Novel coronavirus disease is getting scattered at an exponential rate globally. Every day the confirmed cases are doubling at high speed. Initially, the infection rates increased in China more and gradually spread to the USA and the European Union. Now it’s all over the world. For preventing the rapid increase of infections, most countries’ governments have restricted outbound and inbound travel. Social distancing seems to be the norm now despite the unlock phase that started recently. All these initiatives are meant to flatten the curve of brand-new cases.
Robert Trosten suggests guidelines for employee security
As organizations are resuming work, they are always planning ways to ensure maximum employee security and build-up business resilience. Business and financial advisors like Robert Trosten list down essential guidelines considering employee and work security. Organizations need to understand the impact of the pandemic on people and manage their priorities.
In a COVID-19 driven era, the companies should be very clear about the values which align with their activity plan and brand mission. It will help them to secure their workforce values in such testing times. Proper leadership and impeccable role modeling will be beneficial in such situations. The non-negotiable aspects are:
- Have top-down governance with creative and decisive leadership.
- Have clear employee policies, messaging, and communications.
- Manage risk assessment and necessary controls.
- Ensure effective team leadership and mid-level management.
- Provide the necessary safety and health information.
- Stay tuned into the local news updates.
- Address incident reporting, risk, and investigation.
- Dealing with the existing workforce with empathy and agility.
Companies need to function within an outlined framework through every level of crisis, for maintaining workforce resilience. The objective is to align and establish leadership capacity to evaluate, plan, communicate, and decide on people’s strategies. The six essential steps include:
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Evaluate risks and people’s exposure
Companies should conduct ongoing risk assessment covering territorial and functional risks, global mobile employee implications, safety and health impact, cybersecurity, consumer impact, reward impact, payroll, and tax. The end objective is to have an estimated risk index.
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Outline the crises
Organizations should recognize the worst-case scenarios, that are designed to stress-examine their functional capacity to manage any disruption. That way, companies can assess the impact of present gaps making use of risk evaluation data and findings.
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Create a potential response
It is essential to outline potential response triggers. That would help prevent crisis impact or allow agile response to resolve the repercussions considering the technology, process, and people factors.
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Examine the potential response
It is necessary to implement a crisis scenario simulation, especially mass remote working. It will help to examine the efficiency of the outlined potential response for validating effectiveness against the success criteria.
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Recognize workforce gaps
Companies must recognize essential business functions, crucial jobs, high-value assets, critical elements inside the supply chain. It is necessary to activate the current crisis management policies and protocols in every disruption scenario to recognize gaps inside the current workforce model, comprising quantitative and qualitative impact.
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Develop an intervention business case scenario
It is essential to develop a resiliency intervention business case for impacting validating crisis response triggers. It comprises of needs, solutions as well as a value proposition.
How can companies establish business resilience?
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Companies can remodel business continuity and resilience with IoT and AI
Several business houses might witness a massive disruption in their daily business functions. They might have to undergo a lack of sufficient resources and employee underperformance all through the COVID-19 phase. At the beginning of the crisis, supply chain challenges reigned supreme for organizations dealing with China. But today, the whole world is affected, and companies need to plan for effective supply chain solutions. It’s because people’s needs and demands have changed considerably.
Additionally, the COVID-19 had also affected various industry verticals. But the degree of loss varies. The consumer goods, auto, travel, retail, and electronic goods verticals got heavily impacted. For instance, leading Korean auto manufacturers had to shut down several factories because the vendors could provide the required components. Also, the supplier’s situation inside Hubei province suffered immensely because of the pandemic and later because of complete lockdown.
Furthermore, the factory closures hurt 40% of the global auto manufacturer’s network output, which stopped launching any new car model. Even though these car makers are searching for other vendors for critical components, there will be a slight delay in lead times. Also, the vendor qualifications for adhering with quality management criteria can prevent factory reopening.
Hence, organizations have to conduct various tasks to recover from this crisis. For this, organizations should discuss and decide the ways to avert unwarranted outbreak having a similar impact.
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Execute digital and automated manufacturing capacities
The use of IoT and automation products for intelligent marketing can resolve the dependency on any labor-driven process. The online technology enables a robust manufacturing program that would standardize daily tasks and job aids. It will help to minimize the pressure of depending on people to carry out tasks.
Furthermore, the IoT technology can establish an online ecosystem of connected systems. It will offer the users with updated and relevant data for making updated decisions anytime. The automated manufacturing capacities would enable a company to function manufacturing operations with professionals who can swap duties. It further reduces labor requirements.
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Execute the anti-fragile supply chain solutions
The concept of anti-fragility is gaining prominence now. It’s best described as a process that doesn’t just learn from disruptions but also gets enhanced because of the same crisis. Hence, the anti-fragile supply chains are not only durable but also flexible enough to ensure that it would work under tremendous disorder. Organizations and business houses should go online for enabling anti-fragile supply chains. In 2020, the manual processes will not work anymore, considering the current crisis. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the need of the hour. It’s because AI can assess data, from a wide selection of public and proprietary sources to learn from previous challenges and suggest useful alternatives.
Today, organizations worldwide are attempting to develop business continuity and resilience plans to overcome the pandemic outbreak. The economy can’t sustain favorably if organizations and business houses remain shut. To ensure safe employee health and business operations, companies should implement the mentioned above security guidelines. Staying clued in to the current business trends, predictions, and AI developments will help companies survive this COVID-19 phase with strength and intelligence.
