6 Business Continuity Strategies to Implement Post COVID -19
The coronavirus pandemic, a black swan event, has probably changed the global landscape across all spectrums like never before. From successful companies declaring bankruptcy to governments going on pumping money to people being forced to work remotely, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the very fabric of human interaction.
The effect is visible on people from all walks of life. It has accelerated the process of digitization, thus forcing the companies to become more agile and tech-oriented. With the advent of distributed workforce and employees working from a remote location, it has also opened up new avenues and given rise to new business models.
Sectors like education, marketing, software services have a tremendous opportunity to scale up in terms of products and sizes as the focus has shifted to the digital world.
Hence to ensure business continuity, the firms should develop a roadmap for the future by incorporating business continuity strategies. Technology adoption and workforce modulation would form essential pillars of any such road map.
1. Adoption of technology in business processes
To continue business in the post-COVID-19 world, companies will have to adopt technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, enterprise resource planning, etc. This would happen across multiple domains, be it manufacturing, finance, marketing, etc.
Companies will have to adopt robotics and machine learning algorithms to replace human labor in factories. For blue-collar jobs, companies should take automation to cope up with a reduced workforce.
2. Human Resource Management
Effective human resource management would be one of the key points to ensure business continuity in the post corvid world. As employees will be working from a remote location, it is vital to ensure that productivity and quality are not hampered.
Businesses will have to design a better reward and recognition system to ensure that the employees stay motivated. One of the strategies would be to focus more on emotional intelligence and usher an office environment where employees feel safe about their job. Establishing such a situation would be vital to ensuring business continuity.
To make this a notch further companies might resort to setting up the infrastructure so that the employees can work from home. Given the lack of personal and physical interaction in the early stages, companies should foster digital collaboration as a business strategy to ensure continuity.
3. Outsource resonant processes and pool resource
Given the lack of revenue streams and customer apprehension about spending, companies should focus on outsourcing mundane and repetitive tasks to ensure business continuity.
This can be done across areas where the date is not sensitive. Payroll management, recruitment, and other such stuff can be outsourcing to dedicated agencies so that the company can free up resources and correspondingly use them more comprehensively and holistically. These implementations are part of business continuity strategies.
Furthermore, to ensure business continuity, companies will be forced to pool their resources to ensure that economies of scale can be enjoyed. This COVID-19 pandemic should push the companies in a particular sector to think of their competitors as collaborators.
Give the dire straits most of the companies find themselves. To ensure business continuity, the top players in each industry might come together and pool certain aspects of their resource to ensure that it leads to economies of scale while cutting costs.
Vertical and horizontal integration, as well as upstream and downstream integration, could be critical strategies to ensure business continuity in the post-COVID-19 world.
4. Focus on digital marketing
For any business to continue, it must hold on to its customer base, and no business exits without customers.
Hence with the traditional and physical form of marketing losing traction in the post-COVID-19 world, companies will have to rely extensively on digital marketing to reach out to customers and ensure that their customer base remains intact.
With more people coming online and using the internet due to the pandemic, companies should focus extensively on digital marketing to make their messaging more emphatic and convincing.
By using techniques like artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation, companies can expand their consumer base while reaching out to a new set of customers. AI-powered chatbots would help companies to establish two-way communication with the customers, thus increasing the USP of the product.
Incorporating the customers’ changing preference into their products and services would be an essential aspect of continuing and running the business successfully in the post-COVID-19 world.
5. Innovation & Integration
Since the COVID-19 pandemic has hit consumers’ purchasing power across all spectrums hard, companies will have to resort to innovation to come up with economical solutions. Hence, increased R & D spending and better data collection would be among the essential business continuity strategies in the COVID-19 world.
Companies Can not only innovate with their existing product and services but also start to expand into different verticals to ensure that they stay relevant. The COVID-19 has several hot sectors hard indeed but has also opened up newer avenues for many industries like education-tech, online logistics solutions, software-as-a-service, etc., are seeing increased activity.
Hence companies need to shed their traditional lineage and be bold to reform their business model and branch out to other sectors to stay relevant and afloat.
6. Financial jurisprudence
There is no gainsaying that these are financially tough times for all and sundry. Given the uncertainty surrounding the global markets regarding economic revival, companies need to watch their budgets and reserves.
However, this might be the right time for companies to acquire talented and experienced employees at relatively lower compensation given the economic and employment scenario.
To conserve cash to ensure business continuity, companies should resort to doling out ESOPS to employees to ensure that the morale of the employees is high. This would also help to cut down on individual human resource management costs.
The scale and magnitude of the impact of COVID-19 is something which the world has never witnessed before. This COVID-19 also presents opportunities and challenges for the firms to develop innovative solutions to improve business continuity strategies.
Author Bio:
Mr. Eric Smith is the Head of Sale & Marketing in Accely. He has decades of experience under his belt. He worked as a SAP professional with expertise in a wide range of SAP Solutions. With a knack for technology, he loves to write on the latest SAP developments and share his knowledge with the readers.