Preparing businesses for coronavirus

Coronavirus declared a pandemic

As the instances of Coronavirus sees its largest rise over the course of 24 hours, it has now been declared a global pandemic and businesses have already started to act. Business continuity plans have been invoked and many employees are advised against unnecessary travel. Corporates are instilling a ‘work from home’ model or dispersing staff to multiple redundant office locations to reduce the risk of the impact spreading too far within any one organisation. Preparing businesses for Coronavirus has become a very real priority.

As a business leader you will no doubt have modelled various scenarios for preparing your business for Coronavirus, along with any potential financial impact. You may already be planning your next moves depending on the turn of events over the forthcoming days and weeks and these are likely to carry some difficult and stressful decisions with them. None of us can predict the percentage of people that will be infected by the Coronavirus nor the severity in financial, mental and health terms of the pandemic, but we can make practical decisions to mitigate the risk of lack of productivity and financial impact to businesses.

6 tips to prepare your business for Coronavirus

Remote working. Ensure that your employees have the ability to work remotely. The ability for employees to gain access to systems from any location on their own devices is something that IT departments should be deploying across the organisation. Whilst some businesses have clear IoT strategies, businesses that have not deployed this may need to act quickly to set up access for everyone to business critical services.
Stay connected. With an increase in remote working there naturally comes an increase in bandwidth demand at temporary working locations whether this is at home or a temporary office location. If schools also close then families will need to cover online learning from home which puts further strain on broadband. Those with poor speeds can opt for temporary WiFi services at either their homes or office locations, something which businesses may want to subsidise/recommend for their staff.
Virtual meetings. Businesses should convert face to face meetings with virtual meetings rather than cancel them altogether. 360 degree conference cameras are very good alternatives to face to face meetings if you are still able to perform meetings in group environments.
Up the sales and marketing activity. Webinars, content writing and digital marketing will come into their own. As decision makers spend more time in front of a computer now is the time to capitalise on online communication. and presence, building visibility and credibility with new prospects. Marketing teams should be increasing their efforts to engage with a new audience; efforts which should reap their rewards further down the line and aid business recovery. There are lots of great Webinar tools out there to help drive your sales and marketing engagement if you are not already running these.
Maintain strong leadership and clear direction. Employees will no doubt be understandably nervous during this time and leadership teams should maintain clear and regular communication with their staff to keep them in the loop. Great things can be achieved when teams all pull together in the same direction and the recovery will be much faster if everyone in your business is aligned with the same end goal, no matter how rocky the journey to get there is Regular communication from the top sharing strategies and plans and most importantly direction is key to keeping employees focussed on the end goal.

“If everyone in a business pulls in the same direction you’ll get there faster than if some are pulling in the opposite direction”

As we continue to do our best to fight these uncertain times let’s remember that now is not the time to take a selfish approach but to look out for family members, employees and neighbours. There is no doubt we will get through this but let’s get through it together as quickly as possible and with kindness for those around us.

Internet Connectivity – what options do I have for temporary work environments?