Phased considerations to help organisations overcome the COVID-19 crisis

Make sure that your people are safe, and do the right thing by them and their families. Offer more support and assistance wherever possible; and if they’re all home working, use technology to maintain daily video contact so no one feels unsupported in anyway. Your people will see you through this crisis, don’t cut corners.

Complete a rapid review of your production and service delivery portfolio – what can be stripped back or even completely paused with the least impact on customers at this time?

For example, home insurers may consider temporarily ceasing less critical administrative processes, such policy amends, in favour of moving people to claims departments. Or agencies like HMRC may move resource from personal tax matters to support businesses at this time. Each organisation and industry will have different mechanisms of temporarily reclassifying the importance of their delivery.

Be open and transparent with your customers about how you can or indeed cannot meet their needs currently.

We’re all in this together and undoubtedly goodwill will extend back to you from your customers, but only if you prioritise correctly based on their needs, and tell them about it.

Change fast and often if needed. The coming period looks set to lack ‘normality’ within our operations, so your decision making will need to follow suit.

Dispersed teams can very quickly engage and collaborate using one of many solutions available. Data security is of course a key consideration, however be pragmatic where possible.

Be sure to continue to set expectations of your people to keep control, whether they remain office located or at home. But review and revise frequently – we don’t know what is around the corner. Diversify and utilise spare capacity well: as countries hit lock down, certain organisations will see a direct drop in customer demand. How can you best use your resources during this period? Manufacturers could turn to the production of equipment that can support the crisis such as ventilators; service organisations can invest time in building capability, perhaps using online solutions. 

Now is the time to re-engage with your customers to acknowledge the recent journey, the impact on them and their willingness to understand. Be clear as to when you expect things to return to the normality that they became accustomed with.

You’ve got through this due to your ability to lead; your care and consideration for your people; and through their remarkable efforts. Take the time to recognise these factors in the most appropriate way.

Now is the time to rethink short and mid-term business strategies, for example can you give more focus to transformation or improvement activities that can drive revenue or reduce / avoid cost to help with the financial stability of the business?

Critically review how your organisation managed the crisis – what went well and what didn’t? How can you take positive opportunities from it and systemise some of the brilliant ways that helped you become more agile, allowing you to perform in this way out of choice rather than necessity in the future?