Crisis management and business continuity
COVID-19: Unprecedented crisis requires business continuity at scale and speed
COVID-19: Unprecedented crisis requires business continuity at scale and speed
While the long-term outlook of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic is still highly uncertain, businesses, individuals and families are nevertheless having to adapt to new, troubling challenges such as severe supply and demand disruption, social distancing and serious health implications.
Business continuity is crucial – staff must be protected and able to work effectively so they can contribute to the good of the economy and society. Thankfully, solutions exist that can be rapidly implemented at scale.
In this article, we explore phase one: how businesses can surmount a period of shock and uncertainty while protecting their people and ensuring the stability of both internal operations and those of their clients.
As many staff as possible should be working remotely with all the necessary equipment and tools they need to do so efficiently. To ensure your business can continue and adapt to the changing crisis, you must quickly and extensively implement systems that replace the ways in which staff communicate and collaborate.
When unprepared, working remotely can hinder communication, impeding business continuity and everyday innovation. When management is overwhelmed by crisis management, the answer is peer-to-peer (P2P) support at scale, which can be rapidly implemented through decentralized digital workspaces. If support systems are not yet in place, they should be an urgent priority.
This approach activates the collective intelligence of your organization, giving staff the means to help one another in a self-organized, efficient way.
The multifaceted nature of the COVID-19 crisis is proving overwhelming for many businesses, threatening their continuity. The answer is working closely and intelligently with your clients, partners and providers.
At BearingPoint, this approach has helped support overloaded client crisis teams. With a new, seven-day service we are managing business areas including communications and digital channel implementation. For one client, BearingPoint is receiving and analyzing all internal requests, thus freeing up the client’s time for more critical work.
By helping your ecosystem of suppliers and clients, you can ensure your partners continue to operate effectively, protecting your business in kind.
Stay tuned for the second article of this series, detailing measures and learnings from our initial experiences during phase two of the crisis: endurance.
For information on how your business can quickly and effectively adapt to COVID-19, please don’t hesitate to contact our team today.
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