How to ensure business continuity in COVID — 19 Pandemic?

The world couldn’t be shaken any more as it is today. The entire humanity is fighting to survive the COVID -19 pandemic with social distancing and lockdowns. Businesses are also trying to survive this period. Many corporates have a business continuity plan but most of them are still struggling to cope up with the world’s biggest crisis in recent times.

Considering the present situation, we have laid down three simple tactics to ensure business continuity for small and medium scale IT consulting firms.

3 Simple Tactics to Ensure Business Continuity

Business continuity becomes a crucial aspect at times of pandemic. You must have a proper plan in place to efficiently battle the nosediving sales numbers or any dismal loss of revenue. At this time, you should focus on your client retention and other strategies that can help you in emerging out of the situation.

There are many businesses that might have sustained a heavy impact due to COVID — 19 whereas some have just received a nudge. Irrespective of the type of business you are in, you must have a contingency plan in place and should always be prepared for the worst. Because it is not just you in jeopardy, your employees, and their families all are in it together.

So let us get straight to the point. Being an SMB, there are certain tactics that you must implement, in order to ensure business continuity.

Focus on Goal-Oriented Operations

While working remotely, it is ordinary for employees to indulge in tasks that may consume their concentration. For example, if their favorite movie is being played in the next room, they would be more inclined to watch that. So they would be completing the activities just for the sake of doing it. No one is to blame, it happens to the best of us.

Here employees could be completing all their tasks, but the diminished concentration will result in mediocre outcomes. This can impact your business.

To ensure that productivity of employees and the quality of work is not hampered, you must focus on goals assigned instead of activities. For example, in the sales hemisphere, goals can be the number of meetings or demos scheduled in a day, instead of the number of emails or cold calls made.

Furthermore, in the daily meetings, encourage your employees to report with numbers and you will see how productivity increases drastically.

Measure Every Process

As it is rightly said, what gets tracked, gets optimized. It is essential for your business to keep track of every process occurring in your company. Be it in product development, sales, marketing, support or any other teams.

If the current outcome of your team’s effort is dismal, you must revamp your process. You can test and evaluate the result of different strategies and implement one that serves best for your business.

When you measure the results of your team’s efforts, it gives you insight into the problem of the process, and then only you can provide a solution.

Manage Time Efficiently

For ensuring timely completion of targets, time management becomes a deciding parameter. When working from the comforts of home, you must acknowledge that time is a precious asset and should be utilized strategically.

Generally, employees tend to procrastinate things in a work from home regime. Ultimately, they get overburdened with tasks in their backlog that impact their productivity and their attention span for completing them. As a result, performance gets affected. Employees start burning the midnight oil to cover their lag before performance meetups and fall short on maintaining the quality.

Not only does this create stressful working conditions for employees but it also hails a staggering blow at their motivation.

So to keep that from happening, while working from home one must plan out their day with strict time schedules and must adhere to that. You should allocate time for official tasks, then time for family, and other things as well.

How we implemented business continuity?

Being an SMB, equipping the entire office to work from home was a challenge. But fortunately, after executing our business continuity plan, we saw a frictionless transition towards enabling remote operations. We have enlisted a few things that we have done enabling business continuity here:

We made sure everyone has the necessary hardware to work remotely. Previously, we relied on desktop machines for our operations as an IT consultant but now considering the lockdown we have equipped every employee with a laptop so that there is no hurdle in front of them to achieve their goals.
We circulated a set of instructions on what to do and what not to do during this period. These instructions included proper safety measures for our employees. Also, we incorporated measures to maintain the confidentiality of different contracts.
Effective communication is of key importance during remote work. Considering that, we brought up daily morning meetings to decide goals for the day. We also introduced an evening call for a discussion about the challenges or obstacles that an employee may be facing. Throughout the day, the team is available on Microsoft Teams, Slack and WhatsApp.
Work hours are usually prolonged while working remotely. But everyone needs some time to rejuvenate their minds and spend time with family. Our morning and evening meetings serve as reminders of office hours.

Campus hires joining dates are deferred because the final exams are not over yet. We assured them, we are fighting the battle together till the last stand. We started the training program while they are remote. This is the best way we can ensure that the new hires are trained before they join.

As mentioned by Yuval Noah Harari “Things are better than ever before. Things are still quite bad. Things can get much worse. This adds up to a somewhat optimistic view because if you realize things are better than before, this means we can make them even better.” Hope is never a strategy but with the right strategy and hope of betterment keeps us moving. We are open for business and taking up new projects.

Originally published at https://sulopa.com.