Corporates recently witnessed the crisis like never before and it only made organizations stronger than ever before. According to one of the surveys, around 75 percent of organizations agree to the fact that their organization’s strategic implementation capabilities grew stronger due to crisis. During normalcy, every organization goes through its business cycles and the strategies are formulated in resonance with them. However, the outbreak of this pandemic brought nearly all of them into their depression cycle, testing their preparedness and capabilities in navigating through such crisis. The leadership team of almost all the organizations was forced to huddle around to rethink their business and operating model. The crisis created a need for organizations to demonstrate their purpose and values which they had long stood for.

The crisis brought about a paradigm shift moving away from their traditional working model. During this pandemic, working from home became the new way of working that employees were forced to take up. Dependency on technology grew with new telecommunication apps gathering steam along the way. There was an exponential rise in the daily users of apps like Zoom, Microsoft teams, skype, etc. Lay-offs became the talk of the town and hiring was frozen. The board room discussions shifted from sustainability to survivability. It was clearly evident that there was an urgent need for accelerated strategic transformation across organizations. Below are a few aspects organizations need to consider while managing crisis:

Getting priorities right: The current strategic plan needs to be rejigged in a way that it first protects the short-term needs by keeping its guard up against the ongoing crisis. A balanced approach to protecting today and envisioning tomorrow needs to be adopted. Today’s appropriate response can position the businesses to thrive tomorrow. With this pandemic around, organizations need to be sensitive to their employees’ health and safety by providing the wherewithal & support required to continue doing their tasks remotely with leaders keeping a regular tab on their entire well-being. Decisions are also taken in a direction to ensure business continuity and no impact on customer value delivery. A crisis is a situation when organizations should be looking to maximize their purpose and not focusing on revenue alone. And this can happen by setting priorities early to enable taking quick & right decisions.

Team Empowerment: To weather through the crisis, it is imperative for organizations to empower employees & teams to take certain key decisions rather than getting them dictated from the leadership level. While businesses would have navigated much crisis before, the unique nature of an unprecedented crisis (like an ongoing pandemic) could make all of us on the same experience level when it comes to gauging its impact on the existing businesses. Hence empowering non-leadership level employees could go a long way in making certain effective decisions related to the processes, offerings & customer support to ensure organizations stay relevant & emerge stronger in the post-crisis world.

Effective Communication: Communication is another precarious factor that needs to be managed in such a crisis-like-situation. Information should flow throughout an organization as well as through all the relevant stakeholders to ensure a complete congruence when it comes to putting efforts towards combating this crisis. Transparent & consistent communication would bridge the gap between strategy and implementation, building the organization’s capability to actualize the strategic initiatives effectively. Feeding an organization with real-time updates from the relevant sources also plays a vital role in assessing the situation accurately so that their responses are appropriately chosen in building the right strategy.

Embracing Digital transformation: More than technology, it is about putting people first. Keeping employees abreast of why and where the organization wants to head towards can only bring that shift in their mindset to adopt a new way of working. Digital transformation helps organizations replace their legacy systems with the ones in vogue, which not only provide efficiency gains but also help them achieve their revised strategic initiatives. That said, this drive can only be successful when the change is inside-out and organizations look to bring about this transformation in its culture, processes & their traditional practices. This brings the leadership roles under the scanner and the plethora of skills they are expected to display like Empathy, Communication, Empowerment, and Ethics.

Breaking away from the traditional way of working is a must to derive learnings from the crisis. These learnings are essential to outline the improvement plans in the post-crisis world and stay adequately prepared for any potential crisis (of a similar sort) in the future. Leaders need to be vigilant of certain new business opportunities that might emerge from the crisis, and so it is highly likely that organizations might put themselves into a profitable value proposition in the wake of a crisis.

Thanks for reading . Please feel free to share your comments and feedback.