having an extension of your team in another region provides access to great talent, lower cost, flexibility, and scalability. Over the coming weeks and months, your employees will be tested and your resources will be stretched. Your company’s success and ability to handle future disruption lies in its capability to answer some important questions:

• How quickly can you respond?
• What steps can be taken now to stabilize and support your teams?
• How can you prepare to capture the market as we recover?
• What lessons can you learn from this experience?

Take action now!

Putting the right plan in place to provide your employees with the resources they need to achieve their goals and deliver for your clients is critical. This is an opportunity to demonstrate business strength, creativity and resilience in the face of uncertainty.

• Businesses around the world are experiencing major disruptions to their operating systems. This is manifesting as either massive slowdowns or, in some cases, a spike in demand.
• Identify the functions, processes and steps that can be managed remotely across the business. For functions that truly must be handled onsite, give employees the support and space they need to be efficient and safe.
• Assess each employee’s remote connectivity needs and infrastructure. Your IT team will be busy. Although you will have a new set of remote infrastructure data to maintain, this will be valuable in the future.
• Identify an experienced and capable operating partner that can support each functional team and begin training and ramping them up ASAP. This will become a strategic advantage.

Over-Communicate

Your employees, customers, and partners all need very clear and direct communication regularly to know how you plan to move forward. If you have a business continuity plan, share it widely. Be ready and willing to listen to and act on input from all of these constituencies. This will instill confidence, deepen trust and provide the direction people need.

Messaging to Employees

• Conduct meetings at every level of your organization. This starts at the top and should cascade through structured sessions to your directors, managers and associates.
• Ensure your message is clear and consistent at each level of the organisation.
• The message you send to your employees is critical
  • What do you need from your employees, and how will they be supported?
  • What should your employees expect from your customers, and how can your employees best service their needs?
  • Who should employees turn to for questions?
  • How is the company making the health and wellbeing of each employee priority number one?
• Communicate with employees often. Daily stand-ups or regular all-hands meetings and emails are the best way to keep everyone informed and aligned.
• Listen to their feedback and be willing to address their issues and concerns.

Messaging to Customers

• Be open and honest with your customers. Tell them what to expect from you and even how to communicate with you to get the right service at the right time. This helps manage expectations.
• Provide regular communication on company updates and share metrics to show how you are meeting their needs and goals. This builds confidence.
• Share how the company takes the health and wellbeing of each customer as a priority. This creates loyalty.
• Be empathetic. Realize that your customer organisation is also probably going through the same disruption and may be in a tougher situation than you are.
• Take their feedback and needs to heart and be willing to adjust your continuity plan as much as possible to accommodate their needs.

Messaging to Partners

Perhaps your best ally during business uncertainty is the trusted partners you have empowered to help deliver on your promises to your customers. Share your business continuity plan and explore every way in which your partner can be leveraged to help your organization succeed. Bringing the full power of a partner’s capabilities, resources, and commitment to your side will relieve some of the stress and strain caused by rapidly changing business practices.

• What is your business continuity plan?
• What are your immediate needs?
• Where do you expect to see the most prominent operating challenges?
• How can your partner help, and how fast should they mobilize resources?
• Are there any lessons your partner can share that can help?

Pause, Assess, Anticipate, then Act

Decisions will need to be made fast and with limited information. Be decisive. Move forward in a direction that feels correct using available data, intuition, and experience. The practice of pausing to assess and anticipate, then act for rapid decision-making will serve to help manage disruptive situations in a systematic way.

• Pause – Take a step back from the task at hand frequently.
• Assess – Leverage new data, listen to feedback, and look at the situation from different points of view.
• Anticipate – Prepare for what might happen next.
• Act – Decide what to do and act with resolve. Communicate your plan clearly, so everyone is aligned.

This is a time to lead by example…so, step up!

One leader alone cannot guarantee the success of the business through sheer will. It requires team members across the organization to lead by example. Times of crisis will test the real character of your people, managers, and overall organization. New leaders will emerge, and new opportunities will be created.