Overcoming Business Continuity Challenges amidst Covid-19 Pandemic
The impact of Covid-19 continues to spread with far-reaching implications on both humanitarian and economic aspects. Amidst news of lockdowns, self-quarantine, plummeting stock prices, and international travel restrictions, businesses are faced with the unprecedented challenges to unlock new ways of collaboration and working.
The global population is also facing psychological impact, with increased isolation as human contact and freedom to travel are getting heavily curtailed. Business leaders are grappling with a gigantic challenge to serve customers and clients, as well as protect health and overall well-being of employees.
As the far-reaching impacts of Covid-19 are felt across the globe, it is about time that organization leaders develop and adapt to new ways of collaboration and revamp conventional forms of workplace operations. Leaders have joint responsibility to develop new capabilities and ways of working that will seamlessly enable longer-term changes to how they operate.
Building Business Resilience
With the virus spreading rapidly, it is important to safeguard the interests of people exposed to the risk of infection. Business leaders must make rapid decisions and take immediate actions to sustain business operations in order to avert an imminent deep economic recession in the long term. In order to develop resilience, it is important to kick-start a major innovation drive that ensures service delivery and business continuity.
Companies will be forced to rethink the most vulnerable part of service delivery to meet the growing demand for remote working, and offer more digital experiences such as virtual reality, mobile and web applications to keep newfound online customers.
Remote Workers will become Mainstream
Covid-19 pandemic has jolted businesses across the globe. Remote working has increased as a part of maintaining social distancing to minimize the impact of Novel Coronavirus. Several companies have awakened to the new reality of remote workers. For companies that have been averse to remote employees the transition can be overwhelming.
Given the complexity and magnitude of the situation, investing in best-in-class remote resources who are trained and provide scalability is inevitable. Remote working is being encouraged by tech and non-tech companies. It is important the business leaders embrace this change to build stronger economies.
Remote working needs leaders to embrace change and reimagine the future of organization and how employees can work and collaborate. It requires an institutional mind-shift to a platform mentality, which involves identifying what assets are critical and what are contextual.
It is about time for businesses to act now and delayed decisions will impact business continuity plans. To minimize business disruption, avert global recession and at the same time protect employees, organizations must take steps now — starting with options such as hire remote developers or experts to work on business-critical functions. Remote working is the right step to meet the changing business needs based on global and local conditions.
Building Agile Teams across Geography
Remote working is an example of a business transformation transcending across different levels, providing adaptive ways to deliver economic value and preparing for a variety of scenarios. Moreover, advanced project management and collaboration tools are improving all the time, leaving more space for collaboration and consistency. On the other hand, remote teams can bring productivity and agility that in-house teams simply cannot offer. Distributed teams can interact with project management tools and track the overall progress.
Remote working demands leaders to address uncertainties. Leadership should identify what businesses and operational processes in the organization are crucial to operating the core functions. Businesses need to respond confidently to shape and execute a short-term tactical plan that will mitigate the risks to human health and protect the functioning of global supply chains. To ensure trustworthy and purpose-driven business can be sustained on an ongoing basis, requires nothing less.
Looking Ahead
Businesses will have to rethink their strategies to facilitate immediate responses to crisis. However, these could pave the way for long-term operational and workforce strategies, as well as digital transformation aimed at improving resilience and competitiveness.
